Staff Photographer's Wife Actually Better Photographer than Staff Photographer

The internationally recruited staff of the Holla is generally proud of the work we produce for the eight or nine people who read our fine publication. But every now and again, we have to give credit where it is due. Such is the case with the above photo, taken not by our snobby staff photographer, but by his wife. The photo editor's wife thought the photo department as a whole was selling itself short, but one can't really argue with results. The Holla staff photographer's wife serves on the board of a non-profit group that built a school (along with a number of other community services) for the girls pictured above. She took this photo during a recent site visit. The Holla thinks it is great, and would encourage readers to click on the picture to see a larger version.

Big Changes at the Holla

Among other cosmetic changes here at the Holla, we are proud to announce that we actually found the spot where (we think) we can allow comments from readers who do not have a special Blogger log-in. So if any of the two or three readers out there who don't comment already have been aching to "Holla Back," but have been stymied, you might give it another try.

And as a bonus for our readers, here's a photo of the fireworks from the Quema del Diablo. Fireworks season has pretty much come to an end. Christmas eve is the huge fireworks day, way more than Quema del Diablo or New Year's Eve, but we missed our second consecutive Christmas here. The New Year's Eve fireworks were just as raucous as the Quema del Diablo event, if not more so. Supposedly the celebration of the Feast of the Christo Negro (a famous (in Guatemala) image of Christ and supposed site of miracles) in mid-January is the end of fireworks season, but apparently some of our neighbors have a found a few extras lying aroundt the garage.

North of the Border

Originally, we had planned our vacation to be a whirlwind trip to Colorado and Boston for family time, and then just under a week in Panama. As silly as it sounds, we are allowed one trip for "R and R," which involves normal use of vacation time, but the State Department pays for one full-fare ticket for each of us to the nearest point of relief -- i.e. the nearest spot where we could enjoy an American-style standard of living for a little while. So if you're in Cambodia, they'll fly you to Australia. If you're in Africa, it's usually Europe. And for those of us in the less-developed spots of Latin America, we get a free ticket to Miami. Luckily, the key phrase is "full-fare," which means we can get a $900 ticket for the two hour flight to Miami, or use that much money for a flight elsewhere. Thus, we were going to do Guate-Denver-Boston-Panama-Guate and only pay a hundred bucks or so out of pocket.

And then Congress didn't pass the budget on time, which they never have since the days of Martin Van Buren. So, the arcane rules say we had to wait for them to release the December pile of money before we could buy our tickets home. Which meant we had to wait until three weeks before Christmas. The reader will not be shocked to hear that the prices get just a little higher when you wait that late. So we wound up paying just a hundred bucks or so out of pocket just to do the Colorado and Massachusetts legs of the trip, and then went under our own steam to Mexico.

The sliver of Mexico avaliable to us on a seven-day road trip from Guatemala City is not the most developed part of the country. We had ideas in our heads that we might get up early and with a couple long days of driving, go to the Yucatan or Oaxaca, or to see the Olmec remains in Tabasco. But a more realistic schedule limited us to Chiapas. We kept our expectations low -- surely Chiapas would be just like Guatemala, in geography, culture, and amenities.

How wrong we were! Upon crossing the border, the highway was in noticably better shape, cleaner, and (through no fault of the Guatemalans) straighter and flatter, as the sharpest (and prettiest) of the mountain ranges are on the Guatemalan side of the border. On the other hand, the Mexicans realize that you can drive fast on their roads, and have responded in kind with an extremely agressive speed bump program. Any populated stretch of the road -- which can apparently include a random shack five hundred yards off the shoulder -- merits at least two speed bumps, usually so big that even when driving as slow as humanly possible our poor little Nissan was guaranteed to scrape bottom. I'm mostly sure we didn't lose any parts that were actually critical to the operation of the car.

We decided that we couldn't risk hitting an unmarked speed bump at night, so before darkness fell we stopped in Comitán, a surprisingly quaint city celebrating its 500th anniversary. We checked into a charming hotel room, and had a delicious meal of flavorful beer and even more flavorful food. It is an inexplicable tragedy for the people of Guatemala that the cultural meme responsible for mole sauce never managed to permeate the border.

The next day, we decided to take what our bare-bones guidebook (purporting to cover all of Mexico and Central America) promised was a scenic route. The road surely would be lovely when not enveloped in fog. We made it through the sugar-cane fields to Venustiano Carranza, a town claiming to be home of the marimba -- we decided not to mention this boast to anyone in Guatemala lest things get ugly. There were, in fact, quite nice views from the hilltop town. Maybe not really worth going a couple hours out of the way for, but such are the risks the road-tripper takes when allowing the wind to decide his direction. We passed through a couple other modestly interesting towns on the way, including one famous for their handmade giant ceramic chickens. So.

That afternoon, we reached San Cristóbal de las Casas, at the heart of Chiapas. For those who have visited and are familiar with Antigua Guatemala (or just those who have seen pictures of it), San Cristobal (accent to be dispensed with in all further references) is like Antigua if it was still a real operating city rather than a carefully preserved colonial museum. I love Antigua, but it was fantastic to see actual Mexicans walking around the town (even if many of them were also tourists), and to have a selection of interesting bars, many of which happened to have live music on any given evening. In the end The Lovely Katherine and I decided that a large part of this was probably related to the average age of tourists in San Cristobal being about 15 years less than that of the average tourist in Guatemala. And although a distressing number of these young tourists were of the dreadlocks-and-tie-dye variety, we didn't hear any Grateful Dead cover bands, and avoided having any discussions with starry-eyed fellow travelers about the righteous struggle of the Zapatistas against The Man.

