La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo

Tomorrow the La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo (LAGDP) will be two years old. About 744 consecutive daily photographs and descriptive narratives of a Spanish Colonial Town embedded between coffee plantations, flower farms and volcanoes.

As a pre-celebration party, I am making available another desktop wallpaper for you computer (1600×1200 pixels) of a set of bougainvilleas colors. Like always, by clicking the photo above you will be presented with a high resolution image that you can use as a desktop wallpaper. If you are interested in the other wallpapers available for download, please, browse the wallpaper category.

Second Anniversary Side Note: By the way, I forgot to tell you that La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo (LAGDP) will be celebrating its second anniversary (731 consecutive days of entries) on May 1st. I hope you come to celebrate this amazing milestone (at least for me).

If I had been told when I was a little kid that they would “grow” and “harvest” fish in a farm around La Antigua Guatemala, I would have said, “Get out of here!”

Surely enough, in the picture above you can see the fish farmer’s harvest being sold at the Farmers’ Fair in La Antigua Guatemala.

Now, I still wonder though, what do the fish trees look like, do you know?

Second Anniversary Side Note: By the way, I forgot to tell you that La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo (LAGDP) will be celebrating its second anniversary (731 consecutive days of entries) on May 1st.

The Departamento of Sacatepéquez (State or Province), where La Antigua Guatemala is located and to which is the Department’s Capital, is very dynamic and project-oriented State. Perhaps the fact the La Antigua Guatemala is the NGO’s capital of the world has something to do with it.

Anyhow, this is the most recent project I have come across. Tres Volcanes Honey Project (do you know the name of the three volcanoes?) based out of San Miguel Escobar, is trying to offer a sweet deal to the communities it buys honey from by creating new and innovative products out the labor of the bees.

A really sweet idea, don’t you think so? I hope it spreads!

Can you guess what’s in the big bag?

The fresh produce available at the Farmers’ Fair and at the market are so irresistible. As you can see in the picture above, many people took advantage of the produce available at the fair instead of going all the way to el mercado.

On my way to work I came across this small farmers’ fair at the Alameda of El Calvario Church. This fair is promoted by the Ministerio de Agricultura, Ganaderia y Alimentación (The Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Alimentation). Come back tomorrow for a closer look at the offerings.

It is so good to have friends who are artists; they keep you cultivated and entertained. Such is the case of Rodolfo de León, alias “Fofo” to his friends, whom I met many years ago. Along those years, I have witnessed many of his artistic manifestations; always something new and fresh.

This season, Fofo and his girlfriend Larraitz have put together a body puppet show with a set of characters that are amazing. By just using their hands, feet and knees plus a harmonious wardrobe, they were able to create a body puppets performance which is innovative, stimulating and fun.

I thank Fofo, Larraitz, Manuel Morillo and Casa del Mango for the invitation to see a pre-screening of the body puppets presentation, now being shown in several venues in La Antigua Guatemala.

Can you make out the details of the picture above, can you come up with story for the photo?

One of the benefits of living in a third world country is that you don’t need to read Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Pedro Páramo or El Señor Presidente (The President) to learn about magical realism. No, no, no, we don’t need literature to learn the subtleties of magical realism: we live it everyday!

Las week, in zone 6 in Guatemala City, a police station received a radio transmission by two police officers reporting that their patrol car was stolen. “Nos robaron la patrulla, cambio” (Our patrol vehicle was stolen, over). It seems like our two distinct police officers stopped in front of a cevichería (ceviche restaurant) to calm down the weekend hangover aftershocks and while they were enjoying a shrimp ceviche and a couple of beers during their shift, their patrol unit got stolen. They parked their police patrol vehicle with the windows down and the keys on the ignition switch. They figured who in their right mind or living in the “real” reality would steal a police patrol vehicle, right? Surely, their innocence can not be excuse since as police officers, they may experience magical realism quite frequently.

A famous Latin American writer, whose name I can not recall at this moment, said that if Kafka had lived in Latin America, he surely would had been a clerk all of his life. This was said in reference to Kafka’s fantastic imagination, which it would have been kept in checked by the ordinary magical realism events in Latin America.

What do you think?

Today’s is Earth Day and to celebrate it, I am posting a desktop wallpaper photo for your computer which shows the harmony between the human habitat and nature. Wow, what a pompous description for an old-looking wall and the bougainvilleas and jacaranda trees that crown it.

Today’s entry is the desktop wallpaper number 9 which I made available to all of you. You can browse the Wallpaper category to see the other 8 photos.

I hope you like it!

Please be kind to Earth today and everyday.

L-R: Ronald Flores, Ana María Rodas, Javier Payeras, Julio Serrano, Francisco Alejandro Méndez

As I have shared with you, last Saturday I went to listen to the Guatemalan writers of the post-war in a dialogue they held about Contemporary Central American Literature. Those of us who attended were lucky enough to listen to the opinions and positions of Francisco Alejandro Méndez, Julio Serrano, Javier Payeras, Ana María Rodas, Ronald Flores, Allan Mills and Juan Pablo Dardón. Except for Ana María Rodas (the lady in the picture above) who belong to writers’ generation of 1960-1970, all the other Guatemalan writers and poets belong to the post-war period.

