La Virgencita Guatemalteca

 

"¿Quién es ésta que se asoma como el alba, hermosa como la luna llena, refulgente como el sol, imponente como escuadrones abanderados?"

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

Upon the Votive by Our Door

I have yet to describe or comment much upon the habits and customs of our house here, owing defense due the privacy of my own.  Tonight I invade this near silence sharing this lone image, of the shrine near our front door.

After dinner (circa 8 o'clock) the lights in the common areas go off.  There is little spare income for electricity here, you see.  

The lone light you see when you come through our front entrance after dinner is a votive candle illuminating two icons, those of Our Ladies of Guadalupe and Fatima:

Stuck in the corner, almost out of sight, but with flowers before them.  

I, of course, like and approve this custom very much.   It is yet one more of many things that makes me feel well and at home here.  

Our Ladies of Guadalupe and Fatima pray for us, and bless our homes.  Ruega por nosotros Virgencita. 


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Location: 8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

Sublime yet Trite view of Antigua, from Cerro de la Cruz

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

Personal Note, July 17th 2012

Today, while I was walking home from the Bodegona, I noticed that I was smelling things very subtly.

Or, rather, much more subtly than I have for years.

I quit smoking almost three years ago in Medjugorje. The first week of September, 2009.

People can say what they want about the apparitions there. I know a lot of people have judged them to be false. Maybe so. All I can say is that of all the major Marian shrines I have made pilgrimage to (including Lourdes, Fatima and Guadalupe) Medjugorge is my favorite. It is beautiful there, a little village with a humble church nestled between two Bosnian hills... The place, like all great shrines, is overrun with pilgrims, and the lines for confession there are the longest I have ever seen. Dozens of priests in dozens of languages, lines of hundreds of penitents at every hour of the day.

If the apparitions are false, then that is odd fruit.

I know nothing about the apparitions or the seers. I can only say Medjugorje is amazing, a powerful place. One that I had a strong sense of forboding at, a sense of premonition like I have only felt a few times before. A sense that has always been followed by some consumation. I was very impressed, and was changed somehow.

I smoked my last cigarette there, the morning I hailed a cab away to Dubrovnik. I have not smoked since.

It's funny how I used to love to smoke - I never was a regular smoker, often going weeks without smoking at all. I never felt it as an addiction. I did it with friends, and almost always with good tobacco. As a social act, smoking is sublime. Drinks and a couple bowls in the pipe.. When it is a deliberate, conscious act, and you are paying attention, smoking can be one of the finest pleasures on earth. I often felt the hobbit, you see. It was good..

But not good enough.

The problem is that we all too often do it - like we too often live, eat and work - mindlessly, mechanically. So when I began to start to smoke more often, sometimes a half pack a day for strings of days - and when I began to roll cigarettes with the Frenchmen in Bourguillon, and began to become a full blown smoker, well..

I knew I had to stop, for good.

For while one in ten smokes is sublime, the negative consequences to the body are vast. One of the worst is that you lose most of your sense of smell. And when you quit, it doesn't immediately return. Your body takes years to recover from the abuse..

Years. As I say, it's been almost three now. This past year ambient tobacco smoke has begun to really annoy me. I am thankfully now a re-confirmed as a non-smoker. And now abruptly, just today, I seem to have suddenly recouped some of my long lost sensitivity. Maybe not all what once had as a child, but a stiff modicum of it. I suddenly noticed I was smelling things like I haven't in years.

It was mildly religious, in that I became plutot vif, quickened, slightly ecstatic. The world again leapt with forgotten vibrancy and texture.

Every thing vibrates with sense and poignancy. We are as open nerves receiving the vibration of creation's song; the light, the sound, the scent, the taste..

Taste and see..

How things are good: Gratias Tibi Beata Mater Maria,Virgo et Regina.

Anyhow, I have been in a mild funk these past two weeks, and have left this here blog aside. This week is my last in Guate. A frame shift is coming, and as it happens I think the blog here shall become rather more fecund. I think that I've shed the extraneous attention that I once may have had, and that anyone still following this has merited the grace of my pearls.. Such as they may be..