As we headed on to Palenque the next day, the full Zapatista scene came into sharper focus. Many towns or even cornfields would be marked with billboards declaring that locale "Zapatista Country." If we weren't more than a little scared of what kind of reaction a couple gringo tourists stopping to snap pictures would elicit, the staff photographer would have loved to snap some pictures of one local schoolhouse that was painted in a vibrant mural showing Subcomandante Marcos carrying AK-47s under rainbows and smiley-face suns. (There is a photo of one of the signs, but alas not the mural, on the Wikipedia page on the Zapatistas - scroll down a bit.)

Along the way, we stopped at the Mayan ruin of Toniná, which is not one of the more famous ruins, but was actually lovely. It is built on a hill, so from the temples at the top, the views are fantastic. And there was very little tourist hub-bub about, as it's a little off the beaten path. We arrived after dark in the town of Palenque, which basically came into being to cater to the tourist needs of visitors to the more famous Mayan ruins of the same name, and it looks the part. It did have plenty of opportunities to buy bootleg movies, or t-shirts with pictures of Mayan temples on them. But it's not all bad, as they did have Mexican beer, good Tequila, and spicy food, so we couldn't complain too much.

The ruins at Palenque are a fairly compact site, at least when compared with Tikal. The big attraction is some of the relatively well-preserved murals, showing various Mayans alternately worshipping or beheading other Mayans. We have no photographic evidence of this, as the staff photographer found the colorful lichens to be more photogenic. Many tourists did seem to want to take videos of the temple carvings, which your correspondent found a little odd, but probably not as odd as they thought him for taking pictures of mold (which didn't turn out that well in the end, anyway). More annoying however, and in sharp contrast with policies at Tikal and Copán, was the ubiquity of tchotchke vendors within the borders of the park. Every pathway up to a temple was lined with blankets on each side selling replica masks or cheap paintings approximating Mayan calendars. It made it significantly harder to get any feeling of the history of the place when you were mostly trying to get away from the mob long enough to breathe. Eventually we got away from the worst of the crowd, enjoyed the historic site, and then started heading back to San Cristobal, which is when your correspondent fell victim to his morning's breakfast.

Your faithful reporter has been in Guatemala for a year and a half now, and has never felt more than mild discomfort as a result of the local cuisine, even when buying food off the street or eating in the dirt-floored homes of the local population. And yet something in the cleaner, more developed environs of Mexico didn't agree with me, and after four hours of valiant struggle on windy roads, I lost it at the roadside with San Cristobal in sight. Montezuma, on the behalf of all people of European stock, I apologize!

Given my delicate state, we decided to check into a slightly swankier hotel for our second engagement in San Cristobal, in case we wound up spending more time in the room than we had hoped. We stayed in a historic building on the main square. The quite ridiculous amount of noise that came with a room facing the main square was surprisingly not much of an obstacle in getting to sleep. Feeling mostly better the next day, we took a boat trip on the river through the Sumidero Canyon, got up close and personal with some crocodiles, and then spent an hour driving around Tuxla-Gutierrez trying to find the road to see it from the top of the canyon without success.

For our last day in the area, we did a quick spin through one of the many small villages outside San Cristobal that are still populated by indigenous groups that maintain many of the traditions of their ancestors from the era when the Spanish arrived. We were there for the annual festival in Zincantán, which was not a ferris wheels-and-midway games kind of festival, but a more traditional gathering on the square in front of the church. Many of the men were dressed in elaborate costumes, with straw hats flowing with colored ribbons and brightly colored robes covering the embroidered tunics that all the men wore. They looked on at some sort of play: Two men, wearing bright red masks and carrying/riding what one could only call ceremonial hobby horses had an elaborate and muffled conversation (in between pulls off the bottle) with two men dressed in white sheets that I took to approximate womens' garb. Another man had a large wicker tent with a (also wicker) cow's head on one end, playing the part of the livestock. They brought a series of carved idols of San Lorenzo of Zincantán out of the church and from across the square, took turns being blessed, and then the whole group decamped to a nearby streetcorner where the next act of the play took place, involving a very acrobatic dance by the gentleman playing the cow. It was fascinating, and the costumes were gorgeous. The staff photographer had sadly (or nobly) made a pledge to his traveling companion not to even get out his camera out of respect for the Zincantans, who aren't much for photography. It was with a mixture of pride and deep regret that he mustered the will to honor this pledge during the colorful and picturesque ceremony.

All that remained after that day were final efforts to cram as many delicious tacos, Bohemia beers, and shots of Don Julio down our mouths as we could before returning to the culinary boredom and work-related travails of Guatemala. I can only assure you we did our able best.

Eatin' Good

I broke a personal pledge to myself yesterday. For 18 months, I have carefully avoided going to American chain restaurants, because I figure that as long as I'm here, I might as well eat at the Guatemalan and/or Mexican chain restaurants. So after some time of avoiding Chili's and TGI Friday's, I had a business lunch the other day where the Guatemalans we were meeting wanted to eat at Applebee's. Applebee's opened here sometime last year, and the bankers we were meeting with seem to love it: "It's just like Friday's, but a lot less crowded!" I don't think I ever ate at an Applebee's in the U.S., so I don't know what their design scheme is, but in the one in Guatemala, all the walls are lined with celebrity head shots. Not that they're trying to fool anyone into thinking that Leonardo DiCaprio and Madonna have stopped by for cheese sticks at the Guate Applebee's, I think they just decided it made the place feel more "American." Or something. I was almost convinced I was back home until the chicken-sandwich-and-fries lunch was followed with complimentary coffee and flan.

