Tradition

     Welcome, dear friends, to the season of Lent.  The forty day period of fasting and praying that leads us to the culmination of the Catholic year; Easter.  Lent will also probably be noteworthy in that it will provide me with very little to write about because, as my Grandma always said, prayer and fasting make for boring blogs (I'm not actually sure my grandma knows what a blog is, but if she did, I'm sure she would adhere to that school of thought).  However, the beginning of the Lenten season did give me fodder for at least one more blog in the form of Carnaval (fat tuesday) and the other celebration of the Señor de Esquipulas which falls on March 9th every year; which this year, just so happened to be Ash Wednesday.
     Over my life I have experienced various traditional ways celebrations of Fat Tuesday.  From grade school, where they would serve us an extra dessert at lunch, to high school, where we probably got to go without uniforms for a day, to college, where overindulging on alcohol and greasy foods was the norm, and finally to Guatemala, where they smash eggs filled with confetti over each others' heads and dress up like Disney characters.  At least that seems to be the going tradition at the grade school I visited on the morning of Ash Tuesday.  It's always fun to see kids here in Guatemala, they make me feel at home because kids are the same everywhere, even when smashing eggs on your head.  The tradition at the library was a bit different, and seemed to be "work like it is a normal day," while the tradition at the high school was to paint sawdust.  Maybe that one deserves a little explanation.  Every year for the 9th of March, the people of Esquipulas take to the streets to make "alfombras" which literally translates to rug or carpet.  These alfombras are made in the streets from sawdust and other organic materials.  The tradition goes back to the times of the conquistadores, and is loosely based on the Palm Sunday teaching of laying palm branches on the ground.  While most of the alfombras are made around Easter, Esquipulas has carried the tradition over to March 9th as well.  However, no one wants a sawdust colored carpet, so the first step in the process must be painting the sawdust. 

 

     To this end, the entire school had no classes in the afternoon and all of the students spent their time dyeing the sawdust.  It was quite the impressive operation.  As you can see in the picture above, the entire soccer field was full of students getting down and dirty with the dye.  They even talked me into helping, though I was very picky on the colors I wanted to use.

 

 (Go Vikings!)

     With all of the sawdust dyed and properly stored for the night, the activities of fat Tuesday came to an end and I said goodbye to the all the things I gave up for Lent.  The next day, although technically a day of fasting, was more of a day of feasting in Esquipulas, where the people were not really willing to give up the feast of their Black Christ just for Ash Wednesday.  I spent the morning helping the students of San Benito's High School make their alfombras or, more accurately, I took pictures and learned how alfombras are made while they worked.  

     As you can see in the picture below, the first step in making an alfombra is a base.  Plain, colorless sawdust is used to fill in the cracks in the road and smooth out the bumps, and then other colors are generally laid down to form a colorful background. 

 

     The next stage is making the designs on the alfombras.  These are generally made using a template that they have cut out of cardboard, but a decent amount were also made free hand.  At this stage they talked me in to helping, and I took the moment for an awesome photo op.  

 

     I also got drafted for some other duties.  Below:  "ahh... Miss Karin, what is this alfombra supposed to say?"

     "Where's there love, there's peace"

"... hmm... I think we may want to fix that"

 

And just like that, a Black Eyed Peas allfombra was averted.  

 

 This was one of my favorite alfombra.  The entire thing was done free hand!

 

 

As you can tell, there were quite a few alfombras.  The ones pictured here are only those made by the Colegio San Benito!

 

     I had originally intended on including all sorts of pictures about the other alfombras throughout town, but apparently I have limited picture storing space on this blogger account and I don't want to use up all my space for the next 2.5 months on one blog about sawdust, so this will have to do.  I'll upload the rest to Facebook if you are interested in seeing them. 

     However, just because the pictures have ended doesn't mean the story has!  I took the afternoon off from work as well to wander around the town and check out the rest of the alfombras.  Don't feel to bad for my coworkers for having to work without me though, because all the high schools had the day off, and hardly anybody came to the library.  The alfombras from the town were pretty varied.  Some were incredibly detailed works of art, and others were... not so detailed.  But even so, it was really cool to see a town come together and work on something as unique and beautiful as decorating the streets they walk and drive on.  

     In the evening, also as per tradition, was the "quema del castillo."  This was basically an incredibly dangerous fireworks display in honor of the Cristo Negro.  I say dangerous because the entire time ash from the fireworks was falling on the crowd and multiple times embers, large burning pieces of fireworks, and even rockets were launched into the crowd which was so big that a stampede was a serious worry of the event organizers.  However, nothing bad happened, and hardly anybody was hurt.  In addition, I got to witness yet another great part of Esquipulan culture and tradition.

