Disappointment

My first Guatemalan town was Quetzaltenango. It's a strange kind of place: locals and gringos live side by side, sometimes occupying the streets in shifts (after 20:00 the town belongs to westerners, before that most of them are busy studying Spanish), but not actually competing for room - a very rare phenomenon. That means no touts as you arrive, no souvenir pushers, no good old scams (or even original ones), no English-speaking (that is, the five words necessary for the job) beggars - to say it simply, no touristvores - but all the basic conveniences and general cheerfulness rather than suspicion or unhealthy curiosity (the latter two are what you often get when making the - well, not first, but somewhere from 10th to 50th - contact).

The problem is, i was naive enough to assume that's the way it goes in the country. It was a sour disappointment then to see Panajachel (a typical tourist ghetto, lots of them in every country except Bangladesh - what sane person would go to Bangladesh?) and even more so, Antigua (if Pana is a ghetto, Antigua must be a concentration camp).
Antigua, the "pearl of C. America"! Hawkers armed with the most up-to-date money squeezers, Mayan women trying to sell something that looks like their not so clean underwear for the price of a medium-sized oil tanker (full of oil, if you don't know to bargain; empty if you do), naked blondies strolling through churches, fat old US ex-pats lamenting about lack of proper development (read: McDonald's) and excess of locals ("shoot half of 'em little yellow guys, 'll be easier to move around"), and so on, so on...
I've escaped, of course. On my way to the jungle now - about time, right? But still - what a pity...