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I am not too fond of post cards shots, but I do get them too every once in a while. So, please tell me you will come back tomorrow; I promise to stay away from post card images. I promise!

POST CARDS UPDATE: I want to thank Gerard, Carolyn and Alan for having sent a post card from their home town as I requested in the Postscript entry. If you don’t know what I am talking about, please, do read the Postscript for details. But, in short, I am requesting a hand-written note on a post card, with stamps if at all possible, from all the visitors to La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo so I can learn a little about you and your hometown as well as to test the Guatemalan postal service. I encourage you to participate.

After all those years, all those rainy seasons, all those earthquakes this old wall still stands.

I can still hear the rumors of the doves’ chat while at their meeting in a late afternoon at Iglesia de La Merced in La Antigua Guatemala. Since La Merced Church is one of the landmarks for La Antigua is visited often by tourists and chosen by many Guatemalan and foreigners as their wedding chapel. I dedicate this entry to my good friend Manolo who has a special history with this church.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

Even though La Antigua Guatemala is a very photogenic town and that is virtually impossible to take a bad photo of this old town and its façades, sometimes, you find places that request that you refrain from taking pictures. Yet, if you ask nicely you are even allow to take photos in these places.

What do you think of this sign?

Sometimes bad things turn good. Guatemala’s postal service is so slow, expensive and unreliable that in Guatemala the concept of junk mail is non-existent. El Correo, Guatemala’s postal service, is a Canadian private company with the support of the Canadian Postal Service. El Correo is the result of the infamous recipe prescribed forced onto poor countries: Privatize everything! For better or worse that’s what we got.

El Correo is slow: to receive our telephone invoices printed and mailed in Guatemala City (La Nueva Guatemala) to our P.O. Box in the postal office of El Correo in La Antigua Guatemala can take up to three weeks or more.

El Correo is expensive: to mail a Revue magazine (about the size of the Readers’ Digest) to the U.S. or Canada can cost about Q70/US$9. Post cards about $1 and letters depends on the weight.

El Correo is unreliable: Once I sent myself some post cards from the postal office to our house, which is about 2 miles away, and they never arrived. El cartero, the postman, only delivers once a week or once every two weeks in the communities surrounding La Antigua Guatemala. Because of this we have now a post office box.

But, we get no junk mail. That alone is a fortune. Furthermore, El Correo is reliable for sending and receiving mail and post cards from abroad as long as you have a P.O. Box; even if it is expensive and slow. To send a letter to the U.S. or Canada can take up to three weeks; almost the same time it takes for the invoice mailed in GuateCity to reach La Antigua. El Correo can be inexpensive too, mostly inside Guatemala, since sending a normal letter or post card (20 grams or less) can cost only 20 centavos (Q.0.20/US$0.025). You can download their price list as a PDF file here. But please, don’t expect the tracking service to work, especially in Guatemala.

The Post Card Request Side Note: With the excuse of an experiment and that I would like to know about you and your home town I am requesting a post card from you. I would like to receive a simple hand-written note on a post card, with stamps if at all possible, showing a landmark from your city in my p.o. box. My mailing address is on the Contact the author page. Once you have mailed the post card, please come back the Contact the author page and let me know you have sent it. I will write back to you the moment I receive it and, perhaps, I will send you a hand-written post card in return (it all depends on the how many I receive and how expensive is to send it to you). Come on people, let me know you really like the work I put in this web site through a simple hand-written note on a post card. I will be waiting for your post card!

Credits: This photograph was my wife’s idea and it will appear in the Homenaje (tribute) column of Revista Recrearte in the October edition. Posdata (postscript) was written by Beatriz Zamora as a tribute to the postal service and the hand-written correspondence. It is a great read if you can understand Spanish.

While looking at this typical vista from La Antigua Guatemala, it occurred to me that we are unos mirones, it is sort of like voyeurs minus the sexual connotation, but a little more than observers. I take the shots and you are my accomplices in this venture. We enjoy the captures of the normal street life scenes from La Antigua Guatemala. We are some mirones; I do it behind the viewfinder and you do it in front of your monitor, thousands of miles away.

