With the help of a little tripod and an out of focus shot, you can turn even the most banal and commercial Christmas tree into an awesome Christmas card. I hope you like it even though it is not to easily distinguishable as a Christmas tree.
Christmas’ Eve or Noche Buena in La Antigua Guatemala is celebrated by staying up all night burning firecracker, eating tamales or turkey and drinking real fruit punch or hot real chocolate, visiting family, friend and neighbors for the respective abrazo de Noche Buena and buenos deseos (Christmas hug and wishes); many even go to midnight mass. At midnight the presents under the Christmas tree, around the nacimiento (nativity scene), are opened and everyone laughs and hugs indiscriminately everyone around. These celebrations rate the highest on nostalgic memory scale; everyone living abroad wishes to be in Guatemala for this season and for this night in particular.
Well, what do you know, even Santa Claus pays a visit to the illuminated Central Park. LAGDP’s Santa Claus lives in Motley, Minnesota and she paid a visit earlier in December as a response to the entry where I requested support for this web site through the Amazon Wish List that I maintain for La Antigua Guatemala Daily Photo. Carolyn was kind enough to wear a red fluffy dress and bring the following presents: a mini tripod, a book on Wordpress and a set of rechargeable batteries and charger.
La Antigua Guatemala’s Central Park gets a light dress for the Christmas season. If you remember some of the photos from last year, like Tree branches of Fire or Lit Branches at Central Park, you would know that taking photos of the illuminated park is quite difficult since the resulting photos hardly capture the magical atmosphere of the trees with thousands of Christmas lights. I promised I have tried my best. This year, I have a few more takes on this gorgeous light dress for the La Antigua Guatemala’s Parque Central.
Right now, the going price for tortillas is 6 tortillas per one quetzal (Q1 = US$0.13). This fact brings me to another interesting aspect about tortilla selling in Guatemala: tortillas are sold by units and not by weight, which means some tortillas could be tiny or really thin or worse yet use maseca flour in the mix. 🙁
Well, for starters you need ‘real’ nixtamalized maize dough (nothing of the maseca flour that Manolo uses), a ‘real’ comal (baked clay griddle) and you need to use ‘real’ leña (wood logs, quite possibly pine). After that, you need a good pair of hand to tortear (hit into shape) a real looking tortilla. You don’t need no sticking mold to shape your tortillas ma’am. 😉
Well, chiles rellenos are not just a Christmas seasonal food since they are available everyday, 24×7 in Guatemala. Last year I described Guatemalan chiles rellenos like this:
But like in anything else in life, something good emerged from such a tragic history. Fried plantains, rellenitos (fried plantain mass filled with black beans), atol de platano (plantain-based hot and thick drink) and even the wrappings of traditional Guatemalan tamal came from the banana trees. Man, I could on and on talking about bananas recipes and dishes in Guatemala like Bubba did in Forest Gump about shrimp.
Guatemalan mole is very similar to mole poblano, which is a chocolate and chili based sauce (over simplification of the ingredients). One big difference is that mole poblano is a meal with chicken or turkey, while Guatemalan mole is a dessert of plantains ladled with chocolate sauce or mole for short. Bon appetite!
This guy is the self-proclaimed King of the Buñuelos of La Antigua Guatemala. After making such claim, he turned towards the competition and asked, “Isn’t true that I am El Rey?” to which the other vendors just nodded. Last year on December 6th, 2006 there was a picture of his fair food stand.
By the way, although I have not mentioned it yet, every night as I write the daily entry I can hear the bombas (bombs) firecracker, the cohetes (firecrackers) being burnt, the church bells tolling, the canchinflines (whistle) firecracker and all kinds of unknown (to me) firecracker being burnt and creating a loud bang which I can hear as echoes through the far away streets. In additions to the smells and scents, the Christmas season in Guatemala has a soundtrack of its own.
Guatemalan torrejas is what happens when you mix a good sampling of Guatemalan sweet bread known as molletes; stuff it with manjar …
In La Antigua Guatemala, religious celebrations draw together all kinds of heterogeneous people and the feast day of Virgin of Guadalupe is no exception. In the day of La Virgen de Guadalupe, Our Lady of Guadalupe, you can find gringa mamas, indigenous mamas, ladino mamas and white mamas all taking their children dressed with indigenous clothes to visit the altar of La Virgen Morena. In many cases you have grandmas and the whole family taking part of the visit to Virgin of Guadalupe inside Iglesia de la Merced.
One important aspect to highlight about this series about the library is the fact that the guts of the library are contemporary industrial furnishing inside a colonial 16th century building and yet there is harmony between the anachronistic elements.
So it took us about a week to finally enter the Multimedia zone at the Compañía de Jesús Library, as Lessie suggested. Now I would be extremely happy if the film section had the complete works of Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Emir Kusturica for starters. Or better yet, I would be in film-heaven if they only had the 1001 movies you must see before you die. Sometimes I wish I was a Slacker.