Investigative Journalism

The reputation of the Holla is quickly spreading. While on my way to buy milk this morning, the staff photographer made a quick detour to snap some shots of the red, yellow, and blue seating area at the nearest American Doughnuts location. The results were fair at best. The staff photog is now well accustomed to getting odd looks when he takes pictures, as the idea that you might use a camera for more than family snapshots is a bit foreign to many Guatemalans. On this particular morning, the sole employee of the doughnut shop stared curiously for some time, as she set up the morning's doughnuts. Just as the photographer was packing the camera up again, the employee recognized her responsibility to the store, and confronted him. "Are you with the press?" she demanded. He contemplated for a moment, but in the end admitted to himself that the Holla is more of a literary journal than a bona fide organ of investigative inquiry, and attempted to explain to her that he just thought the light on the colorfully painted metal tables might make nice artistic pictures. She looked confused, and repeated everything back -- "Not with the press, huh?" "Artistic pictures, huh?" She seemed genuinely concerned that there was going to be a damaging exposé in the paper on how badly the chairs at American Doughnuts in Zone 13 need to be repainted. Fortunately, the staff photographer convinced her that these pictures were not for publication. So, if you happen to run into her, please don't mention that you saw the above photo in this internationally recognized journal.

Pure Cream

As Americans go, I'm not entirely hopeless with respect to soccer. As a participant, I enjoyed years of childhood rec leagues and college intra-murals, and have made the occasional effort in Guatemala to particiapate in the local sport. As a spectator, I love the World Cup, and am generally conversant in the more important teams that are always playing for whatevery Lesser Cup they're contesting this week. I know the names of a handful of the world's most famous players, as well as most of the guys on US National Team. At the very least, I'm not one of those people who thinks soccer is a terrible bore because they don't keep changing the rules to make sure they score ten goals a game.

That said, I can't figure Latin American soccer at all. First of all, in Guatemala, they play two seasons a year -- the "apertura" and the "clausura." So each year, two different teams are the "champions." They never play each other to see who's the real champion of the year, theyjust settle for two "champions" each year. And they're ok with this. They just act like both of the teams that win are actually champions, like there was nothing cheap about it all. Having one champion each year is, I suppose, arbitrary, but humankind has divided time by years since some time before the invention of soccer. If you're going with two "champions" a year, why not five? Why not have a different "champion" based on who was ahead at halftime and who won the second half of each game? And on top of having two champions a year, there are a mystifying array of other cups and international club tournaments in addition that I haven't even begun to sort out.

Anyway, not to make it seem less important than it was, but I went to the second leg of the home-and-away Guatemalan National League "Championship" just before departing for Christmas. In Guatemala, there are two teams from Guatemala City -- Municipal and Comunicaciones -- and then ten other teams that rarely, if ever, muster the resources to compete with the big guys. Perhaps because "Municipal" and "Comunicaciones" are a bit unweildy to work into a cheer, the teams are mostly known by their colors; Municipal are the Rojos and Comunicaciones are the Cremas. (The Rojos' mascot is a little devil, while the Cremas' is - no joke - Casper the Friendly Ghost.) When these two play, it is officially called a clasico, even if the game sucks, and when the championship is between the two -- a Classic Championship -- the passion of the city's fans hits a fever pitch.

While each team has their own stadium, when they play in a title game, they play both the home and away games in the larger national stadium. For some reason, it was literally impossible to buy tickets in advance, and we figured that for such a monumental event, we would need to get there early to get a spot in the ticket queue. We arrived at 8:30 for a 12:00 game, walked up, bought tickets, and entered the nearly empty stadium. Apparently the Guatemalan passion for soccer was overmatched by the Guatemalan desire to sleep in on a Sunday. And, much to our dismay, we were informed that nobody would be selling anything to drink in the stadium, and that we couldn't re-enter if we left. With a little sweet-talking, we convinced one guard that this policy was absurd (when applied to us), and he took our names and agreed to let us back in later. We found, among many, the sincerest taco stand outside the stadium, ordered too many tacos, and in a internationally understood pre-game tradition I haven't participated in for years, started drinking beer at 8:30 in the morning.

At the designated hour we re-entered the stadium, prepared with sufficient reinforcements to make sure we stayed in 'game shape' for the duration. The rojo and crema fans were spearated from the field and from each other by twenty feet of cyclone fence and barbed wire. The Cremas had the best regular season record, so they were nominally the home team for the second game, which meant their fans also got the center-field seats. The fans from each side chanted and sang and generally made American sports crowds look a bit reserved. Most charming were the family cheers, such as the entire crowd of one team's fans, when the other team took the field, chanting in unison a swear word whose translation in English is probably the foulest word you care to think of. During the game itself, when someone would commit a hard foul, the crowd would chant a particularly foul Spanish phrase, that in English translates as the comparatively benign "Son of a whore! Son of a whore!"

The game was fair. Not particularly well-played, but close throughout. The home team led after a first-half goal, and after a scoreless tie in the first leg, would win the championship if they held on. Of course, they gave up a soft second-half goal and regulation time ended in a tie. Tied! After two games of championship soccer between the two most storied franchises in Guatemalan soccer! What drama would await in extra time? A sudden-death winner? Penalty kicks? A punishing full-time extra period?

Actually, none of the above. Guatemala is surely -- one hopes -- the only league in the world that decides the grand final league championship on the basis of away goals. (Meaning if the total score added up between the home and away games was a tie, whichever team scored more goals on the opposing team's field wins. So after a 0-0 tie and a 1-1 tie, both on the same field, they awarded the team that happened to tie 1-1 in their "away" game the championship.) The rojo fans went crazy, and there was a trophy ceremony immediately. The crema fans stared in disbelief. We were annoyed, we commiserated with nearby crema fans, and then realized that exactly at the moment of the ending gun of the game, they were allowed to sell beer in the stadium, an opportunity many enterprising vendors helped us enjoy.

