Guatemala in all it´s glory

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Wow.. what else can I say?! Today some friends from school and I visited this tiny town called Zunil, home of the smoking, drinking deity of miracles - also known as San Semon. You have to ask the locals where San Semon resides - currently it´s a tiny house filled with candles and flowers. San Semon resembles a cowboy in an electric chair, complete with vest and cowboy hat, sunglasses, a hankerchief covering his mouth, red gloves and an american flag over his shoulders. It´s completely laughable, but apparently we shouldn´t have.... From what I can gather, San Semon is a serious thing to the Mayans who live in the region. They created him years ago, but now they truly believe that he performs miracles. We were lucky enough to witness a Mayan woman conducting what appeared to be some sort of cleansing ceremony on a young man. She was hitting the guy with branches and candles, dribbling some sort of potion on him, and even spit orange juice on him toward the end, all the while speaking to San Semon in a language we couldn´t understand. Abby, the very British girl next to me whispered, in her rock star accent, "he must have been a very bad boy." To complete the ceremony, the two tipped San Semon back in his chair, and poured liguor down his throat as an offering. It was all very serious to those participating, and quite a site to see....

As if the afternoon wasn´t strange enough, on our way home on the chicken bus, we got stalled on the side of the road for over an hour because another chicken bus (yes, just like the one we were on) had gone over the edge of the mountain on a curve. It rolled and caught fire, burning the farm land around it. From what I understood, no one was injured. Apparently we were trying to pass just as a truck that clearly did not have enough power was trying to pull the other chicken bus out of the ravine. At one point, our bus driver was trying to do a three point turn on the narrow path to try to go back the way we came. Does he not see what happened right in front of us, I thought? Abby and I decided if he tried to turn one more inch, we were going to jump off the bus before we suffered the same fate. Luckily he decided not to risk it and we made it back in one piece. Maybe we owe our thanks to San Semon!

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