Guatemala Day 6: Cultural Show

This evening some local teens put on a cultural show. Very nicely done although the music cuts could have stood some work. At times they ended their dance and left us hanging without a cadence to the music.

They began with a Mayan blessing of the space including, incense from a local tree.

The first part of the show was Mayan traditional dancing.

Modern Guatemala is a mixture of many different cultures including that of Seville, Spain. Steve had told me about a cultural show he had seen on a previous visit with these very full skirts. I'm sure my granddaughter would love one.

At the end of the show, they invited us to join them. Some of our people really had the moves, including our guide Guillermo in the foreground

Day 6 was supposed to be the long drive back past Guatemala City to Antigua. Wake up call was 5 AM with suitcases outside our doors by 5:30 for a departure at 6:30.

We departed on time. But thanks to social media, a few miles up the road Guillermo got word that a town along the way is disgruntled about not receiving the road improvements they have been promised for the past ten years. Can't say that I blame them. There is a demonstration in town--including blockading the highway until 2PM. The "alternate route" is not tenable, so we had the choice of sitting in the bus at the road block in the middle of nowhere for hours or returning to the hotel. Guess which one we chose?

We got our rooms back. I had been sorry not to spend more time exploring the beautiful grounds. Now we have the opportunity. Of course, this means we won't reach Antigua until midnight. The reason for the early departure was to avoid Guatemala City rush hour. I guess we will do that, but on the opposite side of the rush than intended. Adventure. :-)

I had intended to go for a walk when I finished getting the blog up. Of course, as I finish, the rain begins. Can't complain after such a beautiful day yesterday.

Guatemala Day 6: Tikal Archaeology Park

A sunny day in the rain forest. Not what we expected. The forecast was 30-40% chance of rain, but we didn't see a drop until we got back to the hotel ready to swim!

Tikal was the main motivation for the trip. Steve was here with Katie and Adam 15 years ago (following an OC confence where they helped with logistics.) He remembers the freedom to scramble as in Great Zimbabwe. It's still like that although we had a guide who gave us lots of information and time limits for our scrambling so we could move on the the next part of the park. We did NOT see everything.

The civilization flourished here from 300 BC to AD 900. We know a lot of specifics because of Mayan written records in inscriptions. They had a strong view of history, a highly developed calendar and dated all their monuments with birth and reign of kings.

We started with this scale model of the park which I include here to give you an idea of the extent. One of the ladies told me she had been expecting "a pyramid." The someone said something about wanting to climb pyramid 4 (foreground.) "You mean there are 4?" As you can see from the model there are a lot more than 4 buildings.

This temple, impressive as it is when you first enter the park, doesn't merit a name on the map except that it is part of Complex Q.

Below is Temple I. I was so excited that I took a bunch of pictures of the back of it before we ever came around to the front and the massive plaza that it faces.

Opposite Temple I is the smaller Temple II.

You can climb Temple II from the back on shallow wooden steps. "Shallow steps" is very important because climbing the tall steps to the Northern Acropolis just about killed my legs.

From the top of Temple II you an see Temples III and IV rising out of the jungle in the distance. (This was taken with telephoto; they are really further away than they look here.)

Temple II on the right, Temple I hidden by the trees on the left. I'm not sure which temple is straight ahead, but it's part of the Central Acropolis. This is taken from the North Acropolis with the really high steps. Someone told me that they weren't originally so high. What we climb on today is the inner structure. The actual steps were much lower, but they must have been terrifyingly steep. Hard to imagine taken them in full royal regalia.

Here we have the view from the Central Acropolis, with Temple 1 on the right. I didn't leave nearly enough time to explore the palaces on this side.

Temple III has only had its top exposed (behind the trees at the top). You can glimpse a bit of the side of the steps peeking out of the undergrowth that covers most of it. Remember, this whole city was lost for almost a thousand years, all Indiana Jones.

Many of the monuments are only partially exposed or completely covered in earth and greenery.

The Plaza of the Seven Temples, like Stonehenge, was designed to show the solstices and equinox and tell the Maya when to plant. The sun rose through these notches on certain days.

Temple IV is the tallest. We may be seniors, but a lot of us climbed the 187 steps--modern wooden ones against the jungle-covered sides of the pyramid.

