Dos Mundos

Well here I am again updating our blog after a very interesting few days. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time before the school internet room shuts, but I'll try to get some points recorded in the next few minutes.

We have just returned to Antigua after a weekend away touring. I have snuck into our old school to use their internet for free....I'm sure they don't mind.

We graduated from our Spanish School last Friday though I use the word graduated only in the sense that we finished. The second week was very challenging as we got into using tenses other than the present, and our instructor really picked up the pace in his conversation. By the end of the week I was pretty confused and was basically not able to remember the stuff I'd learned. So long, pregnant pauses were the norm when our instructor spoke to me, which was less and less frequently as the week progressed. He concentrated more on Sue who seemed to retain much more than I did and has a much greater ability at langauges than "yo". However, I guess the whole experience was good fun and we will remember the good times we had learning about Antigua culture and history from Edin. Whether we will be able to use our Spanish is yet to be seen. We have generally made ourselves understood, though I am sure they must get a laugh out of our Spanish. We were on our way to one of the school's activities last week and Sue was speaking with our guide for the day, Eric, who is also one of the teachers and a very cool dude. She was speaking about his plans to get married (and American) and move to seattle. Sue at one point asked about his "novio". He looked very offended (in a comical way) and replied "Novio...no tengo novio, no, no tengo novio!!" Of course Sue had got the gender of the noun wrong. It should have been novia...with an "a" which is girlfriend as opposed to novio being a boyfriend. His vehement denial of having a boyfriend was acted out with much waving of arms and a shocked expression on his face. However, I'm sure we are continually making mistakes like that

The tour that day, was in fact, the most interesting one we took with the school. We boarded a chicken bus and headed out of town, changing to another bus after about half an hour. We ended up in a small hill village where there is a famous shrine to Maxamon (not sure of the spelling but pronounced something like Mashamone.....I just call him Macho Man!!) This shrine is something to behold. It has a square courtyard perhaps 15 meters square and a small church-like structure where a statue of Macho Man sits on a pedestal surrounded by red Christmas tree lights. Maxamon is considered to be a saint by the Mayans although he is not recognized, and in fact is disavowed, by the Catholic church. But the very strange blend of the Mayan indigenous religion and Catholicism has produced a unique and sometimes weird regilion using bits and pieces of both religions. The likeness of Maxoman is a ceramic statue of a rather modern day looking dude, with handle bar mustache, black cowboy hat, black suit, gaudy tie and a cigar (or sometimes a cigarette) stuck in his mouth. At this particular shrine (we've since been witness to other ceremonies involving this guy) he was also draped in a bugs bunny blanket. He sat on a raised dias at the end of the dark and smoke-filled "church". There were several people inside praying and lighting colored candles...different colors for different request or themes sucha as love, business, health, etc. People visiting the shrine drop all manner of gifts in a bowl at his feet ranging from money to cans of beer. The church was pretty weird, but outside in the courtyard, a group of mayan men were smoking ceremonial cigars, drinking liquor and burning some sort of combustible material on the courtyard ground. A number of women also stood smoking cigars. These we were informed were prostitutes hoping to impress the men with their cigar-smoking prowess. The men looked pretty stoned and swayed around the fire for a while before ending their pilgrimage by kissing the ground around the fire. A weird and vaguely disturbing scene, by one of extreme interest. Unfortunately (or luckily) we were there on Thursday and missed the Friday ceremonies when animals are sacrificed and chickens literally pulled apart to spray their blood around the site. The people there seemed totally absorbed by this wierd god of theirs and to them he is apparently a fundamental part of their lives. Really weird!!

Sue's sisters Darien and Rose arrived on schedule Friday afternoon and we were very pleased to see them. They stayed Friday night with us in a room at our casa.

Saturday afternoon we left for Chichicastenango a hill town about 3 hrs by mini bus from Antigua. We checked into a very expensive though rustic hotel in preparation for the world famous Chi Chi market the next day. We did have a nice dinner at the hotel, served by our "personal attendant" who was assigned to us for our stay, dressed in traditional Mayan garb. (Of course the Mayans do still wear their colorful clothes...the women especially...as normal everyday dress...some of the pics on the previous blog entry depicted typical dress.)

