De todo un poco

As we learned this Monday, there are two seasons in Guatemala. The rainy season goes from May to November, the dry season from November to April. Since it is the end of January, it is naturally pouring outside. I am using this as an excuse to write a little bit about some of the fun things we’ve done over the past week.

Classes have been going on for a week and a half now. Already I’ve done about as much work as I do in a single day at William and Mary. I am only taking three classes, and a lot of my extra time will be spent doing internships. Spanish class meets four days a week for about an hour in the morning, and I need to start spending more time studying grammar and vocabulary. The class is focused on conversation, so we have been listening to and discussing music. In addition, we are reading the Popol Vuh, the Q’iche Maya origin story. It is an interesting selection, since oral tradition is written in such a different style (think Homer). We’ll also be reading it in English for our Latin American Studies class.

Friday, our whole group took a field trip to Guatemala City. Our program director, Javier, showed us the national palace and cathedral along the Plaza Central. The cathedral was beautiful. The statues of saints and Jesus (they care called imágenes) don’t make me feel like I’m in a waxworks as do many here in Antigua. I much prefer the realism of Renaissance art, it’s not so creepy. Javier showed us the mercado (market) , which is pretty gigantic. My favorite part was the raw meat section and the fruit piled high everywhere. We went to a nice restaurant for a traditional Maya lunch. Ka’kik is a turkey and rice soup flavored with chiles, served with tamales (a sort of bread made of cornmeal, cooked inside corn husks or leaves). Instead of salt and pepper in packets on the table, there was chile pepper and salt. Since being down here I have discovered the wonders of fresh-made limeade, with plenty of sugar, and sometimes some soda water. My host mom flavors a lot of food with lime – especially soup and broccoli. I think I will follow suit when I head home.

For the afternoon, we went to the Popol Vuh museum on the campus of Francisco Marroquín University. We worked our way through Preclassic to Postclassic artifacts, recovered from construction sites and private collections. There was some pretty cool stuff, and I especially enjoyed being able to pick out stylistic differences in the pottery. Javier is a student at the university so he took us on a mini-tour and we all got coffee (though I don’t think anyone actually got coffee) before heading back to Antigua. The drive there and back was fun as well – our driver Josué had a varied of dated music that got us singing everything from Spice Girls to Queen.

After our excursion to the macadamia nut finca, we went with Josué to the nearby town of Dueñas for a local fútbol (soccer) match. We all wore green and white, Antigua’s colors, and had a great time cheering and expanding our vocabularies with the kind of good, wholesome words that you can only learn at sports games. Antigua won, 3-0. There are plans in the works to go again, and this time get jerseys for Antigua, drink some Gallo, and continue to benefit from the language immersion.

Monday was our first history class of the semester. Our professor is one of a kind: an ex-guerrilla from El Salvador with a PhD in international relations. He’s a blunt man with a great sense of humor. One of the students in our group is a military analyst studying international narcotics. When he explained this to our professor, the prof asked, “Do you smoke weed?” Jordan responded no, to which José Antonio asked, “How can you study drugs if you don’t do them?”

The class took a tour of Antigua, to get an idea of the city’s past. Starting at the Parque Central, we visited and discussed the municipal building, the Catedral de Santiago (Saint James is the patron of Antigua, and his feast on July 25 is a huge celebration), the Palacio, and the fountain. A few cool notes: most of the old churches in Antigua face west, which relates to sunlight entering the church. Cardinal directions are really important to the native worldview as well. The fountain in the Plaza Central has associations with fertility tied to a myth of Spanish women who would not breast feed their children (you'll understand after seeing the fountain).

We visited the Posada de Don Rodrigo, a snazzy hotel in the design of a traditional Spanish house with a beautiful view from the roof. We walked through the Merced, the yellow church pictured in an earlier entry, with a lot of the most celebrated imágenes used in the Semana Santa (Holy Week) processions. I learned a new thing about St. Anthony of Padua: he is not only the patron saint of lost things, but also of single women. It is a tradition for girls at age 13 and over to gather 13 coins from their friends and light a candle in front of St. Anthony's image as an offering so that they might find a man. One of the students from our group, Taylor, then responded, “So this is where I come to find single girls!”

Our tour guide took us into a nice restaurant, where there is a room (almost like a cave) with a table for two and lots of candles, ¡que romántico! It is used for engagements – we mused that if a guy wanted to play a good joke oh his girlfriend, he could take her there and not propose. I can imagine several of you guys doing this as a practical joke on a girl with a good sense of humor (you could always propose at the very end). Our final stop was El Convento de las Capuchinas, a neat, beautiful old convent. There was an “eighteenth century recording studio” (as one of my compañeras put it) in the basement – the resonance was awesome.

That’s all for now. I started my internship with CIRMA today – reading social science books in French (yes, you read that right) and writing catalog entries in Spanish. My first book is on the Yaqui du Mexique. I’ll keep you updated on how this goes. Tomorrow we’re set to climb an active volcano – I’ll eat a s’more for you all.