The view from the top includes Temples I and II (close together to the left), Temple III and I think the Grand Pyramid off to the right with the point right at the top of the canopy.

There is a wide buffer zone around the park. I suspect that is to provide us with this uninterrupted view of the jungle from the tops of the pyramids. It would kind of spoil the feel to spot towns and hotels from up there.

Lunch was another open-air shelter. Delicious as usual. Two bottles of water per person to prevent dehydration.

I’m not a big souvenir buyer, but I have been fascinated with the Mayan writing system. On the wall leading to my office at home I have some parchment, some papyrus, a couple posters of illuminated manuscripts, and an Ethiopian story painted on cloth. I thought this replica of a page from the Dresden Codex would be a nice addition to my collection.

Guatemala Day 5: Quirgua Archaelogical Park

[I had to wait for morning and go looking for a bettersignal before I coud get this up.]

Today was a long day on the bus. Wake up call came at 5:30. We had to have our luggage outside the door by 6 AM. Caravan Tours is very efficient. The bellboys picked up our luggage, and Guillerme, our guide, marked it with our room numbers for each of hotels. All we had to do when we arrived this evening was to pick up our key and wait in the room for the luggage to be delivered. 

The drive out of Guatemala City took us through a less prestigious part of town than yesterday’s tour. Guillermo explained that by a law passed to help the nation recover after the 1976 earthquake, no taxes are charged on unfinished houses. Therefore people leave the cement block unplastered and steel reinforcement rods sticking out so they don’t have to pay taxes. It looked a lot like Brazil. The small towns we passed through also looked like Brazil.

The green rolling hills we came through made us think of Minas Gerais. 

 One of the things I enjoyed was “living fences.” It looks like the fence posts planted every few inches have taken root and branched out. They bear pink flowers if allowed to grow that much. Therre were much better views than this, some obviously cut back year after year so they were topped sith mossy knobs, but the bus doesn't make photo stops, especially not to take pictures of a fence. The rest of my shots were pretty blurred.

 Potty stop was a local resort with coffee, lots of flowers and this wildlife.

 The highlight of the day was the stop at Quirigua Archaeological Park

Before we arrived we watched a video in the bus called “Cracking the Maya Code” about how they figured out how to read the texts carved on steles like this one that tells their creation story. It was a painstaking task to even determine whether the alphabet was phonetic, syllabic or representing whole words like Chinese. The art of reading had been lost after the civilization collapsed a thousand years ago and almost all books were destroyed by conquistadores who wanted to convert the Maya to Catholicism. Now their myths and folk tales can be read from the three surviving codices and the many, many carvings.

I think this is a palace rather than the ball court where the losers lost their heads—literally—although the steps are the height of bleacher seats.

 It was really cool to scramble around over the ancient buildings and imagine discovering them covered with jungle a thousand years after they had been abandoned. (Remember that 200-year drought I mentioned yesterday?) Colors are blurred by the fine rain that was falling most of the time--enough to make the steps slippery and call for caution, but not enough to get wet. It just added tot he middle-of-the-rain-forest atmospher. The weather is very muggy and this is January! I don’t think I would want to be doing too much scrambling in July.

Besides the carved stele, there were other carvings. I think this was supposed to be a jaguar, but I can’t see it myself.

A late lunch was in a cabana on the Rio Doce, 16 km upstream from the Caribbean Sea. Guillermo took our orders ahead of time on the bus because they needed to know how many fish to catch and cook for us. It was sunfish that melted in my mouth. Some Americans were hesitant to eat fish that had the head and tail because they had problems with their food looking at them, but I don’t think anyone was disappointed.

Tonight we are in the lovely Villa Maya in a cabin similar to this one seen from our balcony.

We arrived just at sun down. I’ll have to do some more exploring tomorrow. I was hesitant to walk along the lake in the dark since Guillermo had warned us of crocodiles and jaguars. He assured us jaguars are not aggressive, but all the same, I think I’ll wait for daylight.

Guatemala Day 4: Guatemala City

We moved to the Barceló Hotel last evening to meet up with our Caravan Tour.

Lovely hotel. Definitely a step above Holiday Inn Express. Dinner was a seafood buffet, but there was enough to interest Steve as well. A lot, if not all, meals will be buffet. THAT will require disicipline. Everything last night was delicious. Breakfast was delicious and I mostly stuck with fruit, yogurt and granola. OK, plus a couple pastries. And a piece of banana bread. Like I said, discipline will be required.

