Today is our third day of school and the second that our thoughtful neighbor Gail has appeared at our door bright and early with delicious coffee. She totally rules (as we say in Guatemala).
Yesterday afternoon my teacher told me that, for our field trip today, she wants to go to the village of Pastores. I’d resisted since I’ll be going tomorrow as well, but she seemed so eager that I tentatively agreed. Now, honestly: I do know better than to pay a pile of money to someone just to let them take advantage of me. Why did it take the wise counsel of my daughter to convince me to assert myself?
Assert myself I did, and you’d think I’d ruined my teacher’s whole vida. She admonished me (in Spanish) that if I’m going to change my plans, she needs much more warning. Still, she endured her disappointment with the grace of a viper, and survived the five-block walk to our new destination: Casa Santo Domingo.
Its web site says it better than I ever could:
La Antigua Guatemala is a city in which each fountain and wall could tell us a story but instead, is limited to give out the explosive happiness of a beautiful bougainvillea or the nostalgia of a lilac jacaranda. Each studding door, each ruin, the color of the moss covered centenary rocks, tells us about the nostalgia that wraps the City of the Perpetual Roses between gentle landscapes.
Casa Santo Domingo is an important part of the beautiful colonial reliquary, that preserves in its bowels the treasures from the baroque period of ancestral America. Each corner of this house, each stone, each image and each piece that composes this unequaled whole of works becomes alost page in time which one by one are joined forming a beautiful chapter of the grand book of our history.
Today, as the Fenix bird, these treasures are resurfaced so that own and foreign can appreciate and understand the stories that its textures, forms and colors tell us. We invite you to take agastronomical walk through our kitchen where you will be able to select the dish of your predilection.
That’s just … so … beautiful.
My two — no, three — favorite things there were:
- the exhibit of ancient artifacts, each paired with its contemporary interpretation
- the aqueduct system that you can see through a plexiglas panel in the “floating” floor
- the sarcophagus
When we got back, my teacher was tired and wanted to call it quits a little early. I was delighted to oblige; it takes a lot of energy to keep her entertained.
After lunch (gotten at Café Condesa and consumed in the plaza) we went to Mayas Traditions, a travel agency with whom we’d arranged a mule ride for this afternoon. There we met up with Friederike, a woman from our school who’d asked to join us. She’s a delight: quirky, smart and fun; when she’s not traveling she’s one of those leiterin der rechtsabteilungs at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
A van from the nearby coffee plantation, Finca de Filadelfia, pulled up to the curb and out popped Betty, a shrill woman with thin magenta slashes for lips. She spoke English equivalent in quality to my Spanish, but with bravado. We ditched her as soon as we reached our destination.
Our handsome caballero (mule-ero?) was introduced to us as “Mister Bill.” He helped us onto our steeds, each named for a Democratic U.S. president or first lady. I rode Rosalita [Carter] who stood about two stories tall. She had no intention of letting another creature precede her, so she and I bolted before the others (including Don Bill) were ensconced in their saddles.
It was a fun, intriguing and disturbing ride: fun because the mules were spunky and Don Bill gave us literal free rein to lope whenever we wanted; intriguing because of the scenery, terrain and flora [fauna included giant spiders with a passion for leaping from trees, but we didn’t encounter them]; and disturbing because we got a small glimpse of the extreme hardship of life and work on fincas, whose turbulent history I’ve been reading about in the book Maria recommended to me: Silence on the Mountain.
We (actually, the poor sweating mules) climbed steeply up a dust-and-rock road to an elevation of 8,000 feet. We saw where another Hurricane Stan mudslide had taken a bite out of the mountainside. At the top, Don Bill gave us a mini-lesson in coffee-growing (with help from the others I was able to translate about half) and let us taste a coffee berry (sweet) and the green bean inside (slippery). Speaking of slippery, in attempting to step down the 90-degree slope to look at a coffee bush, I took a little ride on my hindquarters. When I stood up again I looked like an angry porcupine; I’d attached myself to a hundred little black spikey briars.
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