Day 21 - Guatemala City Redux

Before I begin, I have to mention junk food in Latin America. It's awesome. They have all the goodies taht we have in the states (Doritos, Fritos, etc...) and add tons of good stuff like Gancito and Pinquino. Their junk food is ultra sugary and incredibly delicious. My personal favorite is Gancito. It's something like a little debbie snack cake. It's got yellow cake with creme and raspberry filling covered in chocolate. Yummy.

Olfo (one of the Guatemalan dental students) set up a brewery tour this morning at the Cervaceria Central Americana Brewery. Their biggest product is Gallo beer, which I've spoken of before. They also make a few other beers (Dorado Ice and Mazo) as well as snack foods and sodas. I didn't realize that Olfo was the great great grandson of the brewery's founder. We ended up getting the cadillac tour from one of the brewmasters. The brewmaster is a chemical engineer who knew everything about beer. We even got to taste Gallo beer directly from the post-filtration tank! They have a nice operation which was revamped in 2002.

After the tour, we tooled around on of their shopping malls. From what I can tell, the malls there catered more to the high end customers. There were a lot of American stores like Gap and many that I'd never heard of. Thankfully we didn't linger in the mall too long. Instead, we went back to the hotel and took a nice long nap.

The Guatemalan students had a big exam at 5PM tonight, so after that we went to dinner with them. Olfo took us to a wonderful steak house which was his favorite place in the city. They have traditional cuts of meat as well as Argentinian cuts (which are slightly different that whate we're used to). The steak was some of the best I've ever had in my life! We also had several desserts, one of which was affectionately called "Farts of the Nun" in Spanish. Fat and happy, we retired back to the hotel and wished our new friends goodbye.

Tomorrow we leave Guatemala. Our flight is at 7:15AM Guatemala time. We should arrive in Miami around 1PM Eastern and hopefully reach RDU by 5:00PM. It's been fun posting to this blog and I've enjoyed reading the comments. At some point I'll post the 300 other pictures and send everyone the link.