Antigua still

We have been exploring Antigua for four days now, and are ready to leave, since today we saw all the rest of the monuments we missed in the days before. We´ve explored so much that I´m not even sure where I should start. We arrived late at night so we went right to bed in our cool room, with the twin beds. The man checking us in had asked if we wanted one bed, I asked if it was a queen, and he said yes, but when we went upstairs there were two beds, one facing each way against either wall. Oh, well. so much for my communication. I figured he though I meant a ¨tween¨. The next day we went out to explore and to check out some of the tour options. (When we got back, we had acquired a huge king sized bed - by pushing out two beds together, it seems.~

Antigua is surrounded by volcanoes, three of them - including Agua (water) and Fuego (Fire) which you may have guessed is active. We weren´t aware of that so much, since for a lot of the day clouds sit about halfway up the volcanoes. but these are usually not there in the morning or the late evening. Agua is a very beautiful shape and sits at the end of our street (I suppose it´s at the end of all the streets). The climate is probably perfect - with temperate days and nights, although at this time of year, the evening temperatures drop a lot and a few warm blankets are certainly useful. During the day, especially if the sun is out, it´s overwarm, so we start out with a shirt and end up carrying it not too long after.

On our first day we didn´t do much touring. We did go to a travel group which offers highly recommended tours and booked two -one of the nearby villages and one of the city centre. The second is offered by Elizabeth Bell who has lived in Guatemala for 40 years, since she was 14 and her parents moved there. After booking the tickets with her charming son Julio, we headed off to find the church of San Jeronimo which like almost all the churches around here is in ruins. Most of the buildings were destroyed in the 1773 earthquake after which the government decided to move to it´s present capital in Guatemala City. It wasn´t the end of Antigua but certainly all the churches were forced to move so they took all the decorations with them, leaving the empty churches we see now.

We also visited another church which holds the tomb of Saint Hermano Pedro who was canonized by the Pope in 2002 -not too long ago. His tomb is very popular with people looking for miracle cures and there are little wax candles representing parts of the body, hanging in the area behind his tomb.

On our second day we did the village tour which took us out to several villages in the surrounding area. We had a guide and driver and too other tourists, self-described as New York Jews. They have both lived in New York all their lives, they both work in the same university and have known each other for over 40 years I think, but have been together officially for only the last 8 years.

The tour generally consisted of us arriving at the main square outside the church, looking at the church facade, talking a little about the village then hoping into our tour bus to continue to the next town, to do it again. At one town though there was a huge outdoor laundry facility where the women were out in full force doing their clothes in the basins surrounding the huge water facility.

The next day was the busy one. We started out with our city tour offered by Elizabeth. She is an amazing fount of knowledge and knows so much about the city and it´s history. It is her assertion that the town was never abandoned and even though the capital was moved, many of the people stayed and continued living there. She took us to the main church, the Santiago church (echoes of Spain there) where there was a first communion taking place. It was obviously an important person whose children were being communed because they had their very own solist who sang Ave Maria - with great histrionics but also with a beautiful voice.

We also saw a local house which, although converted to a hotel, we did get a sense of how the monied people lived, in these huge compounds with several interior courtyards. Our second last stop was at a jade factory, which was a little out of character for the rest of the tour we thought, but it also included the restroom and coffee stop. so we didn´t complain. Our last stop was a very new hotel which has taken over what seems like acres of land and turned it into not only a hotel, but also three museums, a church for very exclusive weddings and the usual other accourtrements of a fine hotel. The museums were closed, but Elizabeth used her pull and had them open the museum with the precolumbian collection which has been intermingled with a collection of contempory glass from all over the world including one excellent piece from Canada.

That afternoon we went back to our place where we had the great pleasure of meeting up with Joanna - one of the Australians we toured with in India, and her husband, who were now on tour in Central America. We spent a great time with them at lunch reminiscing with Joanna and talking about her travels here. We met again for dinner at a great little place we had found the night before which has only about 8 items on the menu. The place has no name, but produced some amazing food from a tiny open kitchen. The first night I had duck breast on a bed of gratineed potato and carrot, and graced with a dollop of creme fraiche. Geordie had a huge bowl of Boeuf Bourginon with large slabs of roasted potatoes. For dessert we shared a lemon tart on a chocolate base. MMMM.

This morning we decided to see all those churches which we had been saving until after Elizabeth´s tour. We went off at 9ish, and had breakfast at a great little place that was hopping today, and then took off for the far corners of the town. All the churches are ruined, having fallen in to ruin after the huge earthquake of 1773. The pillars of the first church almost filled the centre of the nave and we had to climb up and clamber over the stones to see it. The pillars fill the space to about 12 feet deep. Amazing. All around, as with all the churches there are large gardens which are planted very nicely with great flowers and lots of grass where we found many young Antiguans who had hoped to find privacy for their wooing. They were in all the little side rooms too. Disconcerting to come upon them smooching in the dark nooks and crannies.

Each church had it´s major feature - the last one had two, the biggest fountain in Central America and a round collection of cells where the nuns lived. In two of the places we were able to climb up and see the views too, although today the clouds were very low. (I forgot to mention that while we were with Elizabeth yesterday we saw a huge plume of smoke rising up from behind the clouds surrounding Fuego´s summit. Very exciting.

Tomorrow we are off to warmer climes. We will be taking a shuttle which will take us to Monterrico on the Pacific Coast. Julio promised us temperatures of 85 to 90. Maybe we´ll want to come back to the cool evenings of Antigua, but we´ve booked four nights and our return shuttle bus, so I guess we had better suck it up.