A Real Mix

Guatemala City is a funny place, for many reasons. Although a somewhat large urban centre (Gab knows the "exact" number, but I believe it numbers several million) it is nonetheless an odd combination of big city and small town.
Big city:

• crime
• air pollution
• traffic
• noise
• museums
• government/corporate buildings
• transvestite prostitutes! (Gab can tell you about that one)

Small town:

• well, I've mentioned the tendency of strangers on the street to wish you good morning/afternoon/evening as you pass them
• especially in the downtown core, about 70% of the buildings are single-story—a surprisingly low skyline
• goats! We were walking home to the apartment and passed a flock of goats in our busy sidestreet—with no apparent, um, goatherd. Before we could speculate about the possibility of the "wild goats of Guatemala city", a young dude selling goat milk door-to-door followed them up, about a block distant. Which bring me to...
• people sell food door-to-door. They come down the street offering tamales, tortillas, frijoles, and (apparently) goat's milk.
• Chickens! Every morning we awake to the sound of roosters crowing.

I hope to augment this post with some snaps soon. Stay tuned...

A note-after-the-fact: I tried and tried to catch the goat guy with a camera, to no avail. Several times, upon hearing the clanging of bells, I rushed into the street with camera in hand, only to find it was a fruit guy or a shoe guy. And so I leave Guatemala goat-guy-pictureless...