Guidebooks - Don´t Trust Them!

After a leisurely walk and an appallingly bad breakfast at a "recommended" eating establishment, we had a lovely day being tourists!
One of the important lessons to learn when traveling is to never trust guidebooks. Of course I could add never trust other travelers, never trust tourist offices, never trust travel agencies, and a host of other important things not to trust, but the subject for the day is guidebooks. Never trust guidebooks. Not that I'm a non-believer in guidebooks. I love the damned things. I buy at least 2 of them for every place that we go. Reading about places I'm going to visit, or that I might visit, or that I'm thinking about visiting, or that I dream of visiting, is one of my favorite passtimes. Guidebooks are a great place to start all this. But once there, they are inherently untrustworthy.
Assume for a moment that every single word written in a given guidebook is the God's honest truth when it is written. If there is one thing that I can promise you is always going to happen no matter where you travel, it is change. So if you have this year's edition of the guidebook, some of that material is going to be almost a year old - right? Wrong! Most of it is going to be years old! It may be that guidebook publishers like to say that their books are completely updated every year, but think about it. Is that even possible? Sure, a lot of it is updated, but most of it is just there, year after year after ... One instance in particular that we always remember is the time in Costa Rica when we walked and walked trying to find the cute-sounding bed and breakfast in Santa Ana. We finally stopped at a bar that we were familiar with, since it happened to be in the area. Over a beer, we asked the owner where this mysterious B & B that we couldn't find was. Laughing uproareously (and I am sure that is NOT a word in any language), he said, "You're in it!" It turned out that years before, his very bar had been a B & B. "Some owner before me, years and years ago..." he said. Since then, I take my guidebooks lightly.
Speakiing of taking guidebooks lightly, please do not ever carry around a whole guidebook if you do not need it. First off, when you first get a guidebook (assuming that you own it and didn't borrow it from a friend or the library), immediately tear out any pages with bullshit like advertising for travel agencies and resorts. You paid good money for this book. You certainly do not need to be bombarded with paid advertising! Tear it out, throw it away - immediately. Thank you. Now, you may read every chapter and every word, if you so desire, but before leaving on your grand adventure, tear out and take with you only those pages which will be useful to you on your trip. So, for example, if you have purchased a book about Spain, but are definitely going only to Madrid and Seville, tear out those pages to take with you and leave the rest of the book at home. How you handle the loose pages depends on your personality, but don't get all hung up on that thing your mom told you about not defacing or destroying books. Trust me on this. You paid for the damned thing. It's yours to do with as you please. And when you trip lightly up the stairs in the metro station, comfortable with your little 12 pound backpack, you will thank me for this. You have permission to laugh at those serious travelers who carry those huge honkin' 50 pound packs around. (We won't even talk about the volkswagon sized suitcases on wheels here). So tear the pages out, staple them together in sections (one for each town perhaps; or one section for sights to see and another for places to eat or whatever), or leave them loose, but carry them in baggies, or whatever works for you. Repeat after me: "Paper is heavy."
OK. Where were we? Oh, yes, I take my guidebooks lightly. Unfortunately, at times, I still take them. And I still need to try places that are made to sound really interesting in said books. So this place, being near the bus station and the market (always a good bet for good local food at low prices in places with genuine character), sounded like a good bet. Here's a tip: If it takes more than 5 minutes to get your first cup of coffee in a restaurant that supposedly caters to breakfast traffic, it's gonna get worse. Get the hell out of there. Another tip: If the coffee finally comes, but the milk takes another 10 minutes to appear, get the hell out. But oh, no! We've gotta check this out. After all, the guidebook said ... So we finally got the cold rubbery eggs with the bowl of room temperature purreed black beans (NOT what I expect when I order refried beans). Lovely that the little basket of cold tortillas arrived at the same time as the cold eggs. The saving grace was the golden platanos. If only they'd been warm.
We've had so many great meals here. And so many totally adequate meals here. I guess you have to expect a bad one once in a while. So I don't expect guidebooks to be perfect, and I know that places change and are not always consistent, but I still plan to write to the Rough Guide to Guatemala and tell them that they need to delete the Comedor Tipico Anigüeño from their next edition.
After breakfast, I took Gene to see the weaving museum that I had seen a couple weeks ago with Chiqui. I was even more impressed this time than on my first visit.