So they shall be strewn for your collective delectation, my dear public. I begin to write.

Tonight I write merely to tell you that I can smell. Deo gratias. Ay, Just thought you'd like to know.

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Location: :8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

Posted with Blogsy

The Boatman of Atitlan, July 1st 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala


 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Diva Girl, Maximon's House, Panajachel Guatemala, July 1st 2012

 

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

Posted with Blogsy

View from My Window, Antigua Guatemala: June 25th, 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 

Another Photographic Vignette, Streets of Antigua Guatemala: June 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

Upon A Magic Tuk-Tuk Ride: May 30th, 2012

 

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 




 

Photographic Vignette, Streets of Antigua Guatemala: May, 2012

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala




 

Church of San Francisco, Antigua Guatemala: May - June 2012

I've been scandalously derelict posting here. Not from lack of available material, but rather from being preoccupied with other things. As these coming two weeks are very likely the end of my time here, I am heretofore resolved to post daily, both material from Antigua and a few essays that I have had gestating for a while.

My current 90 day visa runs out on July 4th, which while I am going to get an extension, that date also is the day my parents plan on flying down to visit and join me upon a grand tour of the rest of the country. That will be the coda to my beautiful time in Guatemala, a interlude twixt this idle and my coming push south.

In any case, tonight I post some images I've taken the past two months of the wonderful church - el Templo de San Francisco - that is just across the street from my house here. It's a Franciscan mission that was established in the 16th century, and the building - though ruined repeatedly by earthquakes, and rebuilt many times over - is one of the oldest European structures in the Americas. The current facade dates from the 18th and 19th centuries, and is quite beautiful in a colonial baroque manner..

The tomb of the local saint, San Hermano Pedro, is off the front of the nave. The pilgrims flock here. There are many daily masses, all well assisted, and daily confessions heard for several hours every afternoon. There are fiestas with bands and hoardes of people every significant feast day (meaning several times a week) and the courtyard has some of the best cheap eats vendors in Antigua. There are about a dozen Franciscan priests and brothers here, and many other religious from various orders (the Missionaries of Charity I spotted were visting here, and there are currently three brothers from Fr. Groeschel's Friars of the Renewal from the Bronx hanging out here, too..) that frequent the place.

I needn't tell you that the grace of this church being found upon my doorstep (something that I had not planned, but like Antigua in every other sense just sort of happened to me) is one of the main reasons I have been here this long..

Because it, and the people who attend it, are beautiful. Look, see:

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I'll post some images of the interior (which cameras are putatively banned from, but I'll sneak a few of on the sly this coming week, anyhow) soon.

SS Francis, Hermano Pedro, and Our Lady of Poverty, pray for us.

 

 

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Location:8 Calle Oriente,Antigua Guatemala,Guatemala

 

Posted with Blogsy

U.S. Men's National Team Ties Guatemala 1-1 in World Cup Qualifier

I'd bet practically no one up there in Gringoland knows that. But believe me, tonight more or less everyone in Guatemala does.

(Side note, I'm confused as to how come Blogsy's insisting on highlight "tonight" and "esta noche" as if hyperlinked - I've tried to fix this, but can't figure it out..)

Anyhow, I probably should have gone into Guatemala City, less than an hour away, to give our boys some support tonight. My other American housemates did. The boys, they need it. This is a point too few gringo jingoes appreciate, but our men's national team playing anyone anywhere is almost always a big deal to the locals in that country. Especially in the Muslim or third world, and most especially in Latin America. It's often a type of low grade warfare, that I've never heard reported on in our press.

Here's a clip showing how they have to deploy riot police to protect the U.S. team while entering the stadium, along with some fan shenanigans:



The upshot is that to get any good reporting on our team, it seems you pretty much have to go to the British press for it.

Here's the Guardian on what it's often like for our boys when playing on foreign soil:

Tough Crowd:

Well, as with any time the USA travel for a Central American fixture, it's one of those games that on paper they're expected to win, but which in practice is the sort of game people have in mind when they talk about the "grind" of qualifying.

