Awake, arise, or forever be fallen

Procession in La Antigua, Guatemala, celebrating the resurrection on Easter Sunday.

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The band will play on

Trumpeter waiting alongside instruments outside a church in La Antigua, Guatemala, on Easter Sunday.

 

Propriety (or the lack thereof)

Yesterday, I stumbled into the very cool Iglesia y convento de Santa Clara, founded in 1699 and later destroyed (a number of times) by earthquakes. Now it’s a tourist attraction, but it has another purpose as well: retreat for horny teenagers — I ran into three couples (like the one above) macking in hidden corners.

 

The steaming, belching heights of absurdity

 

For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to climb a volcano. “Where else but Guatemala?” I thought. In that same spirit, I decided to climb not just to the top of volcano to ponder its awe-inspiring power, rivulets of flame snaking down the side of the hill, but to explore mere feet from cascading flows, the bottom of my sneakers even beginning to melt. We spent so long on the volcano that the sun set and the group (a motley crew of about 50 ne’er-do-wells, ranging from high school kids studying Spanish in Antigua to a BBC correspondent and a duo that was driving from North Carolina to Colombia) had to hike for two hours in the pitch dark, saved only by a few prescient souls who thought to bring flashlights or headlamps.

Stupid tourists! Get away from that lava!

No! I said away, not closer! Doh!

 

Who watches the watchers?

Or, pictures of people observing the Semana Santa processions in La Antigua, Guatemala:

 

Graffiti in Chichicastenango

(Above: Surf ad in Chichi.)

In addition to some great painted advertisements, I discovered a bit of graffiti in Chichicastenango, the market town about an hour from Antigua. I didn’t ask anyone for details about it, what it means, who the artists are, but I’d be interested to know more about local visual culture and artistic resistance, etc.

 

Para Maria, full of grace

Girls hoist a float of the Virgin Mary on the Viernes procession in La Antigua, Guatemala.