Even though Nica was beautiful, it definitely opened my eyes. As you walked through the streets, beggars and people trying to sell you things would get up in your face and many of them were children.
Once we sat down for lunch outside on one of the streets and a little girl came up to us, no more than nine, who barely spoke any English. She tried to sell us these bracelets which we struggled to refuse. She looked at our table and pointed to the salad that we hadn't yet started and said, "For me." We looked at each other and thought why not. She's a poor little girl who obviously has much less than us. We can share our salad with her. She takes the plate and goes to the next table over and we all thought she was going to sit down and eat it. She took out a trash bag and dumped the entire salad into it. We realized she was going to take it home to her family. She returned the plate and I asked to take a picture of her. She said yes.

The next morning, we walked to breakfast. In that beautiful city, the colors even more vibrant in the early light. All of a sudden we heard this wailing coming from far away and getting closer. What was it? A siren? A crying baby? An old man turned the corner holding a pig in each hand, each by the tail and they were screaming for their lives. It was obvious he was taking them to the slaughter house. We knew it and the pigs knew it too. Thank god I was wearing sunglasses because my eyes filled up with tears and I wanted to scream but that was their culture. Who was I to judge or tell him that's called animal abuse. But anyway, thats the story of how I never ate pork again.

That night, we were sitting at an outdoor restaurant. The tables were on the corner of a closed off street and the people still walked around trying to sell things to us. It was my dad who first noticed it but there were these women standing on the corner. Tall and thin with a lot of makeup too and let me just tell you they did not know how to contour. At first we thought, "Oh well it could just be two friends hanging out on the corner who happened to look sort of like prostitutes." But then an old American man walked by, by himself and the girls were on him, stroking his cheek and he was just shaking his head saying, "No thank you" over and over again. They eventually gave up.