The market started setting up on Saturday night, so we walked around some of the stalls and checked out the two white churches in the main square next to our hotel. We got to bed early but unfortunately had anything but a restful sleep. The religious firecrakers and bomb-like noise makers started going at 4:00 am. This couple with the sounds of rumbling trucks bringing people and their wares from the surrounding country side, was enough to ensure we got little sleep. In the morning we found the most of then central part of the town had been transformed in to a maze of small walkways with temporary stalls on each side. The area was reminiscent of the markets we had seen years before in Merakesh and Istanbul. Dee and Rose told us that they watched people arriving up the steep hill that bordered their hotel room. Men, women and children trundling up the hill with huge sacks of goods on their backs with a strong head band helping to lever the weight. They would shuffle up the hill crossing diagonally from side to side of the street like a skier traversing a ski as they weren't strong enough to make it straight up the hill. The site brough tears to their eyes.

We set off about 9:00 to explore the market and thus began our most intense day so far. The next hours were a major assault on our senses. We wandered around, the girls oggling the beautiful wares and I searching for just the right shots to digitally capture the surroundings. The sites, sounds and smells of the market were astonishing. Everywhere one looked sellers were hawking beautiful crafts, textiles, jewelry, traditional Mayan ceremonial masks, clothing, trinkets, fruit and vegetables, live and dead chickens and roosters. The streets were jammed with locals and tourists and a continuous cacophy erupted from every street in the market. The pungent smells of burning wood, strange foods cooking on grills, animals and human waste, permeated the market. Flower sellers sold profusions of colored flowers. (Get a dozen white monk lillies for 50 cents!) Blind men sat on the cobblestones and begged...others drank and eventually collapsed asleep where they sat. Fire crakers boomed. Men waved cans filled with burning insence on the steps of the churches. Bedraggled dogs which were nothing but skin and bones, ran or limped along the narrow pathways. People sat and ate tortillas filled with this and that, prepared on metal stands strewn throughout the market. And on and on. We were overwhelmed by it all to say the least.

The girls continued their shopping and did buy some neat things. I jumped in at one point to bargain with a Mayan lady on a silk embroidered table runner that Sue wanted, but generally stayed away from the commerce being conducted. But all in all, it was an amazing morning and one we will never forget.

But as it turned out their were other "delights" in store. We had arranged for a guide to take us to the local Mayan cemetary as our books advised not to venture there unaccompanied. He walked us down the same hill the vendors had struggle up in the morning and we could see the multi-colored Mayan tombs on a rise at the end of the street. We climbed up and were guided around this strange place where Mayans come to lay their dead. The richer ones have mausoleums (sp?) where whole families are placed in these concretes structures. Some are as large as small houses and all are painted in various pastel shades of greens, yellows, pinks, blues, and white. Our guide told us that the color signifies the day the person died, but I don't know if that is true as several family members can occupy one structure and I'm sure they don't arrange to die on the same day! The not-so-rich are buried in the ground helter skelter around the graveyard, each burial site being marked by a cross....again the strange mix of Mayan and Christian religions. The dead are buried about 6ft down, and the sites are reused several years later on a rotating basis...the older sites first. I'm not sure what happens to the previous bones, but I guess they might all end up intermingled.