     Thus ended the Second celebration of the Señor de Esquipulas, in a blaze of fire.  And, unfortunately, it rained the next day, turning all of the dyed sawdust in the streets into horrible mess all over Esquipulas.

Pura Vida

     This last week I celebrated my 6 month Guatemalan birthday, and I celebrated the calendar turning over to March, and to the last third of my Central American adventure, in Costa Rica with one of my best friends and study abroad partner, Dave Harrison.  Similar to my last vacation (Belize), this break came at a very opportune time as I was very ready to get out of the monastery for a little while, and found a beach vacation to be the perfect escape.  This trip was unique, however, in that instead of using the time away to experience how other volunteers are living, I was able to share it with someone who was fresh from the USA, and was able to get the news on the motherland as well as get an interesting new perspective on Central America from someone who hasn't just spent the last 6 months here.
     My trip started with a night in Antigua Guatemala, which was a nice warm up for Costa Rica because both Costa Rica and Antigua are crawling with gringos.  It is one of the only places in Guatemala where not only can I blend in, but I'm probably in the majority.  I stayed at a hostel where I met some awesome people (seriously, if you ever travel, stay at hostels) and then set out to meet another friend of mine from Chile, Amanda, who was to be my guide to the nightlife of Antigua.  You heard me right, nightlife!  I probably wouldn't have believed it either if I hadn't seen it myself.  It turns out that Antigua is unique not only for the amount of tourists but also because it is one of 5 places in Guatemala with a nightlife:  Antigua, Zone 9 and 10 of Guatemala City, Xela, and Flores.  Antigua is really different from Esquipulas, and I really enjoyed the experience of a Guatemalan Disco. 
     The next day I woke up to a game of soccer, and then hit the road for the second leg of the trip.  The plane ride from Guatemala City to San Jose was absolutely gorgeous.  The route took us south right along the coast and because it was a short flight we never got high enough that I couldn't see the landscape.  To top it off, our pilot must have been a tour guide in a past life, because over the flight he would come on the intercom just to tell us of some volcano or river or other important feature that we could see just outside our windows.  Although it was a great flight, there's only so much time that one can spend comfortably on a plane, and my limit is about 15 minutes, so I was more than happy to land. 
     I landed at 5:30, and I thought that Dave was coming in around 6:30, which would leave me with only an hour wait outside of an airport, not bad.  Then the 6:30 plane from Miami came in, and I waited.  And all the people on that flight came out, and I waited.  And I figured that maybe he had problems with his checked luggage, so I waited some more.  And then I thought that maybe I got the flight number wrong and he was on the 7:10 flight from Dallas.  So I waited.  And the people came out from that one, and I waited for Dave.  And he didn't come.  I ended up waiting until 8:45, and which point I figured he had missed his plane, so I caught a cab from the friend of a taxi driver I had been talking to all night, and he promised that if he found Dave he would send him on to the hostel.  He gave me his card and I told him, "remember, he is a really tall guy who answers to David."  10 minutes down the road my taxi driver got a phone call from the guy I left at the airport, who had found Dave.  It turns out he was on a flight that came in at 8:30, and I left literally minutes before he came out of the airport.  Oops.
     I met Dave at the hostel, which was an interesting place, and we discussed at length whether or not we wanted to taste some of the San Jose nightlife.  Our hostel seemed like a fun place to party and everyone was headed to a bar later, but after so much travel in one day, Dave and I were only able to handle two beers before falling asleep.  The next day we decided to check out the day life in San Jose, a place which every tourist and tourist website says to avoid like the plague.  Not because it is bad, but because it is not a volcano, beach, or nature reserve, therefore making it just a rest stop on the way to other cool places in Costa Rica.  Because of that, we had little hope for the city.  However, it turns out San Jose is a really cool place.  It was Sunday, so the people of San Jose had taken to the streets to play, watch makeshift parades, and exercise.

 In this picture alone there is a soccer game (left), a volleyball game (center), and a small child canopying over the street (top left).  

     The entire main street was filled with people dancing, playing, skateboarding, and just hanging out.  The only thing missing was cars. Our entire time in San Jose we found the lack of smog and traffic jams incredible.  It turns out that the City of San Jose has driving bans: Only cars whose license plates end in certain numbers can drive on any given day.  It seemed to me like kind of a heavy handed way of dealing with the problem, but in a city of millions, most we saw were taking public transportation, so I guess it worked.

