I have a secret confession to make right now. I really like Antigua, Guatemala.

And I feel like I shouldn’t because the town seems so tourist-purposed and overrun by westerners; Antigua is such a marked contrast to the “dangerous” and grittier reality in nearby Guatemala City. When I mention to other travelers I spent a month total (split across three visits) in Antigua I often get those judgmentally inquisitive lifts eyebrow of an eyebrow.

Antigua’s cobblestone, almost idyllically pretty streets are clean. The low-slung buildings are a rainbow of neatly painted cookie-cutter storefronts. Crumbling ruins pointing to the towns colonial past artfully dot the corners of the city’s small blocks at a regular interval and it’s just, in a grossly simplistic word, cute.

Perhaps beyond cute, it’s also easy and safe. The city has slowly and steadily been built around the tourism industry and caters to the droves of tourists passing through this Guatemalan hub. A variety of vegetarian food is also plentiful and the local artisan’s market is well-stocked with something for just about everyone on my Christmas list.

I feel like my love of Antigua really highlights one of those never-ending debates about experiencing the “real” heart of a country when you visit. Other backpackers so often make a pissing contest with me over who went further “off the path,” who saw the “real” Guatemala. Is there a fake Guatemala?!

To tell the truth, I had some of my best conversations with locals sitting at a Reilly’s, a painfully westernized Irish pub in the center of Antigua. And does the fact that some of these conversations took place in English make a difference? I don’t think so.

Reilly’s turned out to be a perfect place to meet other locals my age; Guate City isn’t exactly a hub of safe partying so the locals absolutely flood Antigua on the weekends, a mere 45 minute drive away. Antigua gave me a glimpse into a vastly different and yet so very similar middle class. These twenty-somethings sport slicked back hair, the women teeter through the uneven streets on pointy heels to accent their trendy legging/long shirt ensembles and all carry the ubiquitous cell phone.

And so many of the twenty-somethings I encountered felt like they have something to prove to the backpackers like myself; that they are constantly working to avoid the stereotype that they are “lacking” what we have, or in anyway inferior because they’re Guatemalan. That was a very real issue in all of my conversations, that travelers come in here so quick to dismiss the wealthier areas, the prosperous side of their country, always looking for the poverty, for something to pity – this was their opinion of the way so many backpackers travel and they were eager to express this feelings and concerns and really stick up for their country.

I feel like I would have missed such a deeply real side of Guatemala if I had avoided these gringo-fied areas and stuck only to the countryside; the off-the-path locations. I did go local, and I volunteered outside of Xela (stories to come) and stomped through forests to remote regions, but my lovely and cute little city of Antigua, Guatemala served me just as well in my efforts to understand this dynamic country and for that I will only raise my eyebrows right back at those who want to start a pissing contest with me, because no matter where I go I am always able to learn something new, and at the end of the day, that’s why I travel.