That "grind" tends to start the minute the team get off the plane. Central American trips by the USMNT tend to be fraught affairs. Previous trips to the region have resulted in a Honduran newspaper printing the floor plan of the US team hotel for the benefit of "fans", a band assembling in the lobby of another hotel, and a previous trip to Guatemala City itself was marked by a local radio station hosting a "promotion", complete with loudspeakers, outside yet another hotel window. These trips have also presumably resulted in around 22 terrible Yelp reviews attached to the hotels in question, shortly thereafter.

And when the US reaches the pitch it's not likely to get much friendlier. The last time these two sides played here in a World Cup Qualifier, in 2008, there were two red cards, seven yellows, and an array of airborne objects that ranged from US players to batteries being thrown at them. The consensus is that the US are likely to be goaded tonight and while Jamaica may be the tougher footballing side they face in this phase of qualifying, this tie may be the sternest test of character.

Klinsmann is fairly phlegmatic at the prospect of what awaits: "It's hostile in Tehran in front of 110,000, it's hostile in Istanbul with 60,000 -- actually you can't even see the field before the game for 10 minutes for all the smoke. It's normal; this is what soccer brings to the table. I think it's just awesome. We are here because we want three points, and we have to take it seriously."


This report, along with a live blogging of the game (which was only available outside of Guatemala on $30 pay per view) can be found here.

The USMNT blog also has some good dirt on the game and historic rivalry.

This match was the second qualifier. The first the USMNT beat Antigua and Barbuda (as in the Caribbean islands, not this my here Guatemalan home, Antigua Guatemala) a sloppy 3-1. The USMNT began playing Guatemala in 1977. "Los Chapines" as they are affectionately called here, won the first four matches ever played, but have never again won since 1988, ever since US Soccer began to be taken more seriously at home. The upshot is that after the game tonight the U.S. is 12-4-6 all time against Guatemala, and 12-0-6 since 1988.

Compare this to Mexico, which leads the U.S. 30-15-12, and has never lost against the USMNT at home, as in not ever.

I decided not to go into the city, and also skipped going to the bar down the street that was showing the game. Probably should have, since I had a tallboy of beer wagered on our guys with Rafael my Guatemalan housefather here. Since it was a tie, the bet is null. I have a long history of betting on the U.S. Men's Team, dating back to a bottle of raki I won on our guys when they played the Turks in Izmir that year, because it's too much fun not to get into it with people when I'm abroad. They could care less about our U.S. sports obsessions, and know nothing about the NBA, NFL or MLB, but soccer gets people excited everywhere..

Excepting at home, of course. Naval gazing ethnocentric self obsession at it's most disappointing, really. If we're going to get all obsessed about grown men playing with balls like schoolchildren, we might as well do it with everyone else, you know? The fact that we have the gall to call our baseball championship the world series when we only invite one foreign team to compete (Toronto) is just pathetic. Why not invite the Japanese, Mexicans, Cubans and Dominicans to field their own teams? Because Boston and New York might lose to the Dominican Republic or Tokyo is how come.

So anyway, while I sat the game out here tonight in my room, I can still report that I could hear at least three televisions carrying the game from within say 100' of my window.

And that when Guatemala scored their goal in the second half, the town erupted in faint distant cheers, and probably a half dozen different sets of fireworks went off in the distance. I'm not kidding. It was awesome, really. I had to laugh.


For while I'm glad the U.S. team didn't lose (I have just enough national pride left in me to mildly care) I'm also somehow pleased that Guatemala didn't lose. I've grown especially fond, and so a bit protective of my dear little Guatemaltecos, you see.. I'm rooting deeply for them. Because while probably less than 1 in a 100 of Americans will even be aware of the game tomorrow, 99 in 100 Guatemalans will be. The fact that they at least did not lose to the great gringo satan is tonight salve for many a Guatemalan soul.. And for that I'm very glad.

Signing off,

Oye todos mis compadres, por esta noche se puede llamarme,

- Carlos Bocanegra Cortes




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