AntiguaDailyPhoto.Com

There are several jacaranda trees in Parque Central which make a gorgeous display of purple or violet during February and March when they are in bloom. I will try to get a panoramic shot so you can see the jacaranda trees in bloon at Central Park.

Well, perhaps it is the fact that gorgeous pale violet colors of the jacarandas trees are more obvious in February, just in time for the beginning of the Lent season in which one starts to see doors and windows adorned with purple or violet bands. Purple is the official color of the Lent season; do you know why?

Jacaranda trees can be found all over town as well. I will be in the look out for other jacaranda trees around town. Stay tune!

Just yesterday I was mentioning how La Antigua Guatemala is often used as a backdrop for films, concerts, paintings, photos, festivals, religious rituals, and weddings. I forgot to mentioned that is often used a commercial studio set as well.

These pictures and video clip were taken during the shooting a national brand of popsicles at one of the corners of la Plaza Mayor (Main Plaza) during a chilly and windy morning. I felt sorry for the kids who were only wearing light t-shirts while I was wearing a warm jacket; the kids, however, were only interested in the popsicles and doing as many takes as possible since only then they got a chance to lick the popsicles.

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On October 1 Guatemala celebrates Día del niño translated Child’s Day or Children’s Day. I grabbed my camera and went to the Plaza Mayor (the Main Plaza) to see if I could captured some pictures to show you some happy faces. I am happy to report a mission accomplished and then some. I probably have about 20 good images with lots of smiling faces.

After I had finished taking pictures I sat a bench to enjoy a rainless moment in Parque Central with lots of really good vibes. I could almost say I had a happy instant and I am sure I must’ve smiled. I had my shoes shines and then a conversation with a couple and their daughter who came from Chimaltenango to compartir with la familia (to have a good time with the family). The father was a fellow park photographer from Chimaltenango and we obviously talked about the quick labs and the cost of park photographs costs in La Antigua Guatemala and Chimaltenango. I recommend a few places they must see and enjoy before they left Antigua Guatemala and said our good-byes. The couple look very similar to the parents in the main photo above.

Children came and went smiling, eating candy and ice cream. Some came with their parents, others came as part of a school activity yet others just wondered around with their friends. All in all, Parque Central was a good place to recharge the hope and optimism batteries.

Nevertheless, we should not forget, as my friend and colleague Luis Toribio said in his personal blog, the high levels of misery in which the children of Guatemala live. Guatemala is among the top countries in the world with malnutrition. There are many children who lack health services and education. Many children spend their days on the streets working instead of being in school as I mentioned in Antigua’s Child Labor back in May 2006. Let’s not forget… but for now let me savor the happy smiles around Parque Central!

When is Child’s Day celebrated in your neck of the woods?

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.

Often during December or the Christmas season, there are several free concerts around La Antigua Guatemala. For instance, the photo above was taken on December 11, the eve of Virgen de Guadalupe Celebrations and there is another concert programmed for December 12.

Often La Antigua Guatemala’s cathedral is use as backdrop for concerts and recitals. By looking at the larger version of today’s photo one can agree at the excellent choice.

I really like the dramatic façades of the spot illuminated churches and ruins around La Antigua Guatemala.

Can you tell me what are those white dots on the top right corner?

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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.

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?