I can’t make up my mind: stay in Antigua these last six days or make the eight-hour-each-way van ride to the caves at Lanquín and the waterfalls at Semuc Champay? My mind is flapping around like the Lent flags at Iglesia Santa Lucia.
I’d like to show you where I’m living on Callejon del Burrito. Here are the living room downstairs and my south-facing view toward El Volcan Agua from my upstairs porch.
While walking to Doí±a Luisa’s for bread this morning, I got curious about some of the things I’ve been passing by for a month. Paying the personas extranjeras admission fee, I popped into El Museo del Libro Antiguo. A sign inside explains why there were so many old Bibles: “With the printing press, religious books flourished, since ecclesiastical people impulsed them.”
On display were the first book printed in Guatemala (1663) and a meter-high volume bound with wood and leather and held together with brass hinges.
A few doors down is the Museo de Santiago de los Caballeros, filled with Colonial stuff. The best room (no photos allowed) has five or six stone fountains in that inexplicable Antiguan style: buxom sirens that shoot water from their nipples. A guide with a “Yo [heart] Jesus” sunglass strap was showing two people the weaponry as I came upon a room filled with instruments of torture. In the artisan room there was a big list of patron saints for tradespeople. The Virgen de Dolores watches over tailors and San Diego over bakers.
A wall map indicates that I’m currently in the Sierra Madre. Can this be true? I didn’t know that.
Following Jesus-Man out the door I turned west toward ruins I wanted to visit. When I got to the bus zone six blocks later, a sudden windstorm whipped up.
It seems that ruins are popular spots for trysts. Can you spot the couple at San Jerónimo?
A block away is La Recolección, the most ruined ruin I’ve ever seen. Very dramatic, and not the spot to be in an earthquake.
Here, I encountered another entwined pair.
After lunch (a chocolate galleta) I accidentally went to a heap more museums. I meant just to poke my head into a one-room folk-art gallery, but you can’t do that without paying for all the associated museums near and in Santo Domingo. So I went into:
- Two criptas where I found a woman sneezing uncontrollably (“I must be allergic to crypts”)”¦
- A colonial museum where Jesus and his friends in Purgatory were definitely Not Having Fun”¦
I saw the biggest rosary ever (it must have been 50 feet high)”¦
There was also an exhibit of caricatures done by someone I’ve never heard of — José Cayetano Morales — which were amazing. I wish Pat could see these.
All over the acres-large premises were dozens of workmen putting finishing touches on preparation for a quinceaí±era that was an hour from beginning. Thousands of candles, red carpets, elegant place-settings for untold numbers of dinner guests, milling guests in Oscar-quality attire, and twenty-foot color posters of the fifteen-year-old guest of honor.
I think the five-star Hotel Casa Santo Domingo is among the most expensive establishments in Antigua, so the price tag of this party must be stunning. It was strange to watch the high-heeled woman in translucent black-beaded dress click past the huipel-ed Maya woman selling keychains.
Exhausted, I headed home past one of my favorite sights.
_