We sat around and drank beer until we were the last fans in the stadium, at which point your ever-probing correspondent decided to check out if the "emergency exit" through the fence was actually padlocked, or if one could get through in the case of a fire. In a surprise, you actually could unlatch and open the gate, and with no more security around, we let ourselves onto the field while clean-up crews took down the loudspeakers and advertising banners and such. We asked permission from everyone we could, and nobody seemed to have a problem with us going on the pitch of the National Stadium of Guatemala. Not exactly Old Trafford, but still pretty cool. We went into the administration office and asked to borrow a soccer ball, but they didn't have one. We asked all the cleaning crews and trainers and such. No luck. The National Soccer Stadium of Guatemala! And nary a soccer ball to be had! Tragedy! We settled for taking some shots on goal with an empty water bottle. After a morning of drinking and sitting in the sun, it seemed amusing enough at the time. We surely looked like full-on retards to the straggling clean-up crew, but it was worth it.

And after all this, we had no choice but to go to the home of our friend with the biggest TV and continue the day watching American football, until I fell asleep, lobster-red from the sun and completely hung over at 8:00 in the evening. It was a hard day, but one I was willing to put in for the sake of the international unifying power of sport.

Keeping the Home Fires Burning

Hello, faithful readers. The Holla offices are ready to start humming again after the staff spent the holidays in various ports of call such as Colorado, Boston, and Chiapas. We'll be back soon with stories sure to thrill and amaze on topics ranging from championship soccer to Subcomandante Marcos. For now, enjoy this picture from the trip described in the previous post.

Tactics for Tactic

Joe, one of my esteemed predecessors in the Consular Section, sent a seemingly cryptic e-mail a month or so ago. He had served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala many years prior to joining the Foreign Service and returning here as a Vice Consul and Third Secretary. He is now on his second tour, in Lithuania. He sent an e-mail to my boss in Guatemala, which she forwarded to the entire section, seeking a volunteer to go to the small town where he had lived in his Peace Corps days to drop off a Christmas present for the family he had stayed with. And he noted that if the volunteer should go on the right weekend, they might witness the "Bolas de Fuego, a celebration that involves the locals throwing fireballs at one another. " Many of my colleagues inexplicably shied away from this opportunity for cultural exploration, but your intrepid correspondent stepped up.

Tactic (pronounced "Tahk-teek," not "Tack-tick") is actually a decent-sized town as these things go in Guatemala. Nobody seems to know with any certainty how many people live there, but I would guess something like 12,000 or 15,000 (the only estimate I found on the web says 27,000, but that's got to include a healthy slice of the outlying area). We arrived on Friday afternoon and met our host, Naldo (short for Reginaldo), on the main square, and he directed us a few blocks to the family home. We were welcomed by Doña Rosa, the matriarch of the family who could understand spoken Spanish but could only speak Pokomchí herself (see #49 on this map). We sat in her kitchen, and she served us each a mug of coffee from the pot that seemed to have its own dedicated 50-gallon-drum-cum-cookstove, one of two in the kitchen. A variety of Naldo's brothers and sisters and children came and went, stopping by to chat and breath in the wood smoke and then filter back to the room with the TV (which we were never invited to watch).

The hospitality that the family showed us was literally embarrassing. Most readers are probably familiar with circumstances where one puts forth obligatory protestations over a host's generosity. But this was a case where we actually felt bad about the kindness of this family that probably earns in a month, with four brothers working, what I earn in a week. They emptied out a room with three beds in it so that we could have a room to ourselves -- we protested, but never found out for sure where all those displaced people slept. They served us a delicious chicken dinner, although I would guess that serving meat was a fairly expensive proposition for them. They served us spaghetti and tomato sauce for breakfast the next morning, which was an unusual but tasty. They tricked us into staying for lunch even though we said we were going to leave, serving soup with potatoes, veggies, and a big chunk o' meat. (As an aside, this was the only meal that involved us having to force ourselves to eat really undesirable food in order to avoid causing offense, as the meat was shoe-leather tough and generally not very appetizing. I ate one-and-a-half servings. It could have been a lot worse.) They helped us feel at home by digging out the CD of "English music" that Joe had left them, full of sixties girl-group classics, even though we said we were fine with marimba.

Sitting in the kitchen and chatting was a little odd, because what did we really have to talk about? But we muddled through. The kitchen was constantly filled with fumes from the two oil-drum cookstoves. There wasn't really a door on it -- just a hand-made wooden gate opening onto an open-air entryway where the two dogs ("Escooby" and "Seca" (also known as "Joe's daughter-in-law")), two cats (both apparently named "Negro" by default), chickens and ducks made their homes. The primary entertainment was the constant efforts of the ducklings to sneak through the gate into the kitchen to look for crumbs and enjoy the warmth for some indeterminate amount of time before Doña Rosa would decide "enough" and pick up her duck-chasing stick, shooing them out of the kitchen again while saying "Psssshhhhhhhhhhhhh!" Coffee was served at every moment anyone was sitting in the kitchen -- even the three-year-old girl had a breakfast of white bread dipped in hot coffee -- in part because it is quite often very chilly in Tactic, and also because you have to boil the water anyway so why not throw in some flavor?