Anyhow, I really like the rhythm of the image above. I like all the different actions of the people, almost totally unaware of the camera. Honestly, I am very happy with this particular photograph. I feel it captures, very well, the essence of an usual street scene in La Antigua Guatemala. For those of you who have visited this colonial town, what is your opinion of this photograph?

Here is yet another textured old wall that can be used as wallpaper or desktop image in your computer. This image even includes the electric meter so you can keep a log of how much electricity you are using while in front of your computer.

Remember that you can also browse the Wallpapers category for another 7 images of La Antigua Guatemala that can be used as wallpaper or desktop images for your desktop PC, Mac or Linux workstation. To download the images as wallpapers, all you need to do is click the photos in this site and you will be taken to a larger-size image (1600í—1200) that you can download. The rest depends on the operating system you use.

I hope you enjoy them. Let me know either way.

Another one bites the dust. Yes, a Subway franchise just opened its doors in La Antigua Guatemala. Transnationals, they all want a piece of the cake. The cake is made up from all the tourists who come an go through the rotating doors of the tourist capital of northern Central America: La Antigua Guatemala.

I think this Subway franchise will have to use its second slogan: The Way A Sandwich Should Be because the Eat fresh may not work in a place like Antigua Guatemala, where most places serve REAL fresh food. With all of these transnational fast-food restaurants in La Antigua Guatemala, we still have to make a run for the border or drive to Guatemala City if we’d like to think outside the bun to enjoy a bean and cheese burrito.

By the way, I’ve been told that a lunch for two at Subway can set you back 2.5 times the daily minimum Guatemalan wage which is Q40/US$8. That is 2.5 times more expensive than any freshly Guatemalan cuisine meal [for two] in the many daily menu restaurants in town.

The La Antigua Guatemala city ordinances requires that the name of businesses be in Spanish. Some business have dual names like Rainbow Cafe which was forced to change to Café Arcoiris (although they kept Rainbow Cafe at a smaller size within the sign). Backpackers Hotel became Mochileros Hotel and so on. For the most part, I agree with this city ordinance because the La Antigua Guatemala is protected by national and international laws since it was declared by UNESCO as World Heritage. In other parts of Guatemala you can name your business in any language you want.

With the short background information above, would you say hotel Arizona is on the clear or not?

Okay, I don’t have much to say today. Or, rather there’s plenty to say, but not enough time to write it up. So, we take a break and pleasure in a soothing image of dog enjoying the late afternoon rain.

Best wishes for the upcoming weekend, everyone!

Thanks to our resourceful readers now we know exactly what shade of blue should the Guatemalan Flag should be. Manolo provided us with the exact Guatemalan Congress Act 104-97, available as a PDF download, which determines the color blue as ISCC-NBS 177. Then, Manolo, who felt like procrastinating, decided that ISCC-NBS 177 was not something most people could understand as Celestial Blue, so he gave us a web site address where we could look at the specific shade of blue. He went even futher, and submitted the HTML codes #4285B4 and #4997D0 for the Guatemalan flag blue. Xensen, took this information and came back with Pantone Matching System 297 and 298 and a link to get an idea of the color. So with all this information at our disposal, we now know what the official blue should be used in the Guatemalan Flag (like the photo below). But, like I said yesterday, “… Reality dictates that the Guatemalan flag can be blue, any blue really, with or without the emblem or coat of arms.”

The Mayan Vote Slideshow Side Note:
Back in July 17th, I described why Rigoberta Menchú’s candidacy was an impossible mission and listed some of the reasons. The New York Times published a recent slide show entitled The Mayan Vote, which presents 12 photographs by Eros Hoagland taken around Santiago Atitlán. The slide shows presents voters from this indigenous Tz’utujil village on the lake-shore of Lake Atitlán and why they voted against the only indigenous candidate for the Guatemalan presidency: Rigoberta Menchú. Like Manolo, you should procrastinate for the next 5 minutes and go see these 12 stunning photographs by Eros Hoagland at the New York Times web site. Come back afterwards and share with us here what these photos make you think and feel.

