Wow, this blog posting is really difficult. It's time to say good-bye to Guatemala, after all this time. Tommorrow morning at 5:30am we leave our house to go to the airport. It's been a very busy and emotional day. When I think about this year, there are some major themes that strike me as being so meaningful to me, and to our family. The first is how wonderful the actual country of Guatemala is. Before we came here, we thought of Guatemala as some poor developing country that was stuck in a tragic history of poverty and civil war. And although [View Full Entry]

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As we wind down our year here I'm starting to get a little sentimental about leaving Guatemala. I hope this entire blog has been able to show the gentle reader why we have enjoyed this country so much, but now I want to take just a moment to mention another reason we have been so happy here: we live in a lovely house! When we arrived last August we had rented a pretty typical modern colonial house located quite near the central park. You can see more of that place by clicking this link to [View Full Entry]

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As I mentioned in our Semuc Champey entry, we wanted to take a couple more roadtrips before we depart this lovely country. Our final item on the list was a trip out to Todos Santos, way out northwest in the highlands. It's considered fairly remote and isloated, so doesn't get a lot of visitors. We decided to time the trip with the visit of our friends Carlos and Djuna, who were visiting us from Seattle, as it's always fun to share these roadtrips with friends. So on Friday afternoo [View Full Entry]

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A while back I was walking back to our house from central Antigua, which is a 20-minute walk along which final portion includes a dirt road between two small coffee farms. I've walked home alone many times, and normally don't think twice about any safety issues, but this time for some reason I didn't like the look of the man in the distance coming towards me. As he got a little closer to me, I started reaching for my cell phone (as a defense it was good for a call to Steve, or at least as a projectile to his noggin). [View Full Entry]

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For Mother's Day, which is actually celebrated on May 10 of every year, as opposed to second Sunday, Lucas and Grace's school put on a little show for us moms. With a scheduled start time of 10am, the event started promptly at 10:45 or so, with a pretty entertaining performance by a nationally known singer, "Elisabeth." (Hey, she must be good: you can find her in Wikipedia, AND she's got only one name). She is a very talented performer of the old-school type: a sort of Edye Gormet sort of singer, and charmed the audience of several hundred women. Then came [View Full Entry]

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As our year here is nearing an end, we have taken a fresh look at the Guatemalan map to see what other places we want to visit before we leave. There are a couple more spots left on our list: the waterfalls of Semuc Champey, and the highland town of Todos Santos. So, on a long weekend holiday from school, we hired Julio, one of Hugo's excellent guides, to take us to the wonderful sights of Semuc Champey. This is an area north-east of Guatemala City, and about 4 hours' drive from Antigua. (We're going to do Todos Santos next weekend). [View Full Entry]

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Today we became landowners! Steve and I casually started looking at real estate in December, shortly after we returned from New Zealand. It was the standard procedure: Steve and I start dreaming about owning a vacation home, we look around and see what's available, and then we come down to reality and talk ourselves out of it. This has worked so well during these past 18 years of marriage - we never once actually pulled the trigger on a vacation property, but really enjoyed the process of dreaming, looking, visiting, and dreaming some more. But to actually buy something? Why [View Full Entry]

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Recently, various cousins from both Steve and my families came down to give us a visit. We had invited as many kids as were able to make it, and 5 came in all; four from my family's side (Courtny, Grahm, Heather and Hannah) and one from Steve's side (Heather, whom we called HeatherL which sounds like "HeatherEarl"). Lucas and Grace were SO EXCITED to have their cousins come to visit them all the way down here! They arrived late Saturday night, which also happened to be Sabado Gloria of Holy Week, so they were able to catch a late-night procession as [View Full Entry]

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Steve: "Holy" Sonja: "Seeped in culture" Grace: "Outstandingly beautiful" Lucas: "Surreal" These are the words we have each chosen to describe Semana Santa, or Holy Week. In the weeks since the last procession on Easter Sunday, I have repeatedly gone back to my memories and tried to come to any sort of clarity on how to describe it. Words will likely fail, so this entry is heavy on pictures. If you do nothing else, please view the pictures in their enlarged view, as they look too small for the job in thumbnail view. The videos give you a small taste; I [View Full Entry]

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Any reader of this blog will know by now that our friend Christine owns and runs a small organic coffee farm here in Antigua. She had told us that the picking season was at hand and that she was a little concerned about getting enough help to pick the crop, and so we gamely offered our family’s labor to help out. Christine politely smiled and thanked us, and as the weeks went by we heard from her a couple of times that the picking was going a little slowly, and every time we renewed our offer to help out. Finally, it [View Full Entry]

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