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Two men melted out of the darkness to our left and blocked our path. "Hand over your cellphone," one of them demanded, reaching into his windbreaker as though to pull a gun. Javier took out his Blackberry without hesitation and handed it over. The thieves then focused their attention on me. I should have been afraid but instead I felt like laughing. This was not how I imagined spending my birthday. I had been cautioned about the dangers of Guatemala City since the day I had stepped off the plane but I considered those warnings part of the standard script every tourist hears in any place they visit: "Watch your valuables, be aware of your surroundings, don't walk around alone at night". As an often solo female traveler they were words of warning I felt I heard in excess, so I listened politely and filed the information away under things I didn't need to think about. What I did think about was the indoor garden in the apartment I was renting and the ants, cockroaches and lizards I soon learned lived there. I thought about hiking Pacaya volcano and toasting marshmallows over the lava like I had read about. I worried that the three months I intended to spend in Guatemala wouldn't be enough to get an authentic feel for the place and I wanted one. I had travelled to a dozen countries before Guatemala but this was my first in depth exposure to the realities of a "Third World" country. Tourist destinations like Lake Atitlán and Antigua painted romanticized portraits of poverty with pristine lake and volcanoes or gorgeous, brightly colored, colonial buildings and charming cobblestone streets as back drops. Guatemala City offered an ugly but honest view of life in a place where most people get by on less than a dollar a day and the presence of drug cartels is glaring in the fact that a homicide is committed every 90 minutes. I was shocked to discover every grocery store, mini mart, coffee shop and gas station had its own militia, armed with guns I'd never seen outside of a movie. Like most urban sprawls, the city seemed to attract the desperate and I was face to face with two of them now. "Give us the other phone." "No." I told them. They looked at each other and then at me. One reached for my purse. I pulled it away. We stared each other down. I held my breath and they stepped aside and let us pass. We walked the 100 feet to my apartment complex where a guard, armed with a shotgun, let us in. "Be careful tonight," he said "there are robbers outside."