I feel worse today. I don’t think it’s the gumdrops after all. It was all I could do to drag myself out of bed at 6:45 this morning, after a night of tossing and teeth-chattering with chills.
The cool thing is that el Volcan de Fuego, one of two I can see from my bedroom window, is putting on a dramatic show. Some mornings I can see delicate wisps rising from the crater, but today there were billows of smoke, getting thicker and greyer as the day wore on. I had a good view from school, too, and was so intrigued that I kept getting up mid-lesson for another glimpse.
It turns out that this was the volcano’s biggest eruption since 1974: dramatic, but not so bad that anyone or anything down below was hurt by the lava. Here’s what the tourism site mayaparadise.com says about Fuego:
Fuego is almost an identical twin of Acatenango [in Quetzaltenango]…. It has been in almost constant eruption since 1524 (over 400 years) with numerous large explosive eruptions and frequent earthquakes. The last big eruption was in 1974. The Cakchiquel Mayans call this volcano “Chi Gag.”
If someone knows what Chi Gag means, please let me know.
My Spanish teacher knows I like to take field trips during my lesson (on the entrance exam I put a check by I prefer movement games to games where one just sits), but I get the feeling she’s taking a wee bit of advantage. Today she wanted to go back to the mercado to pick up some high-heeled white plastic boots for her 14-year-old daughter. I didn’t want to put a crimp in her day, so off we went. Oh, and she also needed to make a quick stop at the stationery store.
I felt awful when we returned — the chicken-bus fumes and mercado flies didn’t help — so I quit my lesson an hour early while M continued hers: a Scrabble game with her teacher.
After lunch at the legendary café Doí±a Luisa, M and I met Don Toí±o (who apologized for being 30 seconds late) at the iglesia by the park. Before driving us to San Antonio he stopped by our house where we said hi to Doí±a Rosa. She’d made us an incredible traditional Guatemalan dinner of spicy chicken, carrot soup, zuccini and those thick little handmade corn tortillas.
We passed through Ciudad Vieja which, if by some remote chance I understood Don Toí±o correctly, is the original capital of Guatemala and home to the country’s oldest church.
San Antonio is famous for trajes tipicos, brilliant-colored handwoven Maya clothing, and other textiles. I got a bedspread like the one I admire of Maria’s: a patchwork of old huipiles from around the country.
San Antonio is not far from el Volcan de Fuego so we got a closer look at the eruption, but the clouds are getting thick and it’s hard to see much.
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