We discussed the main event of the evening a bit, and many of our hosts were not really thrilled about going. "I don't usually go -- it scares me," said Naldo. But duty called and we went to see it, and he and young Eber felt equally duty-bound to accompany us. We stood on the main square in the drizzle for a bit. A small crowd was hanging around in little pockets on the square and around its periphery. Peppy live music blasted out of the evangelical church on one side of the square. We admired the mini-version of the Gallo Beer Christmas Tree in the square, and the Lovely Katherine chatted with Eber about school while I chatted with Naldo about his work repairing shoes. Eventually, a fiery glow emerged from one of the side streets, and a bunch of youngsters showed up with a coffee can full of flames. Other youngsters ran to the non-operational fountain in the square and soaked their jeans and gloves in the stagnant water to prepare for battle. One of the kids lit up a canteloupe-sized ball, made of rags wrapped in twine or wire or some such, and soaked in kerosene or similar. He threw it at another of the kids; it hit him and bounced to the ground, at which point a scrum developed around the ball and they all tried to kick it, but it soon flickered and went out in the damp conditions.

At that point I realized that I had somehow projected onto Joe's invitation the assumption that this annual tradition must entail some community pride, some pomp and circumstance, some official speech by the chairman of the planning committee that it was great to be able to celebrate the Bolas de Fuego for another year. Instead, it was more like the American "tradition" of young hooligans throwing eggs at cars on Halloween than it was like a sanctioned town fair. The entire event consisted of teenage boys throwing flaming rags at one another, and at bystanders who for some reason gathered nearby to make targets of themselves. In fact, it was exactly as Joe had described it, nothing more, nothing less.

I quit thinking about that when the young toughs decided that Mr. Gringo-with-an-expensive-camera looked like a particulary good target. We had a couple fireballs tossed in our direction, but then again, so did a lot of people, so maybe we were just paranoid. Whatever the reality of the situation, which the Lovely Katherine described to our other friends as "maybe the first time I have ever been literally weak-kneed with fear," we decided to decamp to Foto Lydia, the portrait studio near the square where one of Naldo's brothers works. This didn't remove us entirely from danger, as the young flamethrowers kept throwing fireballs wherever they saw people, to the point where they even threw a fireball into the door Foto Lydia, but the ubiquitous cinder-block construction provided fireproof cover. The drizzly conditions helped snuff out most of the fireballs before they could do to much damage, and somehow we didn't see anyone sustain any injuries -- which apparently is not the case every year.

The next morning we walked with Naldo and three-year-old (or so) Rubi up to the church on top of one of the hills in town, which afforded nice views for what one could see under the clouds; and then went with Naldo, Eber, and Rubi to the local park and zoo. It's sort of weird that such a small town has a zoo, but it did, with one row of various pheasants and peacocks and such, plus some spider monkeys, crocodiles, and rabbits. We rode the merry-go-round with Eber until we were sick. It was both a shame and a relief to bid an mid-day farewell to the family on Saturday and head on to see the orchid nursery in Cobáan. It was really exhausting making friends with people from a background so different from ours, but a fascinating and much appeciated weekend none-the-less.

Photos coming soon, but maybe not until after we get back from Xmas. And the photo department doesn't think any of the pictures of the bolas de fuego are worthy of publication, but we'll see

Beat the Devil

Being American or from Protestant stock or generally unbothered by religion, I had no idea that there actually is an official start of the Christmas Season. Apparently December 8 is the day of the Immaculate Conception, which leaves only 17 days until Christmas Day. I'm not sure if that's in the Bible or if it was just established by some papal bull or the Knights Templar or whoever makes such decisions, but it seems to imply less of an Immaculate Conception and more of an Immaculate Nearly-Full-Term-Baby-Jesus-Insertion. In any case, as in America, the Christmas trees and the carols playing in the grocery store and such have been going on for a while, but the religious celebrations just started last week. Apparently there are ceremonies of some sort where they cart around Joseph and Mary sculptures in a symbolic search for an inn every night for the next week.

Before all the Christmassing gets started, there's a final blowout, not unlike Mardi Gras, except that after the blowout, no fasting is required. In Guatemala, December 7th is the Quema del Diablo, or Burning of the Devil. The idea is sort of that one removes all the malign spirits from one's house through the symbolic ritual of dumping any trash or other unwanted possessions on the street and setting them ablaze. In many neighborhoods and towns, this tradition is pretty much unchanged, and the local news (immediately preceding my interview, in fact) had a lengthy story about how it really isn't good for anyone's lungs to burn unwanted tires, even if they do provide hours worth of incendiary entertainment.

In the posh neighborhood full of doctors and construction magnates and foreign diplomats, there aren't many tires being burned anymore. Making the holiday somewhat more literal and yet less practical, many now celebrate by purchasing a papier-mâché devil and burning that instead of a pile of garbage. The child labor force of Guatemala must be working serious overtime in November, because on December 7th, all variety of fireworks stands and mock devil outlets suddenly appear, offering diablos from the small and economical to larger-than-life-size. Ideally, the devil is stuffed with firecrackers, piñata-style. At dusk, the devils are burned, and fireworks are set off all over town. We could see fireworks in every direction, going up right behind our building, in the yards our balcony overlooks, and dangerously close to a building up the block. Any José with a few bucks in his pocket can buy the kind of fireworks in Guatemala City that Americans can only get in Wyoming. I'm not sure if the Fourth of July used to have the thrilling 360-degree spectacles of neighbors in every direction shooting off huge fireballs. But I assume we banned these things for a reason, and I hesitate to guess how many Guatemalans lost fingers last Thursday. Our whole neighborhood smelled of burnt gunpowder and whatever other toxic substance they use to make sparks green or orange.

If you've ever wondered what you're missing by not living in Guatemala, you should know that The Lovely Katherine declared Quema del Diablo the best holiday in the world. That might be putting it a little strongly, but it does have a freewheeling spirit that American holidays maybe once had, but no longer do.

