black sabbath, yeah, wow!

hi everyone. today´s update. in backwards order from friday as far as sunday. just to confuse you.

friday
went to panajachel, a town on lake atitlan to the west of antigua. aldous huxley (not to be confused with bill huxtable of cosby show fame) referred to this as the most beautiful lake in the world. he obviously hadn´t been to lake windermere, or lake titicaca, or lake victoria, or perhaps any other lakes ever. or perhaps all that acid he took to inspire the doors of perception messed with his perception of lakes. we got off the bus at 10am and it started raining at 10.01am, and it didn´t stop until who knows when. if we had to sum up our time in panajachel it would be rain, cakes, rain, tuk-tuk, rain, lunch, rain, dinner, reading, rain, rain, rain, sleep, rain, cakes, rain. had a strange little room in a hostel-hotel type thing (motel?), watched some tv, bumped into our friend charis from antigua which was nice. went to the circus bar in the evening for pizza, it was touted in the footprint guide (which we have renamed the footsh*t guide for it´s unfailing ability to be really rather unhelpful) as a really friendly, warm, cosy place for food and music. it did have really good pizzas, and there was a brilliant band doing traditional latin american music, but the staff seemed to be all mute-deaf types. there were some really good posters of circus things up on the walls, my favourite was titled something along the lines of captian willy and his amazing trained sealions. the second band the singer was some zoned out gringo singing supposedly in spanish, but the gautemalan drummer couldn´t keep a straight face, so we figured there wasn´t much integrity to this performance, and ordered an ice cream to get through it, then left.

as a footnote panajachel is the sort of place where tourists go to visit and then end up staying there as it is so idyllic, and then they open up little coffee bars and make photo albums of their journey there from texas, usa, or maybe they sell little bracelets they´ve made or just generally hang out with their pot bellies and greasy beards, re-living the 80´s, or whatever decade they started coming to panajachel as youths. they speak spanish like tourists still, yet believe for some reason they are locals. it has a couple of main streets with various shops, restaurants, hotels, stalls selling weird food or aforementioned bracelets. we gave it around 5 out of 10 by the end of day 1 there. purchase of the day was some coloured pencils to liven up my journal, and my life in general, which they definitely did. did i mention it rained a lot?

saturday
got up and had breakast (my favourite time of the day). got a boat to san pedro, a town over the most beautiful lake in the world. it was a little boat, ideally for around 8 passengers, but with 12 of us on. we set off, overweight, and did a tiny little circle, and then re-docked. a man ran along and put a tub of petrol on board. then we set off again. it was raining by this point. we dropped a few people off en route, and got to san pedro around 1, planning on eating then watching the guatemala v trinidad & tobago world cup qualifier. we wandered around some strange grassy paths, through fields rife with rabid dogs, and horses munching trees, or grass, or stray tourists, saw a few machetes, wondered if maybe we´d missed a turning, then found a place to eat. we ate some nachos. san pedro by this point was making panajachel seem like new york to us. it was even more gringo, drop-out, ´travellers´ paradise´, complete with tie die long skirts and smelly dreadlocks. it was exactly what i used to imagine when people said to me i´m taking a gap year and going travelling. a conversation at our lunch stop between the bar man and some local yokel gringo extrordinaire - ´hey man what time is it´ ´it is now. it will always be now. there is no other time it could be other than now´ ´yeah but man, what like o´clock is it?´ ´it´s like 2.30 on your planet, whatever that means´

enough said i think. we left on an earlier boat than planned, and were overjoyed to arrive back at panajachel which we now rated at 10 out of 10. we found the guatemalan equivalent of hard rock cafe, and watched the 2nd half of the football. it was a draw 1-1. we spent the rest of the day getting drunk with 2 locals, harim and willy (not the one with the sealions). they explained how important the match had been, and that had guatemala not got their goal in the last 2 minutes, they´d be out of the qualifiers. we were shocked at how close our new adopted country had been to being knocked out, and discussed in (lost in translation) depth the different tactics of guatemalan football versus trinidad football. guatemala are better basically, but don´t have good strikers, their goal was pretty flukey. we then covered such topics as english-irish relations, career prospects (they were both still studying), languages, religion, churches, spirituality. after a few hours of this, the chat descended into talking about bands that were from england or america that we knew, and it literally went like this: guns n roses? yeah we know them, wow, they´re ace. yeah! michael jackson. yeah wow yeah! the beatles? yeah, wow, the beatles! the stones? yeah, wow! coldplay. yeah wow! yeah coldplay yeah! we ate pizza with them, then left them, very happy to have met some REAL locals and gained a little insight into guatemalans mindset. they were really friendly and sweet. wow!

sunday
we went to chichicastenango market. it´s around 30k north of panajachel, and has an amazing market on a sunday- food, textiles, jewellery, etc. its name means place of the nettles, though i didn´t see any. i checked my dictionary to see if this was a mistranslation, but it is correct. it has a central plaza, where the market mainly is, and 2 amazing churches on either side of the plaza. it was a special day in the mayan calendar (of which there are many, look on wikipedia for further information), so there was lots of incense burning, and candle lighting, and kneeling, and chanting. the main church, of santo tomas, was the most amazing church i´ve been in for a long time, maybe even ever. it was very old, plain white walls, a huge wooden altarpiece, and various figures of jesus around the place, but not overwhelmingly so, and no gold or silver to be seen. it smelt amazing with all the incense, and there were wooden blocks with candles on the floor in the aisle, with rose petals on them too, and various men and women in traditional mayan costume doing their version of hail marys. in a little side room was another mayan man doing a sort of tarot reading, with little red pebbles, counting them all out and putting them in little piles, then shuffling them all around, and counting them again, and putting them in little piles again, then telling somebody something in spanish. the whole experience was surreal and amazing, and we decided it was definitely a special moment.

we then went and bought things in the market, to exorcise any vaguely religious selfless feelings we may have been having. purchase of the day for me was a little toy cat made of traditional guatemalan textiles, and for abi a little traditional guatemalan textile bag. i went to a museum of local archeological finds and maps and things, which was nice, mainly as it wasn´t crazily busy like the market. i was the only person in it, so took full advantage of this by getting my dictionary out to look up all the words i didn´t know from the displays, without worrying that people might see me doing this and give me strange looks. the word for nettle is ortiga.

we went back to antigua for the night after all this fun. on our little bus there was some strange muddle with our tickets, and we had to have a slightly stressful conversation with our driver afterwards, but it was useful as i had to learn the past tense, so i now know how to say ´but when we gave you our ticket you said it was all ok´.

to be continued as we have to go and eat our dinner now. just so you know we are now in a place called rio dulce, staying in a jungle lodge hostel place, by the lake, it has a pool and jacuzzi, but it is really hot and there´s a few bugs around the place. it has a tv, but didn´t manage to show the murray-federer us open final which was a shame, but i think it was a bit of a walkover, which is also a shame, mainly for murray.

more to come, and competition answer too!

x
ps tomorrow night at 2000 our time, is guatemala v cuba, which i think if we draw or win we are fine, so it will be quite momentous if so as i don´t think we´ve ever qualified for world cup. it´ll be around 1pm england time, so watch it if you can and think of us.