The Guatemalan civil war began after a successful overthrow of the freely-elected Guatemalan government by the CIA coup “Operantion PBSUCCESS” in 1954. The Peace Accords were signed by the end of December 1996, after the death and disappearance of more 200,000 people.

So, in the forum on Saturday there were two generations of Guatemalan writers, each with its own style and specific issues to write about. Ana María Rodas and Mario Roberto Morales belong to the war years and thus they find it very difficult to understand the very prolific post-war generation and the subject-matter the choose to write about.

I like reading both generations of writers, but I most definitely identify with the post-war writers and their disenchantment with the right and left wings and the war and its aftermath as a whole. Anyway, I do not want to bore you with all the details of the dialogue between the writers. Suffice it to say, it was a great evening and the dialogue continue afterwards in a local restaurant in Central Park. As to not bore you with all this dry writing, I prepared a mini photographic chronicle. If you click at the photos below, you can get more details and background information from the titles of the photos.

If you guys want me to write a little review about some of the Guatemalan writers of the post-war period and all their incredible novels and poetry, please, let me know. I will be more than happy to comply. In the mean time, if you can read Spanish, please visit the blog of Allan Mills to get an literary overview of the night.

Photographic Chronicle of the Diálogo sobre Literatura Centroamericana Contemporánea

Guatemalan mixtas (mixed) are basically hot dogs which come with tortillas instead of a bun. Simple and great tasting. There are other kind of mixtas (which really just means mixed) like beers, like ceviches, et-cetera. You get the point, right.

With this very simple dish we close yet another mini Guatemalan food series. Now you can bring back the scale.

Since Manolo needs to improve his tortilla making skills, I am posting this image to help him in the process. Even Carmen may benefit from these lessons!

Bohemian Literary Side Note:
Since I talking about Manolo, might as well invite him for a bohemian night with the writers that will appear in the 17:30 hrs activity by the name of Diálogo sobre Literatura Centroamericana Contemporánea as shown in the activity program below. For those who can read Spanish you can click the thumbnail below to see an enlarge version of the activity program for the Día Internacional del Libro y los Derechos de Autor (International Book Day and Copyrights).

It looks like today will be a very busy day and night with a heavy workload, literature, writers, friends, bohemian talks, mixtas (both kinds!) and book buying. If Manolo and Carmen can make on time, it will be my pleasure to invite them both the first round of mixtas. Oh how I wish you were here!

Like always click the thumbnail to see an enlarge version.

There are some Guatemalan fruits that are impossible to translate into English; jocotes is one of them. Jocotes is the little round fruit that looks like cherry tomatoes in the image above.

Can anybody help translating what jocotes are and what could be a close equivalent?

The Jocote Translation Side Note Update: Thanks to Cindee for providing the following information about the fruit Guatemalans called jocotes.

Jocote or Ciruela Roja

Known in English as Red Mombin and Hog Plum, jocotes are tree fruits, produced by Spondias purpurea of the Cashew Family, which is native to tropical America. Often jocotes are eaten raw but Mexicans also like to mash them in water, add sugar, and drink the water like Kool-Aid. They are 1-2 inches (2.5-5 cm) long. Jocotes are usually reddish, but can come close to being yellow.

Ciruela, or Spanish Plum

Ciruela or Yellow Mombin, Spondias mombin. Sometimes known in English as Yellow Mombin, the Spanish name ciruela means “plum,” and these tree fruits look and taste a lot like northern plums. They are very closely related to the above jocotes, being in the same plant family and genus. They are Spondias mombin. Note the large, white, very hard, boxy seed. After growing on leafless tree limbs for months, the fruits ripen at the end of the dry season, in June or so. They are good raw and also make tasty preserves

Granizadas is the Guatemalan Spanish word for shaved ice snacks. Basically, you take shaved or crushed ice and add any combination of the following: syrups, fruits, condensed milk, cooked fruits and their syrups, tamarind, camote (sweet potatoes), nance (sweet yellow cherry), just to name a few of the possible ingredients for the sweet granizadas; you add pepitoria molida (ground pumpkin seeds), salt and lime-lemon juice for the salty granizadas.

In the picture above, you get two see a sweet and salty granizada. The sweet granizada has several syrups and cooked camote with its syrup as toppings.

As you begin to see, the combination of pepitoria molida, salt, ground red hot chili peppers and lemon juice is used very often in many Guatemalan snacks.

Granizadas is all the Spanish term for hailstorm.

In 2006 I showed a colorful street vendor cart of granizadas, can you tell me what was the message written on the front of the granizadas cart? The first person who post when and what does it says in the cart, wins a 10,000 LACA miles.

Since you guys are having the cravings for Guatemalan fresh fruit snacks, I decided to show you the current options. All you need to add is pepitoria molida (ground pumpkin seeds), salt, lemon juice and ground chili peppers (cobanero, that’s what we have today). I believe Mario (MO) described the eating process of fresh fruit from a plastic bag pretty well… he really made my mouth water by his description; I had to have seconds.