Antigua

Quetzalteca Especial

Oh, hey! We're back to Guatemala for the foreseeable future.


Returned pocket-size empties of Quetzalteca Especial liquor at the Antigua market.

Mardi Gras: Down on the Bayou

The other activity we undertook in the greater Cut Off metro area was not actually Mardi Gras-related, but definitely Louisana- related. We took a swamp tour on an airboat. The swamp was actually beautiful, filled with birds and Spanish Moss hanging from every tree branch. Our host, Arthur, reports that we were there at the worst time of year, and that soon flowers will bloom and gators will come out of hibernation.


We did manage to see a few alligators, although Arthur (above) was unable to catch one for our wrassling enjoyment (not for lack of effort). We also saw approximately one million nutras, which are basically giant swamp rats. They are so plentiful that apparently nutra season is quite lucrative due to the bounty for each nutra killed. This despite the fact that the nutra was maybe the only animal, bird, or plant in the swamp about which Arthur did not declare, "Them's good eatin'."


Pictured above is the airboat, which goes really fast, and is very loud, requiring the bright yellow ear protectors as pictured below. Other than going fast, and doing big fishtailing turns, which are pretty darn cool, the best part of the air boat is it's ability to hop over levee embankments and go zipping over grassy patches of swamp. We only wish that we lived on a river and could commute by airboat each day, although we might not go for the camouflage coveralls for everyday use.

Mardi Gras: Thibodaux Parade People

So as mentioned a few days ago, your correspondents were privileged to ride on "Uncle Pott's Band Wagon," a float in the Thibodaux, Louisiana Mardi Gras festivities. We took along a bunch of the snazzy (but still cheap plastic) necklaces we had caught in New Orleans, along with several bags of store-bought necklaces. At Mardi Gras, the "value" of a worthless plastic necklace is determined by the size of the beads, the length of the necklace, and if it features any bonus crazy shaped beads other than plain spheres. We had plenty of necklaces that were essentially the most worthless of the worthless.

This did not deter a large section of the crowd from finding them quite desirable. Obviously, the fun of the event is the game of catching goodies thrown by random strangers, not the true value of the items caught. Thus, the game appeals highly to children, who get very excited about catching even small prizes. Of course, many very small kids had learned to wave their arms to beg for a necklace, then cowered in fear if one was actually thrown their way.

This also did not stop a large number of grown-ups from scooping up a ridiculous amount of the necklaces and storing them in big trash bags or the like. To what end? Perhaps they were going to be riding on their own float later in the day and needed stuff to throw. Or maybe they have a wall of their garage lined with trash bags of Mardi Gras treasures dating back for decades.

We tried to be judicious in only tossing our special beads sporadically, so they would last the duration of the parade. Your correspondent took an attitude that he would not reward particularly obnoxious behavior; therefore kids who screamed for beads like they were having a tantrum got cheap beads. Older people who made gestures or remarks indicating a sense of entitlement got skipped entirely. People who seemed to be having an awesome time regardless got the best prizes. The biggest prize went to a young kindred spirit who appeared to be trying to take artistic street-photography pictures of the floats. The second biggest prize went to some young entrepreneur in front of a bar who ran alongside the float and traded me three jell-o shots for some beads. Hooray for capitalism!

Unfortunately, we were not judicious enough in our throwing. We were running low on fancy beads as we came into the African-American part of town, which resulted in no small amount of guilt on my part that we would look like racists, but I just didn't have any more cool stuff to throw. And Uncle Pott's generator blew out and the music stopped, and we wound up kind of a sad float playing no music and throwing no fancy beads. Pott was pretty disappointed about the generator situation, but there was nothing he could do. He is a showman, but his vocal cords have some miles on them, and he can't sing unamplified. The more we didn't throw cool stuff, the more people gave us indignant looks and told us not to waste our time throwing them junk. Editorial discretion prevents us from publishing more details here (nothing like mild racial tension to set the nerves on end), but the point is: I might do things differently, bead-conservation wise, were I invited for a return engagement on Uncle Pott's Band Wagon.

In any case, it was not too long after running out of fancy beads that your correspondent pretty much ran out of beads entirely, or at least let his crew-mates throw the last few beads and took pictures of the crowd in the last stretch of the parade. It's an interesting slice of humanity, including cute kids and pickups of drunk college kids and older folks who have probably been watching the Thibodaux Mardi Gras parade from their front lawns since dirt. Check out a slideshow here.