We started the morning with an orientation. We went around and introduced ourselves--40 of us. Mostly active seniors. A few less active. Several from Wisconsin. A German couple next to us. Everyone seems friendly. No one seems too excentic.

After a break we boarded the bus for a couple museums at the university.

Museum Ixchel (named for the goddess of the moon, of love and of the textile arts) is a textile museum specializing in Guatemalan weaving. There are 120 different blouse styles representing different people groups. Sounds like a lot until you find out there used to be more than 300. A workshop on traditional technique was being taught in the basement.



No photos were allowed in the museum. I'll have to watch for fabrics and traditional dress elsewhere.

The archeological Museu Popol Vuh (People's Book) was across the courtyard.

It allowed photos if you bought a special pass, but I'm not a fan of pictures taken through glass display cases so I skipped that. This guy was in the courtyard. You are looking at a person emerging from the jaws of a snake, seen above and below. (The snake would be more obvious if I had thought to take a side picture as well.)



The museum is divided into small exhibition rooms from pre-classic through Early Classic, Late Classic and Post Classic to the Spanish periods. I had to laugh as we breezed past Spanish art that I would have considered fascinating in Europe, but wasn't worth my time in Guatemala. Our guide is very knowledgable and told lots of myths and history. Unfortunately, I have forgotten most of it, but I come away with an impression of a highly developed Mayan society with writing, a base-20 counting system and the concept of zero. Also 200 years without rain. That certainly gives new urgency to talk of climate change.

We came back to the hotel for lunch--another buffet. This time I focused on salads of which there were  several very tasty ones with completely different flavors.

After lunch some people hung out in the hotel. Steve was tempted by the football game on TV (Colts vs. Chiefs) but we decided to take the bus tour and catch the second half. The bus took us down a lovely Avenue of the Americas with lots of parks and monuments in the broad median. Lots of plush condo high-rises, but no skyscrapers since the airport is right in town. We saw lots of new development, but I'm not a fan of pictures from moving buses any more than I am of pictures through glass museum cases, so you'll have to look up Cayalá on the internet.

We did make one stop (without getting out of the bus) near some governement buildings. I was impressed with the traditional art incorporated into the modern architecture.

Tomorrow we have to have our luggage outside the door by 6 AM for the drive to Tikal with a stop on the way at Quiriguá, another archeological site. This should be the highlight of the trip.

Guatemala Day 3: Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Trinity

Next spring my high school class from Tudor Hall School for Girls in Indianapolis, Indiana, will celebrate fifty years since our graduation. Some of us have been getting together regularly for the past ten years, but we are making a special effort to track down everyone before next April. One of our classmates was Inez Ayau Garcia from Guatemala. She stayed in Indy to attend Marian College, but after that we lost track of her. Last fall one of "the girls" found an article about her on the Internet. She is the abbess of an orthodox monastery in Guatemala.

"I'm going to Guatemala in January," I said. "Maybe I can see her."

With the information from the Internet article, our friend Paul Sywulka was able to make contact and set up a visit today. Paul drove us to Villa Nueva. Although the distance wasn't great, Guatemala City traffic made it an hour-and-a-half journey each way.

Other than the black habit and a few silver hairs peeking out, Inez looked exactly as I remembered her--that same infectious smile. The paper she is holding is messages that I brought her from other classmates. "That means we are all together in the picture," Inez told me.

She said she had always wanted to be a nun, a dream that she realized after one year at Marian College. Eventually she moved to the Russian Orthodox Church and thirty years ago returned to Guatemala where she founded the Monastery of the Holy Trinity on land donated by a friend of her family. There she has built a beautiful church.

A Russian iconographer came to supervise the painting of the interior with Bible stories from every part of Scripture. "It is the Bible that we must teach," Inez insists. In the Orthodox church all sorts of symbols remind worshippers visually of truths connected with the various stories. I would love to systematically teach my Sunday school class from pictures painted all over the chuch--pictures that they would look at (and hopefully remember) when they were getting bored with the sermon.

All around the sanctuary the word "Holy" is painted in every language they could find.

The setting is fabulous, overlooking a lake south of Guatemala City. Inez took me up to the roof to enjoy the view.