Watch This Space

We were on a bit of a dry spell there in terms of events with any reader appeal in Guatemala. But the last week was full to bursting with newsworthy tidbits, often involving pyrotechnic derring-do and ridiculous risks to life and limb. So clear your calendar for some exciting posts to come as soon as the editorial staff gets time to get this edge-of-your-seat stuff ready for publication. Or, at least, as ready for publication as we bother to get anything.

In the meantime, trip out to this picture the staff photographer took of the lights on the balcony above ours.

King of All Media

It was a little while in coming, but the media titans of Guatemala finally realized that my dashing good looks were being wasted on radio interviews. So I finally got my big break, interviewed for a television piece about how if you want a visa to go see Tia Marta in California for Christmas, you need to schedule an appointment now. (Or more accurately, two weeks ago.) It was short and to the point, and I managed to not sound like any more of an idiot in Spanish than I probably would have in English. I don't know what happened to my collar, it was straight when I looked in the mirror and checked my teeth for spinach just before the interview.

The night they said they were going to air the interview, they didn't, and I was a bit worried that they realized how boring talking about visas is. But they claimed that they wanted to maximize the audience for it so they showed it morning, noon and evening newscasts over the last day. Somehow, they managed to squeeze in three minutes of me into the other 57 minutes where they exclusively discuss murders, disappearances, grisly fires at illegal child-labor fireworks factories, and sports.

Stopgap

Sorry we didn't do anything exciting this weekend other than dig ourselves out from under the mountain of Thanksgiving dishes. The photo department has been on a self-assessed hot streak though, so you can cruise over to Flickr for your Guatemala fix today.

Turkey Day

We hosted a whopping 26 people for Thanksgiving dinner in our apartment yesterday. It was a lot of work and the kitchen is still a disaster, but the event was definitely worthwhile.

Despite the fact that The Lovely Katherine was intensely uninterested in touching the turkeys, and that the only time I have ever been in the kitchen during turkey preparation was to grab another root beer from the fridge while Grandma did all the work, we cooked two delicious turkeys. I managed to carve them satisfactorily, although every source of instruction on the topic gives detailed direction on carving the breast and then assumes you know what to do with the rest, so all the dark meat was chopped into bitty pieces. Thanks to our twin-oven, twin-turkey plan, we had the perfect opportunity to do Grandma's two kinds of stuffing, sweet and sage. The sage dressing turned out to be "my" dressing because Katherine was unwilling to deal with sauteed turkey liver. I'm not sure I would have been such a fan of sage dressing had I realized as a child that it involved sauteed giblets. But now I know and it was no less delicious; even though there was no sage to be had in Guatemala, our slight variation was not too far off from the original. We even had leftover gravy.

A good time was had by all. We hope to never do it again.

Photo Department Wins International Acclaim; Cheif Correspondent Quits in a Huff

The snowball is beginning to roll downhill on the Holla photo department's inevitable domination of the world market for tourist photos of Guatemala. The staff photographer's photo of a guy who sells pony rides in Antigua has been chosen for inclusion in the web-based promotional materials for the Friends of World Heritage. The photo is reproduced in extra-tiny eye-strain-o-vision on a flyer about how to be a socially conscious traveller or some such, and also included in a handy .pdf version, in case you want to carry it with you on your travels. (If you want to see the photo in visible size, you'll have to check it out on Flickr or you can see it real big, too.)

This organization, Friends of World Heritage, contacted me after finding my picture on Flickr, with a message that said something to the effect of: "We like your picture and we reckon you're amateur enough to give your work away for free, and we don't really want to be paying actual pro photographers for their work." I looked at their website, which looks professional enough, and it's got an actual UNESCO logo on it, so it must be a legit and worthwhile organization. So I told them that they could use my picture for free as long as I was attributed as the photographer. Which they did, on a separate page (way at the bottom), that nobody would ever look at unless some browser malfunction took them there by accident. (Some Holla readers may recognize another name on the list, as well -- pure coincidence.)

Anyway, since the Holla's prose has never been published anywhere outside of this shabby forum, the photo department has had to receive several lectures reminding them that we are all one team and that they best not let it go to their heads, as 99% of the photo departments' masterpieces languish in obscurity on Flickr.

Of Glorious Workers' Paradise

There are not very many Guatemalan institutions that one would feel good putting a lot of faith in. Without veering into actual verboten editorializing about any particular government or political party or subcompartment of the bureaucracy, I think even those in the employ of the State Department could say that it is a matter of public record that Guatemala's public sector has some serious problems with corruption and inefficiency.

Which is what makes the Instute for Workers' Recreation such a surprise. The Instituto de Recreación de los Trabajadores de la Empresa Privada (IRTRA) is basically a public version of Six Flags. A payroll tax funds a small amusement park, water park, and complex of hotels and restaurants in Retalhuleu, a few hours toward the Mexican border from the capital. We figured that Veterans' Day would be a perfect time for a visit as we'd have the day off and the Guatemalans wouldn't so there would be no lines for the Guate version of Space Mountain. Many in our traveling party had heard that the parks were nice, but I was still shocked.

The hotel was of a quality that is seldom seen in Guatemala, the grounds of the parks were meticulously maintained, everything was clean, and the staff were all friendly and professional. There were no ferris wheels rotated by hand like the ones seen at small town fairs here -- all the rides appeared to involve actual safety equipment and one could ride them with only the fear they were designed to produce, not the fear that they were going to fall apart because they hadn't been oiled in years. At one point when we were trying to walk back to our hotel from the theme park, an employee ran out and yelled to us that we were going the wrong way -- we all agreed that it was perhaps the first pro-active, informative, and conscientious action we'd seen by a Guatemalan public employee in... well, perhaps ever.

