AntiguaDailyPhoto.Com

The fountains around the Plaza Mayor provide the perfect sound track for spending a relax time sitting on a bench and watching the world go by… especially during the lazy afternoons.

Can you hear the water falling and murmurs of the people near-by?

Believe it or not, after 500 years, the Plaza Mayor, also known as Parque Central, still is the most popular venue to meet with friends in La Antigua Guatemala.

While I had my shoes shined, I watched this group of friends laughing and having a good time until I realized that the friendly gathering looked like the Guatemalan version of the sitcom Friends. Only then, I decided to capture a few laughs and smiles and I was so lucky because at the very moment another friend showed up and one of the girls was pointing and shouting something to her as she approached them.

Split a life in two; then in decades; the decades in years; the years in days and so on. Life is just a string of fleeting moments; like a necklace of beads strung together. Life is good the moment one begins appreciating the brief instants that occur everyday; that bring happiness, peace or perhaps a tear. Short lapses of time like a sunset can bring good feelings if one is ready to accept them. Break often to smell the coffee, to hear the fountain, to appreciate the falling leaves; a passing cloud over a lit park.

If we were the least as Funes the Memorious, we could perceive everything in full detail and remember it all. If we were the least as Funes el memorioso, we could feel, shiver really, with the form of a constantly changing flame. Instead, most us have poor memory like René from the film Wintersleepers, so we need take advantage of every opportunity to capture those distant instants. Life pues!

That’s what I do; I take pictures of the quotidian life of La Antigua Guatemala to share with you. In the process, I focus on the fleeting moments and sometimes I am able to capture some of them. Like René, one picture at a time I build my life puzzle, my memory, my good life.

To close this incoherent entry, I would like to share with you this tender and thought-provoking melody by Rockdrigo González entitled Distante instante. I would love to hear your impressions, your pondering, your feelings pues.

It was only last week that I told you that often during December or the Christmas season, there are several free concerts around La Antigua Guatemala. La Antigua Guatemala’s cathedral is use as backdrop for concerts and recitals. By looking at the larger version of that day’s photo one can agree at the excellent choice.

Well, it seems like the Palacio de los Capitanes building is also often used as backdrop for concerts and recitals. Remember for World Aids Day, Palacio de los Capitanes was used as backdrop for the marimba concert.

Wow, I wonder how many free concerts and recitals there have been already since December 1. I love all the Free Culture available in La Antigua Guatemala year round, don’t you?

I taped a little clip of the Christmas Carol of this afternoon. Enjoy!

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These electricians are working hard against the clock since they have to install over 225,000 lights over the trees of La Antigua’s Central Park before Sunday’s evening when the inauguration of the Christmas lights will take place.

The Christmas lights will illuminate the Parque Central during the Navidad season. For extra bonus points, what date is Christmas season over in La Antigua Guatemala?

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On my way to lunch I caught all the Central Park photographers taking a break from the their photo-taking profession. Tourism has been slow and catching the majority of the photographers from Central Park taking shelter from the mid-day sun under the shadow of a tree is a good indication that things are slow.

These photographers charge Q15/$1.75 per photo. They live mostly from national and regional tourism. Next time you come to La Antigua Guatemala, have your photo taken by one of these photographers and make sure you take a photo of the photographer as well so you can keep both images together as confirmation of how simple it is to help others earn a honest and decent living.

Notes on Google’s Safe Browsing Advisory Monopoly: Two nights ago my hosting company suffered a “DNS poison attack” on their DNS servers, which basically means that DNS server has received such non-authentic data and caches it for future performance increase, it is considered poisoned, supplying the non-authentic data to the clients of the server.

In plain English it means that when you were supposed to be taken to AntiguaDailyPhoto.Com files hosted in one their computers (servers), you instead were redirected to a site in China, listed as suspicious. The telephone equivalent would be, you dial your friend Manolo in Toronto but Christian in Zimbabwe answers your call; you try to dial several times and each time Christian responds how many viagra pills are you going to order?

The actual files that make up AntiguaDailyPhoto.Com were never compromised and AntiguaDailyPhoto never hosted malware. It was simply an incident of URL redirection.

