Saturday in Antigua

On Saturday Jen, me, Maria Jose and her friend Tuve (I have no clue how to spell this girl's name!) all drove to Antigua for the day. Its about 45 minutes away from the city and is soooo much nicer that Guatemala City. Its an old colonial town so there are cobbled streets and old ruins of churches and places to buy things. It's a hot spot for expats and travelers. (There are amazing Spanish language schools there too)  It is also a bit safer to walk around and there are wayyyy more plants and fresh air.

Breakfast in Antigua is particularly good and I loved the place we went in the morning. It was a restaurant and a plant nursery.

Breakfast...Soooo good. 

This plant is called green jade. Look at the little bee flying into it!

I got one of these real cute and cheap little succulent plants. 

Come and visit me!! I now have two really good breakfast places to take you in Antigua!

Then we did a little bit of exploring around. One of the real fancy boutique hotels let us look around and it was gorgeous!

Maria Jose

me

Jen and Tuve in the window

Later we walked around, went shopping, and saw a performance over by the (very famous) arch. 

One of my favs

Mayan Cleansing Ceremony

Soooo, Jen and I decided to have a Mayan cleansing ceremony for our house and selves. Our Spanish teacher, Maria Jose, (she comes to our house every Tuesday and Thursday to teach us Spanish) knew a Mayan woman who lives in Antigua that was willing to come and perform the ceremony.

In order for her to do that we had to collect a whole bunch of things for her to use in the ceremony. First, we had to buy bundles of 7 sacred herbs. We then needed to boil them and bathe in them while asking them to clean us for 7 days. (That swiftly became a pain in the butt..)

As I said, while bathing we were supposed to be calm and peaceful and ask the herbs to clean us and then thank them. But, whenever I was dumping smelly herb juice over myself all I could think of was this clip from Baby Mama (watch it to the end, you'll get it)

The weekend before the ceremony, Jen, me and Maria Jose went to the market in zone 1 get the rest of the stuff we needed. All in all, we had to get 5 different colored candles, 3 dozen tiny candles, incense, and incense swinger, charcoal and a terracotta plate. The market is a bit hectic and a kinda dangerous place for me to have out my camera. Hence the crappy camera angles (trying to be incognito). 

All of our stuff, laid out artistically on the kitchen table with a lovely piece of traditional Guatemalan cloth behind it. 

 

I didn't take any pictures of the actual ceremony because thats not exactly kosher...The Mayan lady was really nice and friendly (I was secretly scared she was going to summon the devil in our house or something, but after meeting her it was obvious she wasn't going to do that). She started by having us place four different colored candles in the four corners of our apartment. Then she walked around the entire house with the incense swinger and burnt incense while praying. She opened up every cupboard and cabinet and wafted smoke inside. While she was doing this, she had me and Jen sit in the living room and light dozens of tiny white and yellow candles and place them upright on plates. Later, she had us stand one by one in the living room while she wafted burning herbs over us and prayed for the ancestors and the spirits to cleanse us, our apartment and our lives. Finally we all sat down and she talked about our different personalities based on the Mayan calendar and talked about what problems the ancestors told her we were facing and gave a few suggestions for our lives.

The whole ceremony took almost three hours and was really, really interesting.

Mariachi Band Outside My Apartment

Watch it till the end, you wont regret it.

Me and Jen, my roommate, were hanging out in our living room and we kept hearing this trumpet sound. We were like, "Oh god, someones taking up the trumpet and were gonna have to listen to them practice." OUr neighbors in the building are always making weird sounds.

So we look out on our balcony and down the street theres this mariachi band playing.




Yup, I totally walked into the sliding glass door. 

El Pilar Hike in Antigua

One Saturday, some of the teachers at the school (Shannon the 1st grade teacher, and her husband Dexter the 4th grade teacher) drove us out near Antigua to climb El Pilar. It is a beautiful tropical mountain setting with a natural spring. They filter out the water and there are a series of pools at the entrance that you can swim in.  

The Virgin Mary (Catholic country)

Dexter!

Beautiful roots

At the beginning of the hike its all stairs. My asthma was acting up and I felt like a bit of a pansy. The stairs were brutal though, everyone was breathing heavy. Although Dexter had gone ahead because he likes to run and us girls weren't feeling that.

Fun vines hanging down from trees. 

LANDSLIDE!! It has been raining been raining here like crazy! (Its rainy season, soon to turn into windy season) The rain creates landslides all over and apparently the side of this hill had fallen. It was scary because they mine the side of the hill right below this landslide area and its a pretty sheer drop.