We payed nearly extortionate rates at the hotel since we were not paid into the IRTRA tax system, and rates at the amusement park and water park that were high for Guatemala but certainly far less than we would pay for similar attractions in the U.S. The Guatemalans who pay the IRTRA tax get into the parks for free and pay next to nothing for the hotels.

Let's put aside for a moment whether or not building amusement parks is an appropriate public-sector activity or maybe something better left to private enterprise. If they want to tax everyone so that some people can ride a roller coaster until they puke, I guess it's only different from our National Park system in degree. More important was the demonstration that the Guatemalan public sector can actually put together an enormously succesful operation when they want to. If they put the guy who runs IRTRA in charge of the Public Ministry here, who knows what they could accomplish?

Except they didn't end it with "Stairway to Heaven"

Maybe your office has an annual uncomfortable christmas party, and a summer barbeque, but we have both of those, times two, plus one with a DJ and a sit-down dinner: The Marine Ball.

One may suppose that after some time as a diplomat, one grows accustomed to gala evenings of tuxedos (known locally as "smokings") and ballgowns. After enough National Day celebrations and balls and such, perhaps they stop feeling silly. Maybe there is, after all, a point where one can stop referring to such things from the only frame of reference your average young Foreign Service Officer can, i.e. "It's like the Prom. Except with an open bar."

Suspecting that my slight cynical streak may have taken root early, one of my colleagues asked me not too long ago if I had attended the prom in high school. I told her that I had indeed gone to the prom, stinking of irony, because it seemed like such a corny, funny thing to do. She replied: "That's so sad." I suppose she was right, and fourteen years later, we went totally irony-free to the Marine Corps Birthday Ball. I didn't manage to rent a smoking, but I did manage to wear a tie that didn't have any cartoon characters on it. The Lovely Katherine even went out with the girls and got her hair did. Maybe we're older and have learned to appreciate the rare moments that pass by without keeping them at arm's length. Or maybe it's just easier to get enthusiastic about a dance with an open bar.

The event itself is celebrated at every U.S. Embassy around the world (and probably other places that Marines gather) to honor the anniversary of the founding of the Marine Corps. It features a speech by the oldest Marine veteran in the country, the symbolic cutting of a birthday cake with one of those Marine swords, a DJ playing salsa and hip-hop, and (did I mention the open bar?) a couple Guatemalan bartenders who stare at customers blankly when you order complicated drinks like "whiskey en las rocas." It was a fabulous time. With luck, we still have plenty of time before we slide from sneering past enthusiastic and all the way into world-weariness.

Under the Sea

It has once again been some time since I last sent word of events in Central America. This time around, though, it was not pure sloth that prevented your coresspondent from writing, but the presence of family members in Guatemala, and then a week of what I would consider well-deserved vacation in Honduras.

Appetites whetted by this blog, your correspondent's parents came to see Guatemala firsthand, and within a couple days they were cavalierly hailing unmarked cabs off the street and chatting up the locals like long-time residents. Perhaps someday they will publish a report of their adventures here.

After they had a week of soaking in the local color, we decamped for Roatan, Honduras and Anthony's Key Resort, an entirely foreign experience for your correspondent. While accustomed to traversing washed-out dirt roads to visit remote hamlets and sleep in scorpion-infested flophouses, the experience of an all-inclusive resort was uncharted territory. My spirit of adventure undimmed, I bravely agreed to give it a try. Anthony's Key is primarily a scuba diving destination, and the "all-inclusive" tag means not just three squares a day, but three trips out to dive on the reef surrounding Roatan. The meals were all served by waiters who universally refered to the guests as "my friend" and the drinks served by bartenders who referred to the guests as "buddy." There isn't really a beach to speak of, so visitors who choose not to dive would be limited to sipping fruity cocktails by the swimming pool. I can't imagine why one would choose a tropical resort without a beach if diving weren't the goal, but there were some individuals who were fixtures at the pool, plowing through trashy paperbacks or cartons of cigarettes, demonstrating that people like to do all sorts of weird stuff on vacation. For your correspondent, other than a quick horesback ride along the beach, and a quick kayak trip around the little island, I spent the week doing two things: scuba diving and scratching bug bites.

Your correspondent learned to scuba dive three years ago in Vietnam, under the tuteledge of a French instructor, which had the advantage of being able to close one's eyes and imagine being taught to dive by Jacques Cousteau. I'm sure he was a good teacher, but not all his lessons found a permanent home in this pupil. Upon arrival at Anthoy's Key, your correspondent asked for a refresher lesson in diving, to which the dive shop replied that I ought to give it a try and see how it went first. This doesn't seem particularly safe, but we were in shallow enough water that it wasn't really life-threatening when I went under for the first and made it immediately clear that I had no recollection of what any of the tubes or buttons on the scuba gear were for. The divemaster now convinced, I took my refresher lesson and was ready for the week of diving ahead.