Anyhow, the whole incident lasted less than a couple of hours, but sufficient time for Google to put a safe browsing warning for AntiguaDailyPhoto. I have contacted Google Webmaster Tools several times requesting that the warning be removed, but so far they have not responded and I am not sure how long it would be before they remove the warning. I have verified through independent web scanning services like McAfee SiteAdvisor, Unmask Parasites and Stopbadware.org; all of them come back with a green flag for AntiguaDailyPhoto.

Here I see the problem with ONE COMPANY having too much control, in this case Google, which puts a safety warning for an incident that lasted less than two hours and they can take several days if not weeks to remove the warning. Without third party verification or control, Google can take as long as they please to remove a red flag. Monopolies are never good. From this point forward, I will make sure to use as many search engines and services as possible. I will not give Google total control over my tiny web parcel. Let a lesson be learnt here!

Here are the elements of a weekend photo of LAG on a weekend afternoon:

The Bride and Groom
The SUV
The locals (whatever that means)
The tourists
The hippies
The old cars
The motorcycle
The ice cream cart
…
Loteria! Every picture you take from anywhere around el parque central (is it called that way in LAG?) plays like a game of Loteria (sometimes even with El Borracho thrown in the mix).

Guatemala is a land of contrasts, and in that sense, La Antigua is where these contrasts are more visible. The “metropoli” of Central America keeps reinventing itself century after century and I wonder if I would recognize her as that hangout for my middle class youth, that “centre of the universe” around which my life seems to orbit. What it is still true, is that LAG is the destination of many middle class “ladinos”, like me in other times and every time I visit the motherland, for their weekend afternoons. The capital of the kingdom, full of criollismo and paternalism. With reminders of the power of a class that felt trapped between their European ancestors (that treated them like second class citizens) and the local natives, who were trying to protect their identity from the violent conquest and subsequent colonization. That is the charm of La Antigua, the hometown of Francisco de Fuentes y Guzman chronicler of the kingdom. It can be said, that it is the city where the idea of Guatemala, as a country, as a nation was born. That experiment on eternal feudalism where I left my navel. Don’t let the cobblestone streets and the clay roof tiles fool you, La Antigua is a stronghold, a fortress, a survivor of a time where everyone was still in their place within the colonial social structure. Reborn after earthquakes and exodus as a souvenir a monument to us, ladinos & criollos.

¡Viva La Muy Noble y Muy Leal, Ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala!
¡Capital del Reyno de Goathemala!

text and photo by Manolo Romero Escobar

About Guest Contributor: Manolo Romero Escobar is a Guatemalan ex-patriate that calls Canada his godmotherland. Self-exiled and retired blogger is enamoured with the art of science, particularly psychological research and methodology.

Last night I talked to my lovely niece who just turned eleven recently and we spoke about being 11-year old now and before (in my life) and the differences. I also had a conversation with my dear sister about how with the passage of time we forget names, we forget faces, we forget people and events.

I want to dedicate today’s photo to all the people and things that went before. Today, I will send some emails to old time friends or even make some calls to long forgotten friends. There’s no better time like today, right?

There are places i’ll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends i still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life i’ve loved them all… In My Life by The Beatles.

Normally, every photo at AntiguaDailyPhoto.Com comes with a caption, a narrative or even a story. Not always, the story is about the photo itself and almost never the narrative is the story behind the photo. Today’s an exception.

I went to one of the banks around Parque Central to do some mandados, errands, and when I was done, I went to get my shoes shined before heading back to the office. I found a nice spot with shade near the fountain of Las Sirenas, and began making small talk to the lustradores, shoe shinners, while one of them work hard. Then, I noticed the young woman above right across from where we were sitting taking photos of the shoe shinners and the indigenous women selling artesanías, handicrafts, on our side. She was timid and pulled her camera swiftly, took the photos and put it away before anyone can say cheese. Not extraordinary here; this happens dozens of times any given day in Central Park in and around La Antigua Guatemala. It was only until she picked up Nuestro Diario, Our Daily literally, the most sensationalist newspaper in Central America and the one with biggest distribution between Mexico and Colombia, that I decided to pull my own camera and record the extraordinary vista. I took my time since I am little more experienced at this photo taking business, you know, I captured perhaps six or seven different shots. You have probably seen some of them in the Antigua News Tweets. Oh I really like the feel and movement of this image for a number of reasons.