She's a pretty agile lady considering it has been nearly fifty years since our high school graduation. She couldn't understand why I wasn't comfortable standing on the curved roof of the nave (right) to converse.

Inez's great-great-grandfather founded Raphael Ayau Orphanage in the nineteenth century. The monastery took it over and rescued hundreds of children whom they placed for adoption with Orthodox families around the world. They were building a new orphanage and school on the monastery property when all private orphanages were nationalized and they were forced to return children to the nearest relative no matter the conditions of the home. The facility now serves as a retreat center.

It was so good to see Inez again after so many years. She is warm and friendly and has a huge heart for God, for his Word and for the children whose lives she has been able to influence for good. I longed to have her join us for our next retreat where we could sit and share stories and get to know each other as women with so much in common. I encouraged her to travel to the class reunion in April, but she has so many responsibilities and doesn't want to travel that far. She invited us all to come to Guatemala for our next retreat. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Guatemala Day 2: relax at SETECA

Last night we had a lively dinner with Paul and Jean Sywuka. Paul is a 3rd generation missionary who has been a pillar of the school here. Now retired. Jean has a huge gift of hospitality. Other dinner guests were a Dallas prof Jim Adams, and a young couple from Dallas headed into missions. She is an MK who was here at SETECA as a toddler while her parents did theological studies and then grew up in Mexico.

I had zero responsibilities today, and it was raining so I didn't feel any desire to explore. Steve spent the day at a different Bible college while I worked on revisions to my new WIP. (That's work-in-progress for you non-writers.) I should probably have done some research before I started writing, but hey! I felt inspired. Unfortunately, once I did some research I discovered that some of my assumptions were completely wrong, and I needed to relocate opening events in a different setting. Not as difficult as I first feared. I'll probably finish the revisions tomorrow morning and be ready to move forward when we get home.

This afternoon Kathi Small came for tea. Kathi is from my home church. She has lived in Venezuela and more recently Peru and I had forgotten that she moved here to Guatemala recently, but she was at Steve's faculty workshop yesterday and made the connection. So glad she did. We had a nice time drinking tea and talking. Again I am impressed with how many awesome people have come out of Faith Missionary Church in Indianapolis.

We had supper in the school dining hall. Classes aren't in session, but there is a doctoral workshop going on so the kitchen is open. The young couple we had dinner with last evening joined us at our table and we had a good time. It is so cool to be with young people excited about what God may have for them in cross-cultural ministry.

Tomorrow will be relax and get packed in the morning. After lunch, we will visit my high school classmate Ines Ayau Garcia, abbess of the Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Trinity and head of the Raphael Ayau Orphanage. I am really looking forward to seeing Inez after almost 50 years! (Is that possible???)

Guatemala Day 1: SETECA

Yesterday was a long day of travel—MSP to ATL; ATL to Guatemala City—but Steve had booked us in business class, so it could have been worse than it was. Lunch was an antipasto plate with artichoke heart, cheese, salami, cold asparagus, etc. Very nice. Dinner was nicely seasoned chicken whose juices flavored a mixture of potatoes, onions, etc.

I watched the Christopher Robin movie, but it was kind of weird. “Based on” was all they could say. Totally fictional story that reminded me of Hook in the plot of over-worked dad who needs to get back to his childhood roots to relate to his daughter. They treated “Robin” like it was Christopher’s last name, calling him “Mr. Robin” at work. But the animals were nice and in character, and there were a couple joyful frolic scenes. But I wouldn’t watch it again. What I really wanted was the movie about A. A. Milne and his relationship with his son.

We arrived about 8:30 at night—same time zone as home. THAT is very nice. In the airport I saw several women in colorful traditional dress like it was their ordinary get-dressed-up-to-go-to-the-airport dress. You don’t see that in Minnesota. 

Steve’s friend Paul picked us up and brought us to a guest room at SETECA—Evangelical Theological Seminary of Central America. The campus is a maze of beautiful courtyards. 

We have a three-bedroom suite with bath, sitting room/kitchenette and tiny bedroom located behind this neatly trimmed tree. We didn’t kick each other out of the double bed last night, and the bed was nice a firm, just how we like it.

Today Steve is off to teach a faculty workshop. I will stay here, explore a little and do some thinking on paper about my new book project.