Mardi Gras: New Orleans Parade People

The Saturday before Mardi Gras (sometimes called "Samedi Gras") has its own parades, as seen in a previous entry. The schedule basically goes:

1:00 - 4:00: Parade
4:00 - 7:00: Sit around holding your place on the parade route
7:00 - 10:00: Parade

The staff photographer, meanwhile, has always been interested in taking more pictures of people. But it is hard to get up the courage to ask permission, particularly when in Guatemala and the request could be interpreted as a condescending tourist equivalent of "you sure do look funny." And taking portraits without permission opens a whole ethical can of worms that the staff photographer hasn't really come to terms with. In any case, the inter-parade break presented the perfect practice opportunity: A slightly inebriated staff photographer asking happy and also slightly inebriated fellow revelers if they would mind having their picture taken. It's a baby step, but still a step. Being Mardi Gras, the results are mostly pictures of ordinary people wearing funny hats. Nevertheless, we've assembled 15 of the better results for your viewing pleasure. Check out the slideshow here.

Mardi Gras: Thibodaux and Golden Meadow

We may not have been riding with Kevin Costner or the Doobie Brothers on the Endymion parade, but we did get to experience the other side of the coin in beautful Cut Off, Louisiana. The Holla staff was escorted to Louisiana by a Native Guide, who comes from a family of entertainers and ne'er-do-wells in the bayous southwest of the Big Easy. Her grandfather is local institution Pott Folse (pictured below), who has his own float in a local parade; with various other relations playing in the backing band, he delights the crowd with Cajun-flavored songs and a few bawdy jokes.


Our Native Guide managed to get us highly prized spots on Pott's Band Wagon for the Sunday parade in Thibodaux, LA. We scooped up the pounds of plastic trinkets we had caught in New Orleans the previous day, purchased many small suitcases of additional plastic necklaces, and got ready to roll. It was fantastic. The crowd loves Pott, but maybe not quite as much as they love plastic trinkets. The plastic trinkets, in turn, were not quite as popular as the stuffed animals tossed out by more experienced companions on our float.


The reactions of various members of the trinket-chasing crowd could serve as the foundation for a graduate dissertation in game theory and/or sociology. They will be explored in further detail (but not at dissertation length, we assure you) in this space shortly. The picture at the top of this entry is from a parade we watched that evening in Golden Meadow, also near our Native Guide's ancestral homeland, and was added as a teasing splash of color. We sadly did not get to/have to wear such get-ups while throwing beads. Immediately above, The Lovely Katherine demonstrates a more measured bead-throwing style.

Mardi Gras: New Orleans Parade

Because we really, honestly have a bunch of fun pictures of Guatemala to get to, we shall endeavor to bang out these pictures of Mardi Gras in a week or so, and then not go anywhere else cool for a while.

The big attraction for many Mardi Gras attendees are the parades. For the unaware, there are a couple weeks worth of parades leading up to Fat Tuesday itself, with the biggest parades in New Orleans. We went to the Tucks and Endymion parades on Saturday and had a bunch of rich guys in masks throw baubles at us, and to see other parade attractions like crazy costumes (as below) and homeless guys carrying decorative propane-torch devices (not pictured, but real).


Any number of sane (though intoxicated) people claw and scratch to get the thrown baubles -- mostly plastic bead necklaces -- and upon obtaining them, wear them briefly and then have to figure out what to do with ten pounds of plastic crap. In any case, the fun is in the chase, however foolish the prize. Women famously reveal a brief glimpse of their breasts in exchange for the nicer (and of course that term is relative) necklaces, and in this age of easy digital photography, I would guess that some number of women expose themselves more famously than they might desire under less intoxicated circumstances.


For the record, the theme of the Endymion parade was "A Salute to Rudyard Kipling," thus the British Colonial Dude float, as in the first picture above. As for answers as to why anyone decided it was time for a salute to Rudyard Kipling, our crack investigative squad came back empty-handed.

Happy Mardi Gras!

Well, it's time for yet another detour from the Guate-centric raison d'etre for this publication. We spent a quick weekend down in Louisiana for the days leading up to Mardi Gras. The staff photographer had a few drinks which didn't help with his already-loose shutter finger. More to come...

Guatemala City III

One of a thousand street stalls in Guate selling completely legitimate, fully-copyright-compliant movies on DVD, or hundreds of hit songs in the popular RIAA-standard .mp3 format on a single CD.

Guatemala City II

In the last stretch of our time in Guatemala, the photography department realized it had never really taken many pictures in Guatemala City, our headquarters for two years. In part, it's not photogenic in a traditional way, but more importantly, it's an absolutely world-class top-notch place to get a camera stolen. We did manage to spend a day running around Zona 1, the historic downtown, trying to capture just a bit of it. We emerged still in possession of our camera, and even with a couple decent pictures on it. None of them will win any photography awards, but hopefully they manage to show a bit of what the old part of town is like.