As I have said before, “Well, I don’t have enough words to describe the feeling or “puncture” I derive from this photograph as Roland Barthes calls it in his book Camera Lucida. The interesting part about photography is that we are all affected or tickled by different things. This photo might not do anything for you.” It punctures me dearly!

This warm light was the dry season. Although, I am sure we can get similar sunsets during the rainy season, I don’t think the quality of the light is as good as in the dry season.

However, even in the rainy season there are opportunities to get good contrast between the rich saturated colors of La Antigua Guatemala and the washed out skies like in the entry La Tienda de Doña Gavi Sign.

La Antigua Guatemala’s Central Park is the most often used stage around town for free culture events. In this particular case, the park served as stage for FICCUA VI; that’s the Festival of Central American Colleges of Culture and Art. For three days there were cultural and artistic manifestations in the Parque Central and with the Cathedral as backdrop.

In the picture above, you can appreciate a musical performance from Panama.

I don’t know how it happened, but I had lost this vista of the Jacaranda trees in bloom at La Antigua Guatemala’s Central Park among the other 15,000 photos of my fototeca (photo library). Shame on me!

With this image of the jacaranda trees adding the subtle violet color to Antigua Guatemala main plaza we wave goodbye to the jacaranda photos. Come on, enough is enough, you can only see so many jacaranda photos; right?

Have a wonderful weekend and please start making your bags if you don’t want to miss the Eternal Spring weather, the heart touching violet color of the jacaranda trees and the processions and decorations of the awesome Lent season in La Antigua Guatemala. If you are already in Antigua, don’t forget that tomorrow there will be the last FREE Jazz concert at the atrium of the Compañí­a de Jesús Ruins as part of the Festival Internacional de Jazz en Antigua Guatemala. The free jazz concert by Lalsax Quartet from Italy will start at 7 p.m. tomorrow, Saturday the 21st, 2009.

What better way to welcome the Spring Season, really, that with a free jazz concert at night?

What an interesting combination of colors and light temperatures can be achieved during the twilight zone in La Antigua Guatemala’s Central Park. Oh I can hear the intro and fade music of the twilight zone but it’s being played with a marimba and decorated with chirimilla accents and pre-Columbian drum beats; now this music really ads a mysterious mysticism to the twilight zone. Don’t you think so?

The winter weather in Antigua Guatemala has been wonderful: a little chilly, a little windy and a little warm, all in the same day; heck in the same hour sometimes. But, the winter weather in La Antigua Guatemala has been comfortable enough to entice strolling around town; especially around Antigua’s Central Park.

As you can see above, I was lucky enough to capture a group of young tourists as they listen to the guide explain and put in context the wonderful things filling their young eyes.

Of course, you know that you can always check the weather conditions, in real time, of Antigua Guatemala if you scroll down a little to almost the end of the second side bar.

On the same side bar, you will find the Premium sponsors of La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo. Please, if you get a chance, go check them out and if you can, please use their services next time you come to La Antigua Guatemala. The premium sponsors are making it possible for me to continue providing and maintaining the daily updates. Also, thanks to their support, next week I will start using a better camera so I can bring you even better photos. So, please, go check their services as soon as you can and please let them know you learnt about them in La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo.

About a month ago I reported that La Antigua Guatemala had become the first digital city in Central America, but I did not get a chance to try out the free public wifi zone available in Antigua’s Main Plaza until now.

Thanks to the iPod Touch I received as birthday present from my sisters, I walked into La Antigua Guatemala’s Plaza Mayor, also known simply as Parque Central, to verify the wireless public Internet access and its speed. I am happy to report that when the wifi zone works, its speed is very good: average 480 Kbits/s and Maximum speed of 692 Kbits/sec. A quick glance at the DNS servers from the wifi access points show the service is provided by Telgua, Guatemala’s telephone land lines monopoly.

I promise to a series about Guatemalan monopolies, if enough people request it.

Below you can see the screen captures taken with the iPod Touch.

Public WiFi Zone Speed

Public WiFi Zone Settings