Antigua has got to be the Guatemalan capital of weddings.

The kids are in Spanish classes for a few hours a day while we are in Antigua. Lowe’s teacher showed him a picture of a watermelon and asked him what it was. “Sandía.” So she asked him what it was in English, and he said, “Sandía.” Ali and I laughed at the story, remembering when Ouest was about five and asked for some agua. We asked her what it was called in English and she said, “Agua?”

Convento La Recolección. I enjoyed the story of this place. Two missionaries show up in 1685 and in no time they are asking the City Council for permission to build a huge monastery and church. The Council, rather surprisingly I think, said no. The town was already covered in monasteries and there was hardly enough of this group to warrant all of that building and expense. But as seems to have happened back then, someone somewhere made a royal decree pushing the building along anyway. So they banged away for a couple decades and finally wrapped things up in May of 1717. It lasted a whopping 4 months before historic earthquakes rocked the area and seriously damaged the place. A sign perhaps? They fixed things up, a few more friars moved in, and the earthquakes kept coming. When the big one hit in 1773 the place was pretty well totaled.

The kids pulled a pretty good joke on us. We weren’t near them when they hopped up on this thing, so when we came into the area we yelled over to them, “What’s down there?” They looked down, as if it were a hundred feet deep and said, “I think there’s water down there.”

We yelled at them to get off! Then went over to find it’s three feet deep. Ha ha, very funny.

It’s hard to imagine how massive this place must have been and what it would have looked like to someone 300 years ago.