Guatemala City I

Special directorial credit to The Lovely Katherine for saying something to the effect of, "Hey, look at that guy carrying a mannequin!"

Bus Stop

Really, anywhere you want to flag down a bus is a 'bus stop.' Chimaltenango, Guatemala.

Musee Mechanique VI

The last of the Musee Mechanique photos (for now). Next: Back to Guate!

Musee Mechanique V

One of the centerpieces of the Musee is this large display of a miniature carnival. There are midway games, sideshows, rides and more. It's a kind of goofy, fun thing to stare at, but it gets better when you put in a quarter and all the bits move. They don't all move very much - some barely wiggle. It's also really tough to photograph due to it being small and poorly lit but also encased in glass with fluorescent lighting reflecting off it. Ah, well, you'll just have to go put a quarter in yourself next time you're in San Francisco.

Musee Mechanique IV

This game is actually, in full, called "The Marathon Cycle Race for Two Players."

Musee Mechanique III

This is from one of two different displays of elaborate carnival dioramas built entirely out of toothpicks. This one is a single large Ferris Wheel, while the other had smaller pieces but set up an entire toothpick-based amusement park. Someone had a lot of time on his hands; I read somewhere it was actually a felon whiling away his time behind bars. No surprise, what with our prisons being practically country clubs.

Musee Mechanique II

The previous picture and this one are from a pinball/baseball game. A pinball pops out of the umpire (who is luckily standing just behind the pitcher's mound) and into the basket attached to the pitcher. The pitcher then flings the ball toward the player, who has uses a single pinball flipper "bat" to hit the ball into the field. It may be caught by one of the fielders, or may make it to the fence, where it scores a hit.

(If you couldn't care less about baseball arcana, feel free to stop reading here.)

This game is one of two versions at the Musee Mechanique. They each list the names of the All-Stars you are supposedly playing against. This picture, then, is of a mini version of the Brooklyn Dodgers' Dazzy Vance. Also featured on this machine are Hall-of-Fame outfielders Goose Goslin and Chuck Klein, and third baseman Willie Kamm. (The rest of the names have been worn off over the years.) The other baseball machine in the Musee is the same except for the names, and is maybe a year or two older, with Hall-of-Famers Joe Medwick, Luke Appling, Earl Averill, Charlie Gehringer, Bill Terry, and non-HOFer Frank Demaree. Given the time these players were at their prime, I'm guessing both machines are from the early 1930's.

Musee Mechanique I

We said we were going back to Guatemala, and we did, for a few pictures of buses. And then the staff photographer got wrapped up in some pictures he took while we were in San Francisco for New Year's Eve.

The Musee Mechanique is, for our money, one of the coolest attractions in San Francisco. It is a collection of old penny-arcade attractions from various Bay Area amusement parks of days long past. It was once housed in the basement of the Cliff House, which had two advantages: First, it was in a location you might want to visit anyway, and second, it was in a cramped, dim space that seemed perfectly fitting, as if you were going through an old attic where these oddball delights had been hidden away.

It got the boot from the Cliff House due to renovations or progress ever marching forward or some such, and looked as if it was going to disappear. But in the end, it found a new home in a big warehouse at Pier 45, right next to Fisherman's Wharf. This has the disadvantages of feeling kind of cold and sterile as warehouses do, and of being in a part of The City where almost nobody over the age of 14 would go unless forced at gunpoint. Your staff photographer was the exception.

(The editors would like to point out that we are much in favor of the Musee Mechanique continuing to exist and lure quarters (no longer pennies, alas) from the throngs of tourists ambling around Fisherman's Wharf. It's no Cliff House, but it's better than being homeless.

Chicken Bus VI

No excuse for not having posted lately... but we're back with maybe the last couple chicken bus pictures. If you just can't get enough of our chicken bus pictures, there are more here. Anyway, this is another stylishly decorated bus, with the noteworthy (although in Guatemala, not uncommon feature) that it is not a Blue Bird bus, it's a Mercedes. And yet, the owners decorated it with the Blue Bird school bus logo anyway, perhaps indicating that Blue Bird is an established status symbol in Guatemala, up there with the fake Louis Vuitton purses.

Chicken Bus V

We're back! We had a lovely Festivus party and a great ski trip to Tahoe, and now we're back to provide you more photos from Guate. The photo department is working on the next set of images, so the bus pictures will continue for a couple more days. This one is a pretty ordinary chicken bus; the staff photographer was mostly just trying to get the waiting passengers in the frame without being too obnoxious.