Well, who knows really. I know there’s legislation which describes to the T what a Guatemalan flag is supposed to look like, but like always in Guatemala, laws are beautiful abstract texts that live inside very dusty books. Reality dictates that the Guatemalan flag can be blue, any blue really, with or without the emblem or coat of arms.

However, I am glad the Guatemala’s/Central America’s Independence is celebrated in September because with all that different shades of blue in the million flags out there, it does compensate, a little, for all the white/gray skies in my photographs.

Could any Guatemalan come in and fill in the exact color blue that the Guatemalan flag should be? Any Guatemalan really, even gringos chapines or Canadians chapines.

Sometimes, you just feel like abandoning all reason and common sense in order to have bacon for breakfast. Sure, fresh fruits with honey are tasty and colorful, but it doesn’t compare with a ‘real’ antigüeño breakfast with refried black beans, eggs, charcoal-broiled tomatoes, bacon and a strong cup of the best coffee in the world.

See, even a fancy-looking Guatemalan breakfast includes the black beans and eggs. With today’s photo you have seen three different versions of the Guatemalan breakfast. For sure, you remember the Typical Guatemalan Breakfast at Fernando’s Kaffee and the fast-food version of the Typical Breakfast served at Pollo Campero. Would you have a Guatemalan breakfast tomorrow morning if you were given the opportunity?

The Guatemalan Writers Side Note:
For being such a tiny banana/coffee writers republic, Guatemala does produce and export quite a few good writers. I have mentioned some of them in this site like Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Pepe Milla, Ronald Flores. But, I have not done enough to talk about the great Guatemalan Literature written by its many excellent writers. Thanks to a comment by Coltrane_Lives about the possibility of his adopted Guatemalan daughter becoming a writer, I can point out a great Guatemalan novel written in English by Francisco Goldman, a respected journalist whose work appears often in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books and Harper’s (source: literaturaguatemalteca.org [ES]). “Francisco Goldman won accolades and international recognition with his extraordinary first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts… ” (source: amazon.com). Another great contemporary novel is Ruido de fondo (background noise) by my dear friend Javier Payeras. Javier Payeras is one of the clearest and loudest voices of this generation and his poetry and prose has won the recognition in and outside Guatemala. Ruido de fondo has been reissued by the Guatemala’s Government Editorial Cultura to be required reading for High School students in Guatemala. For those who are fluent in Spanish, I leave the link to one of my favorites poems by Payeras: Soledadbrother.

I guess you can have a breakfast like the one pictured above just about anywhere in the world since these tropical fruits are shipped everywhere now. This breakfast, however, was made from fresh fruits grown and harvested within an hour or so from La Antigua Guatemala; with luck the fruits were picked the day before.

Sometimes, you just want to have a fresh and healthy breakfast. This meal can be had at Rainbow Café on 7a avenida sur No. 8.

How to make a Guatemalan is a recipe that have eluded the brightest Guatemalan minds and puzzles many newly adopting parents of Guatemalan children. My friend Ale, if I may call her that, from Congo Days and Desde Kinshasa spends some her time writing about identity while she can tell the forest apart from the trees. She pointed us toward a French film which touches these issues; below her exact words:

While thinking about these issues I remembered a great film I saw almost two years ago that touched upon many of these subjects. Sandrine recommended it first and I loved the movie. It’s title in French is Va, vis et deviens (“Live and Become“) and it is a beautiful story that touches upon identity, race, religion, adoption, history and love from one child’s perspective.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but the title alone is hauntingly enough, for me, to make me want to see it. Live and become could be the short answer for those searching how to make a Guatemalan from a newly adopted baby. With that in mind, I leave you a short slide show and a video clip of the activities around the Guatemalan Independence Day.

I dedicate these photos, video and sounds to all my Guatemalan readers living abroad; may these vistas bring you home for a little while.

Last year Guatemalan Independence Day activities:

• Independence Day: Flags are everywhere
• Independence Day: Come on baby, light my fire
• Independence Day: Run Lola, Run
• Independence Day: What about the Peace Accords of 1996
• Independence Day: Slideshow