Antigua

we are in antigua guatemala hanging out for a week taking spanish classes. i'm not sure how much good it's doing us, but i think we all are really glad to have a week off. peter got really sick (from food), and erik spent the first couple days asleep. i went to make a phone call on halloween, and came back to the room at 6:00 and found both of them totally passed out. it was maybe like the lamest halloween of my whole life. i wandered around for a while, then came home, ate a bowl of cereal and read for a little bit. i was really bumbed out about it because halloween is my favorite holiday, but then it ended up the next day, dia de los muertos (day of the dead)was really awesome. i went to this pueblo with my spanish teacher and some of her friends, to see these kites made out of tissue paper called barriletes. this is a close up of one of them. the indigenous people make them, and a lot of the messages were really political. this one says "live in peace and protect the world", but a lot of them said things like "guatemala, you've hurt me so much. you've burned my land, killed my ancestors, but my culture survives." at the end of the day, they tried to fly the kites. a lot of the came crashing back down to the earth and were destroyed, but some of them flew. and it was so crazy. it just looked like these giant, ornate jelly fish flying through the air. on the strings the indigenous people put messages to the dead.
fifty seven percent of guatemalans are indigenous, and they are really, really different from the ladino (non-indigenous) people of guatemala. the indigenous people have really strong spiritual beliefs. for example you're not supposed to take pictures of them because they think you are robbing their sole. the women still wear traditional clothing, but most of the men use western clothes. during dia de los muertos, the indigenous cover the graves of their relatives with pine needles and flowers and hang out in the cemetary all day remembering their family members who haved passed away. it was really beautiful.
This is a picture of the "organ meat stew" i had for lunch. next to it, in the pot with the red rim, is iguana. the big black lumpy thing is beans. yum... i kinda wanted to try the iguana just so i could say i'd eaten iguana, but the organ meat stew was not sitting well in my stomach, so i had to pass that one up. love,
-jessie