     San Jose is also home to some pretty cool sculptures and architecture, which we saw during our solo walking tour, but we found that one day in the city was enough, and after one day, headed for the beach.
     To get there, however, we had to take a bus.

 
     They don't make buses in Costa Rica to fit a 6'8" David (to be fair, I don't think they do in the USA either), and to make matters worse, the bus broke down twice.  While this was very frustrating, I'd like to point out that in Guate, if a bus breaks down only twice and each break down costs less than 15 minutes, that's a great bus ride. 
     After about 5 hours on bus, we found ourselves in the town of Quepos on the south west coast of Costa Rica, near the national park of Manuel Antonio.  Once again, after traveling in buses all day, we were far to tired to go out on the town (also, it was Monday), so we hit the sack pretty early.  After a less than comfortable night's sleep (read, horribly hot and humid without air conditioning) we decided to pack up and head for the rain forest.  We got a very nice room right with air conditioning next to Manuel Antonio for decently cheap due to the fact that huge resorts had all moved in up the hill and destroyed these hotels' business, and headed for the park.  Although the guides were decently expensive ($20 a person) we decided to get one because, after all, this was one of the reasons I wanted to go to Costa Rica.  The guide turned out to be a great decision.  He had all sorts of information on the different species of the rain forest,  and was incredibly good at finding sloths hiding in the trees.  For example, can you spot the sloth hiding in the trees in this picture?

He did. 

    We were able to find some sloths on the trails though...

Another example of the guide's vision.  This crab was seen through a telescope and zoomed in on the camera.

I really liked the sloths.

  

     We then made it to one of the two beaches in this national park and found it crawling with monkeys.  The monkeys were bold enough to come right up and steal people's lunches as they went for a swim!  I didn't think places like this existed, but here it was.  It was truly an awesome place.

      

     After the park, we went to the beach to relax, but, being a couple of landlocked Minnesota boys, we found the prospect of playing in the surf much more entertaining than sleeping on the beach.  The sun set and we hiked up a mountain side to find a restaurant where we had some of the best seafood we've ever had.  After dinner we headed back down the mountain side only to find that all the good bars and places to hang out were back at the top of the mountain.  After much discussion, we decided that we were too tired from all of the activity of the day to hike back up, so once again we called it an early night.

     We got up decently early (early to bed, early to rise) and made our way towards Jacó, a surfer town just north up the coast from us.  Based on some advice we got the first day, we headed to a hostel called "papas and burgers."  It was lucky that we found it too, because the first hotel we checked out turned out to be where all of the prostitutes take their clients, so I doubt that we'd have had a very peaceful night's sleep.  Now, on our first day in the country we were also told that Wednesday night at a bar called "the backyard" was the best night of parties in the entire area, but this recommendation came with a warning.  Apparently, because it was ladies night, the bar would be full with "mad bitches."  We wondered all week why there would be dogs in the bar, and even more pressing, why they would be so angry.  Every time we discussed this troubling warning we became more and more intrigued, and our desire to actually make it to a bar one night of the trip grew.  To this end, we limited beach time and activities, so as to conserve energy (also, it rained most of the day).  

     Finally the night came and we made our way to the backyard.  Much to our relief there was not one dog in the entire establishment.  What's more, the majority of the people there seemed to be in good spirits, not one looked mad!  That being said, after the rave review, we found The Backyard to be nothing really special.  I commented to Dave that it is just like Sal's bar except in Costa Rica and with far more prostitutes.  Some people from South Africa heard us say that and commented that it is just like a bar in their home town too, but with far less prostitutes.  A gentleman from England said the same, as did an Aussie.  It turns out that bars and parties are the same just about everywhere, and it has more to do with the people you're with than the inherent "fun" of a bar, "mad bitches" or not.  We did have a fun night though, and we are now able to say that we experienced the nightlife of Costa Rica, if only for one night.

    The next day, our last full day in Costa Rica, we were able to experience another almost unavoidable Costa Rican happening: horrible horrible sunburn.  I guess that's what happens when you forget your sunscreen and spend multiple hours on the beach.  The only thing I have going for me is that the parts not covered by my shirt already had a good base, so the blistering and peeling was limited to the concealed parts of my body, reducing the embarrassment a little.  I can only imagine what Dave's virgin Minnesota skin is going through...

     Having experienced all that we had hoped for in Costa Rica, we caught a bus back to San Jose for the last night.  The next morning, we got up bright and early to fly back to our respective countries, and I bid farewell to Dave and Costa Rica.  It was really a vacation to remember.

The plane ride to Guatemala went as expected, and my bus ride was far better than I had hoped for: It only broke down twice!