We walked to the far end of the cemetary where more ceremonies involving Maxoman were underway. Several Shamans and witch doctors were praying infront of dirty smouldering fires. One was just setting up a new one, carefully placing colored candles amongst the eggs, hunks of chocolate and other food stuffs making up the pyre. Our guide told us that people "hire" these shamans to perform ceremonies where they prey for whatever is required...a sick family member, better business, good luck, etc. We were pointed to one fellow who stood chanting in a cloud of black smoke from his greasy fire. He had a handful of black candles which he threw one-by-one onto the fire. Our guide told us he was performing a "black ritual" intended to bring harm to whomever was targetted by the person paying. Weird weird weired! These sights were extremely interesting from the perspective of experiencing other cultures, but were very disturbing and emotional. It's hard to fathom how the natives in this country believe in things we would consider to be from the dark ages. And the ceremonies we'd seen previously and these here in Chi Chi demonstrated just how seriously people do take their unique religion. Those in attendance at these ceremonies, which were basically performances of witchcraft, sat or stood silently often praying along with the shaman. It is something that is just so far removed from our day-to-day lives and customs that it's hard to wrap one's head around it. And remember, this country is 3hrs flying time from Houston! It really showed us how we do live in two totally different worlds....Dos Mundos.

After the graveyard, we were escorted back through the market stopping at the mask maker shop to seen some authentic ancient masks....most impressive, and the costume shop where they make the unbelievably colorful garments used at major festivals like Holy Week. Our guide obligingly tried on some costumes for us and the obligatory pictures!

He then led us on a road out of town a km or so to climb a hill to another important shrine. After a grueling climb we arrived at what was basically a hunk of black stone in the shape of a phallus, surrounded by some other black smaller stones and fronted by the usual fire. Mayan ceremonies and sacrifices are also apparently performed here frequently, though the only signs of such were two full beer cans boiling away in the fire.

By this time we had had just about enough, though we were escorted to one last shrine a the base of the hill for another intrusive look in on some women kneeling and praying in front of yet another likeness Maxoman. This one had a fedora instead of cowboy hat but was otherwise identical to others we'd seen. We begged off quickly and headed back to our hotel, thoroughly drained physically and emotionally.

We'd arranged for a mini bus to pick us up at the hotel and we set off for our next port of call, Panajachel on the shores of lake Atitlan, a couple of hours drive. We were delighted to find a very nice little town reminiscent of some places we'd seen on our travels through Asia in the late 70's. The town was much cleaner and quieter than ChiChi and we soon found a wonderful little hotel called....wait for it ....Dos Mundos! It was quite fitting for the two extreme worlds we'd been experiencing lately. We had a beautiful little "casita" or small bungalow in a lovely garden set back from the main street, a long thoroughfare lined with shopes and craft stalls. We settled in and after a struggle with one of the town's 2 ATMs (we finally got it to spue out some Quetzeles to augment our dimishing stash) we headed off for a great meal at a local restaurant on the shore of the lake. It was dark by this time, so we didn't see much of the world famous lake and its surrounding volcanoes.

The next morning we were up early and down at the lake shore at 8:30 to catch the all-day ferry boat tour around the lake. We stopped at three different towns around the lake where we wandered the steeply inclined streets at the base of the volcanoe, the girls once again checking out the stall (I think they look on this as one big shopping spree), while I wandered off to take shots of the interesting streets and local people. Each of the towns was a little different. At the second we stopped for lunch. Apparently Dee's chicken sandwich was not a good idea as she suffered through some GI problems last night, though seems ok today. All in all the day on the lake was very relaxing after our hectic day in Chi Chi. Lake Atitlan was very pretty though whoever said it was one of the, if not the, most beautiful lakes in the world, has never seen Lake Louise and the other lakes of the Canadian Rockies, or, for that matter dozens of other lakes like Lake Geneva...etc. Anyway, it was a nice way to spend the day.

This morning we toured a very impressed nature reserve seeing little mongoose-like creatures (can't recall their names) with the most beautiful little faces and some spider monkeys swinging in the trees. And the nature walk along suspended bridges through thick jungle to an impressive water fall, was a delightful way to spend our morning. And this afternoon we bused it back to Antigua. Tomorrow we are off to Coban for two days and then Tikal.

Well, the school has stayed open longer than expected, so I've managed to get some of our experiences recorded. It's impossible to recorde everything we see and do, but hopefully I've capture the essence of our last few days in our "Dos Mundos". Hope to write again soon.

Robb