As a dive-centric resort, there were a whole fleet of boats equipped for dive trips. Each guest was assigned to a boat from which they would dive for the entirety of the week. So, not unlike joining an organized tour and rolling the dice with whatever other tourists sign up for the same tour, we spent a week diving with, and getting to know, an odd assortment of fellow travelers. Among them were a Catalonian couple who had wetsuits that looked thick enough for use in the North Sea, perhaps to compensate for the fact that each of them appeared to have about 0.5% body fat; a gregarious Georgian (as in Atlanta, not Tbilisi) who had been to Anthony's Key just a month ago and was already back and shared a seemingly endless supply of veteran pointers (e.g. "A lot of people don't realize that the guy at the pool bar brings his own boombox to play music at the pool, and if your camera says your batteries are too low for the camera, they can still power the boombox, so it's a good idea to give him your batteries instead of throwing them away"); a middle aged Sicilian from Detroit who seemed to always have what looked like a matchstick hanging out of his mouth who was probably not a mobster, but could play one on TV in a pinch; and a 57-year-old guy and his 10-year-old daughter from Vicksburg, Mississippi, which young girl was apparently missing school to go on a dive vacation, and seemed a bit young and reckless to be diving, but was mostly harmless, and which older guy was relentless in videotaping every second of his daughter's every dive, and was not shy about bumping fellow divers out of the way to get that Scorcese-esque camera angle he needed of her. They were all fine people, although we certainly spent more time chatting with some rather than others. But there is something a little odd about spending a substantial amount of money to go on a relaxing vacation and for an integral part of that vacation to involve long stretches on a small boat with randomly assigned strangers, not knowing for sure whether they're going to be tolerable or not until about halfway through the week. Maybe we were lucky, or maybe people are always going to be generally pleasant when they're on vacation; one way or another, we lived.

The diving was fantastic, as it would have to be to support a week of hanging out in one place with nothing else of note to do. For nature enthusiasts, diving is like going hiking, except that the wildlife doesn't scurry off and hide when it smells you five hundred yards away. As such we saw at close range sea turtles, moray eels, giant crabs, one seahorse, and an almost infinite variety of technicolor fish. The Holla regrets that we were unable to send the staff photographer along to snap colorful pictures of Blue Flathead Parrotfish and Juvenile Spotted Drums, although having seen the behavior of many underwater photographers, you're not missing that much. Your correspondent was trapped on one merciful brief water taxi ride with a fellow guest who insisted on showing off all the pictures of fish he had captured underwater, and while the staff photographer is certain that he could have given underwater shots a little more compositional interest than this gentleman, he still suspects that most such photos will more often than not just look like a bunch of fish. (Although the staff photographer would like to encourage you to click on the picture above of the fish that lived in the shallows near our bungalow to see a larger version of it.) Even so, we particularly regret not having visual record of the shark dive, when we went 80 feet down with a bucket full of chum, and spent ten minutes swimming within a few feet of 20 circling reef sharks bigger than we were. Your correspondent was still focused enough on not screwing up the whole breathing underwater thing to feel even a tinge of fear from the sharks, who, honestly, weren't going to put the effort into biting off anyone's leg when there was a whole bucket of already-dead fish waiting for them.

That may have been the most compelling story of the trip, but maybe the most amazing view was on the final day of the trip when we dove near the pointy end of the island, where the piscine superhighway passed by. One could look left and right along the reef and see thousnands if not tens of thousands of fish stretching as far as the eye could see in each direction, eventualy merging with the deep blue of the water.

Oneupsmanship

So from what your correspondent can gather, there was much fuss this summer in the U.S. about the clever/fun/campy title of the movie Snakes on a Plane. Well, I think the Guatemalans have won another small cultural victory. Now playing at a theater near us: Serpientes a Bordo. No, you're not missing any subtlety of translation -- it means "Snakes On Board."

Good Job, Chris

I may have mentioned before that one of the remnants of the pampered diplomat lifestyle is our enjoyment of both American and Guatemalan holidays. It couldn't be otherwise, as the Embassy is part of the Federal government, and thus American holidays are not optional, but would grind to a halt without its Guatemalan staff, who require their own little holidays, too. Well, we got another three day weekend this past weekend -- and those of you who live outside of Boston or DC may be surprised to know it was one of the American ones. Apparently government people, not just mailmen/letter carriers and bankers, still get Columbus Day off.

It may be a sign that we're exhausting the three-day weekend options around here that we didn't have a big plan set. We've got some things scheduled for a few months out, but this one was a blank space. It dawned on us that there were several volcanoes around Lake Atitlan that we had yet to climb. So we headed up to Santiago Atitlan, and started asking around about a guide to take us up Volcan San Pedro. The guide services seemed a bit more expensive than we had anticipated, given that being a guide for a Guatemalan volcano ascent basically has only one requirement: Machete ownership -- and not for chopping underbrush, but for scaring off brigands and thieves.

We dind't get everything firmly set the night before. We scurried from the restaurant to our room under umbrella and continued our plot to find a guide by the docks at sunrise the next morning. We contemplated the eight-hour climb as the sound of pounding rain beat on the roof of our bungalow. And then we realized that we hadn't planned our next volcano ascent for October because it's still as likely as not to rain cats and dogs on any given day. As we sipped beers by the sunny poolside and gazed up at the peak of San Pedro enveloped in cloud cover, we saluted our ability to come to our senses, better late than never.

We did manage to avoid a complete weekend of sloth by doing some canoeing. We've taken many opportunities to go kayaking on various Guatemalan bodies of water, but there were no kayaks to be had. So we did a spin around the inlet in a canoe, which had a kind of old-school charm. Which is very important in feeling more in touch the locals, who also use canoes, of sorts, such as the one pictured above. They didn't say it out loud, but you could tell by the look in their eyes, as we paddled by their wood-plank canoes and fishing nets floated with old milk jugs, that we were each celebrating Columbus's contributions to the Americas in our own way, and that they really felt the connection, too.

Banana Republic Indeed

So Chiquita apparently exports just a few bananas from Guatemala. If you don't have your glasses on, click the picture to see it a little bigger. This was docked in Puerto Barrios as we were shooting across the bay to Livingston. When we came back, there was an equally large boat called the "S.S. Dole" at the next pier over.