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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.