Too Much to Say!

Hello, friends and family! Hope all of you are well! Sorry for the long delay in posts...there wasn't much new happening last week, and then this weekend, a ton of stuff happened! So now there's much to say.

My days last week mostly involved going to Spanish school and walking around Antigua. One place I visited is the enormous San Francisco Church on the south side of Antigua. This church was built in the 1500s, so not only is it gigantic, but very very cool. One of the neat things about it is that San Hermano Pedro, the first saint from Antigua (and Guatemala, I believe) is buried there. So this is a majorly important place for Guatemalans, let alone Antigua. I was able to take some pictures, which are on my facebook. But here's a little preview:

Okay, so the outside is a bit worse for wear (this building somehow survived two rather significant earthquakes that turned several other buildings into ruins, though it didn't make it through without a few scratches...as you can tell from the right of the picture), but the inside is beautiful. Alas, I do not have any pictures of the inside. There were signs saying no picture taking, and I didn't want to be THAT foreigner. You can see more pictures from around the church here, and you will get some more of the history from those pictures too. I can't put it all here.

Although my week was pretty chill, the weekend was a bit fuller. Rosa Maria, my Spanish teacher, invited me to her parents' house on Saturday for lunch because it was her mom's birthday. So on Saturday, after doing some shopping in the market in Antigua and picking up a pumpkin pie, we took a bus to San Luis, a town right outside of Antigua. When we got off the bus, it was very obvious we were not in Antigua anymore. The town is much more impoverished. And I was probably the only white person there at the time. This became apparent to me when I was walking down the road with Rosa Maria, who, incidentally, is four inches shorter than ME, if you can believe it, and everyone who passed by was staring at us. Or, me, rather. Everyone was very nice, don't get me wrong. But it became apparent that not many foreigners frequent that town. Eventually we got to her parents house, and I was greeted by a small old lady, which is Rosa Maria's mom. As I found out, her parents live very simply: they have a small stove on the inside of their house, but they also have an outdoor kitchen where they do most of the cooking. They don't have any indoor plumbing, and their sink is outside. Her mom grows coffee in their yard as a way of making income, but her parents are getting to an age where they can't do much more hard labor than that. It was quite different from Antigua, but I was glad about that.

One of the best parts of Saturday was helping to prepare lunch. My teacher told me to go to the outside kitchen to help her mom make TORTILLAS. How cool is that? So I went outside, and there was her mom, so little, kneading away at the tortilla dough and pounding out tortilla after tortilla. It was mesmerizing how fast she could go. When I went up to her, she gave me a hunk of dough and showed me how to pound it flat to put on the hot stove top. So I did. Mine were a lot smaller and oddly-shaped than hers, but she said they were ok! At least they were edible. When we were done, there was a bowl of water by the stove for rinsing our hands. I didn't have a towel so I just wiped my wet hands, after rinsing, on my pants. Well, I was wearing black pants. You can probably guess what happened:

Yep. Floury-water left floury handprints on my pants. Super attractive, I know.

All in all, I was very glad my teacher invited me to her parents house in San Luis because I was able to see a side of Guatemala that I hadn't seen yet, but  had a strong desire to learn about. The house where I am doing my homestay, although extremely nice, is certainly not the way most Guatemalans live. So I felt honored that my teacher was so welcoming as to invite me not only to meet her family, but also to see the reality of life for many Guatemalans.  I was extremely humbled by their welcoming presence. I know that the United States is probably not the most favorite country of many people in Latin America, but they couldn't have been warmer to me. 

The next day, which was Sunday, was much quieter. I went to Mass at La Merced, which was packed, albeit beautiful. When I sat down I was admiring a magnificent carpet in the middle of the aisle. However, when I looked closer I gasped: it wasn't a carpet at all. It was colored sand. I had to take a picture:

It was absolutely amazing. Can you imagine how long that took? So so beautiful.

Later on in the day, I had a couple little adventures. First of all, I went to the store and bought laundry soap to hand wash my clothes. I was looking for liquid soap, but all I could see were different kinds of blocks of soap. Then I realized: that was the laundry soap! They come in packs of three, but if people just want one, then they take one out of the pack and pay for it. So that's what I did. When I told a friend and my parents about washing my clothes in my bathroom sink, they asked for some process pictures. I got one, which I think is probably plenty because it's really not that exciting:

You see that semi-cyllindrical, bluish-green thing on the left of the faucet? That's my laundry soap. I actually quite like it. It smells very good, and is much more practical for hand washing clothes.

The other kinda funny thing about Sunday has to do with Lazario, the parakeet. I had finally coaxed the bird into letting it sit on my finger without trying to bite me, and I wanted a picture of it. So here it is:

She's cute, huh?

So I was standing there, hanging out with the parakeet, taking a couple of pictures, and the next thing I know, she starts walking up my arm to sit on my shoulder. She had never done that before, so it caught me quite by surprise. Here's another picture:

The challenge, I found out, was getting her off my shoulder. I tried to put my finger up for her to step on, but she reached out to try and bite it. So that was a no go. So I bent down towards her perch, thinking she might step off my shoulder and onto the perch. Oh, no. No, she walked onto my back. So there I was, walking around with a parakeet on my back, trying not to stand all the way up because she might start biting my ear or my neck or something. And she can't fly, so if I stood up, she would just fall. I couldn't even coax her all the way down my arm with a banana. Eventually, I had to sit on the ground and bend all the way over to her food bowl, which she jumped onto. I was SO glad no one was home at the time because I looked ridiculous, walking around frantically with a parakeet chilling on my back, enjoying the ride. It was pretty special.

Well, I think that's all for today. There's more to say but I will write more tomorrow so as not to overwhelm everyone. Peace to all who read this!