Dexter left us a message in the rocks.

Sheer drop. 

I was worried. 

Mountain climber extraordinaire! 

haha Dexters message once we got over!

The pool down at the bottom! It was a bit cloudy and chilly then, so we didnt go in, but the water looked amazing!

Apartment!!

We managed to find a apartment before school started, thank goodness. We chose to live in Zone 14 (near Zone 10 where the nightlife is but 14 is safer and more residential) Our apartment is one block from Las Americas. Las Americas is a major road that has a large grassy median. On Sundays they close one side for people to walk their dogs, ride bikes, rollerblade, etc.

The apartment is up on the fifth floor, which is nice in terms of views but scary in terms of Tisa. We’ve been keeping her off the porch.

Mini tour!

You walk into the apartment and on your left are a few closets and the guest bathroom. Then you turn right and head into the dining/living room. Turn again around the corner and there’s the kitchen. I love the large window over the sink.

Further in the kitchen is the maid's room and bathroom. Memo to guests who'd like to visit: You will have your own (tiny) room and full bathroom. Although right now all that's in there is a rug. haha

View off the porch. When it's not so cloudy you can see the hills in the background.

Jen's bedroom is before mine in the hallway. Her bathroom is across the hall.

My bedroom is at the end of the hallway (Jen and I did a coin flip for the master and I won). The school provided the bed and I bought the end tables and bench outside of Antigua. I am still meaning to get a corner table and possibly a desk. I recently bought these two plants from the plant shop across the road from the apartment. One is a regular little palm tree and the other is called a Guatemalan pony tail palm. (a name I love, it’s whimsical). 

Palm tree!

Guatemalan pony tail palm!

Gratuitous Tisa picture

Colegio Maya

After Antigua, I spent a few days setting up my classroom and unpacking all the crap I brought from the states. (One whole suitcase of school supplies! Out of the two suitcases I was allowed.) That I already had stuff printed and laminated and ready to put up was great. It really helped with some of the beginning of the school year stress.

I’ve got a real sweet group of kids. I have a class of 13 (amazing number: enough to create small groups but not too many to handle in terms of behavior and being able to spread out in the classroom)

My school provides me with a desktop computer, projector and ipad. I looooove the ipad, projector combo. I use it literally every day. In the picture below, I was taking a picture of the kids with my ipad while projecting it on the board. 

 Recently I had my kids work on writing by creating Wanted posters and I told them they could write one about me if they wanted (as long as there was no death and no guns). Half of them choose to write about me and more than one mentioned in their description of me that I am “usually seen with an ipad”. 

Guatema-holla!

The flight to Guatemala was incredibly short and easy compared to the flight from Tanzania. In a blink of an eye it was done. And I had good luck, to boot. When mom dropped me off at the airport, the guy at the American Airlines counter was in an especially good mood that day and even though I had two overweight bags, he just waved at me and said, “Oh we won’t charge you for that!” I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t.

Tisa had no problems on the flight. She’s a pro now at being stuffed under airline seats. Bringing her into the country was swift and painless thanks to the blood, sweat and tears that went into getting all her documents done in the states. (I had to get a international health certificate from a vet, then take it to the USDA to have them certify it. Buuuut USDA office lady was a bit of a nitpicker and told us that vet had drawn lines on the form where she wasn’t supposed to and therefore the papers could not be certified. IN order to get all the paperwork on time I had to have it certified that day so Mom and I sped all the way from downtown Richmond to Manakin-Sabot, got the vet to resign the papers, then back to the USDA office we did this all within 40 minutes. Thank god the USDA office lady certified that batch.  Then we had to mail those papers to the Guatemalan consulate so that they could certify them. Long process.

Jennifer, the school’s business manager, picked me up at the airport and dropped me off at the hotel with a welcome basket, cat supplies and a phone. I was the first of the new teachers to arrive but the rest (theres only 5 of us) came the next day.

The week after I arrived was spent doing  some intro to the school stuff, searching for apartments, and basically getting oriented.

Myself, Jen (my roommate, we decided to live together because our housing allowance stretches farther if we combine it), and the new high school principal went on a day trip to Antigua. Antigua is the old capital of Guatemala and has beautiful architecture and on old-timey feel. 

These brightly colored buses are known as chicken buses. They are old school buses from the states that are used as public transportation here. They are pretty dangerous though because they refuse to pay bribes to the gangs and so occasionally get shot up.

Artisan's market

This is the McDonalds in Antigua!