Taking advantage of the fast internet available to us in Antigua, I decided to upload all of our vacation pictures from 2010. Don’t worry, we’ve been working as well. The organization we’ve been collaborating with provided us with a couple of DVDs of images that I conveniently left back in our site. I’ll upload those in the next few weeks*, or as our slow internet where we live dictates. We’ve been without a camera since early 2010 up until a couple of weeks ago, so having a record of our work during that time is quite a relief.

*Edit – April 27th: Please see the back-dated post here to read and view what work we’ve been doing over the past couple of months. If you’re on the main page, see the post before this one.

Galleries are shown in chronological order, from oldest to newest.

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Christmas/New Years on the Lake with the Cranes

Way back in early January, my family came down for a week-long visit. We spent most of the time hanging out, soaking up the sun, and enjoying the beautiful weather. We rented Casa Paloma, author Joyce Maynard’s second home in San Marcos, Lake Atitlan. It was amazingly luxurious. In all of our time here, we’ve never enjoyed as much residential decadence as we did that week.

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Semana Santa (Holy Week/Easter) 2010

Sarah’s mom, uncle David, and cousins Ashlee and Courtney came to visit at the beginning of April. We spent the first week enjoying the festivities of Semana Santa. One of the biggest tourist draws of Guatemala is Semana Santa in Antigua, and we feel lucky to have seen it and taken part in it! The hostel we stayed in, Yellow House, has the guests help make the alfombra (carpet) of sawdust. We sifted it, dyed it, laid it out, and watched it get trampled by the Good Friday processions. Yes, you read that right. We spent twelve hours preparing this thing for it to get walked on by hundreds of people carrying floats on their shoulders*. Quite the experience! David gets a special mention for designing, laying out, and preparing the base of the carpet (see pictures below).

After staying up all night/morning of Good Friday looking at everyone’s carpets around Antigua, we rested and slept for the entire next day, gathering our strength to climb one of the most famous active volcanoes in Guatemala, Volcano Pacaya. We spent the afternoon climbing the volcano, saw a smidgen of lava, and stumbled down the mountain in the dark. One of the best parts of going at night were the views of the magma spewing out of main crater. The next morning we hightailed it to Lake Atitlan. Sarah treated her family to the rustic stylings of La Iguana Perdida, and we enjoyed home-style meals and lake-front views.

Towards the end of our time at the lake I was taken out of commission due to a pesky intestinal bacterial infection, and Sarah took her family to Santiago Atitlan to be introduced to Maximón (pronounced mosh-e-moan), the revered sinful folk saint of the Mayan cultures in Guatemala. He has his worshippers spray Venado all over him and place hand-rolled cigarettes are placed in his wooden mouth in his honor. Quite the saint, indeed.

After the trip to Santiago Atitlan, Sarah and her family spent an afternoon learning the process of back strap weaving. We headed back to Antigua the morning after to decompress and get any last-minute gifts that people needed.

*see the video below the gallery to observe the Good Friday procession in action

Here is a quick video taken with a little point-and-shoot showing the procession advancing through the streets of Antigua early in the morning on Good Friday. These processions passed all week, all hours of the day, through all parts of Antigua.

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Semuc Champey, 2010

The last part of our most recent vacation was spent entertaining our good friend from Cincinnati, Annaliese. We’ve already been to Semuc Champey, but it was great to be able to see one of the most beautiful hidden treasures of Guatemala again before we leave in mid-June. After more than sixteen hours of travel in two days aboard public transportation, we parked ourselves at Yellow House in Antigua once again to enjoy the laid-back atmosphere and good food of the city for a few more days before Annaliese returned to work as the director of Over the Rhine’s Peaslee Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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That’s it for now! I’ll be making a post of our recent work when we get back to good ‘ole Quiché tomorrow. Once we get back home, we’ll be entering our final two months as Peace Corps Volunteers in Guatemala; wrapping up work, saying goodbye, and getting everything organized for our return to the states in mid-June. We’re both excited and sad to start this process, so we’ll see how it goes.

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