Antigua

We stayed with Frank and Sarah, a mixed- anglo-american couple who have a spectacular traditional house on 7th Avenue in Antigua, right along the procession route.

Inside Sarah & Frank's

The house stretches along a central courtyard, with all of the rooms opening upon it. George and I stayed in "The Zoo," an upstairs room lined with large masks of large animals that had an unfortunately sloping ceiling that caused more closed-head injury than all of the caves combined.
We stayed there on Palm Sunday on our way to Atitlan, and then for four more nights over Good Friday through until Easter.
Frank, a lively 80-year-old had climbed on of the volcanoes the day before we came. Over the course of our climb to El Mirador, and other times during the trip, George had noted that whatever it was that we were doing, it wasn't nearly as bad as climbing the volcano, which was the hardest thing he'd ever done. It upset Frank that this time up the volcano he hadn'd reached the summit before his teenage grand-nieces. Other than this slight upset, Frank remained jubilant the entire time, aside from exchanging barbs with Sarah. Sarah's younger than Frank and lived a very interesting life prior to retiring in Antigua.

Antigua's cathedral

Frank's nephew, Chris, his wife Beverly, and their children, Hope and Miriam also stayed in the house. Chris works as a GP in the UK and Beverly works as a hospital chaplain and a minister who encourages her parishioners to not leave their brains at the nave. She jokingly admits to being borderline pagan and once preformed an exorcism of an ICU. Both their children read all the time and our discussions centered around books, religion, and medicine. They recommended a series of books by a bishop Spong, the most recent questions the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth.
The family's trip to Antigua stands as the most recent in a very long line of trips abroad (it's a terribly small island) to locales such as India, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka (where Hope received a massage from a "horrid man" who was way to strong that turned her off to the practice all-together.

Chris and Bev's family

Sarah's son Chad and his partner Eric and their precocious son Javier made the trip down from Atlanta for Semana Santa. Chad works for the CDC, where George hopes to go after working with the Pediatric AIDS Corps in Africa next year. They chatted about this a lot, and spoke of various higher-ups on a first name basis. Chad may even end up in Botswana next year. Eric works for Coca-Cola and shed some light on the afore-mentioned Cola War. He said that Pepsi's victory came about because of decisions made in Mexico City by Coke people that make more money than he does.
Javier's mother let him get adopted because, as he puts it, she "didn't have enough milk to give me." He celebrated his sixth birthday in Antigua on Maunday Thursday.
The party was quite extravagant, and it mainly seemed an excuse for the ex-pats to get together and drink. Javier and his best friend Ben ran around the house a few times, nearly beat me in checkers (I don't believe in just letting kids win), and then decided that they'd prefer swimming in the pool to listening to a lot of boring adults talk.
Speaking of which, I got cornered by a drunk gentleman, who after learning I was a doctor, began in broken English (despite my protestations that it would be easier for him and that I would understand him equally poorly in Spanish) began quizzing me about what combination of number and location of bullet wounds (indicated by jabs of his finger) would force me to conclude that I should make no efforts to save a patient. I found this somewhat awkward. Fortunately Regina's sister appeared and in her excellent and gringo-friendly Spanish explained that he had seen terrible things with the army during the civil war. Then he started into how I should date this particar young woman and I wandered off.

A procession at night

The spectacular processions draw the tourists like ourselves to Antigua. I can't claim to know much about the reasons behind them or the planning or execution of these religious demonstrations. I'll limit myself to describing what I saw.
The processions usually came in several parts. First came the roman centurions with spears and helmets and shields and breastplates. Occasionally they would take their authority seriously and direct people to stand back, or hold crowds at bay with crossed spears. In the largest procession in Antigua the Roman "officers" rode through the streets on horseback. Next would come the smaller floats - usually carried by 4 to 6 people and representing angels or people of importance (John the Baptist, Mary of Magdaline, etc).
Then came the incense. These people, like everyone in a procession, took their job very seriously. They had a direct mandate from heaven to fill the street with billowing clouds of incense. If you could see your hand in front of your face, you were insufficiently censing. From the roof of Frank and Sarah's house you could track the progress of the processions by looking for the rising clouds of incense, as if hundreds of people on fire for God were marching around the city. And this wasn't sweet, light stuff, either. The smell lay somewhere between burning rubber and charred meat. Towards the end I excused myself for this part of the processions, as apart from a billowing cloud of partially burnt hydrocarbons, there wasn't much to see, plus it got my airways reacting.
After the smoke cleared, the main floats came by, carried on the shoulders of 50 to 100 people. They were basically a huge rectangular wooden frame with intricate carvings on the side surmounted by Jesus, beautifully clothed in a richly embroidered robe with a gilt cross over his left shoulder looking as abjectly miserable as the carver couuld convey. Usually apostles or angels accompanied him. The largest of these must have been 75 feet long. Many had lights for illumination with other people pushing a generator behind. After Jesus came a float for Mary, usually slightly smaller and carried by women (only men can carry Jesus, of course). These were similarly elaborate depiciting Mary in her grief. Following Mary came the band (the largest processions had two bands) who played with widely varying ability a selection of dirge-like marches.The pictures really speak for themselves. These processions would wind their way through town, lasting over twelve hours in some cases.
The men who carried or accompanied the floats dressed, as near as I can tell, like Arabs with flowing purple robes and a head covering. They made these outfits for children, as well, with predictably precious results. After noon on Good Friday, they traded in the purple costumes (Sarah called them "purple people eaters") for solid black robes and Christ was then shown miserable and dead in a glass coffin, instead of miserable and bearing the cross. The women wore white or black dresses with a veil and usually heels, a fashion statement bordering on suicide on the cobblestoned streets of Antigua with a multi-ton Virgin on your shoulder.
Hundreds to thousands of people dressed like the carryers walked with the procession. They switched out carrying the floats every few blocks. George told me that they paid for the priviledge of carrying, and that those in the front paid the most. Accompaning the processions came the small army of street vendors selling sunglasses and noise makers, ice-cream, balloon animals, candy (cotton or otherwise), but strangely no incense.
We probably saw seven or eight processions, including one where the children carried the floats (it reminded me ofthe Children's Crusade, which along with Divx and getting involved in a land war in Asia, ranks among the worst ideas of all time).
Along the routes of the processions, homeowners and churches would lay out alfombras, or rugs, that the procession would passover and obliterate. As you can see in the pictures, these alfombras became quite elaborate - note the map of Central America composed entirely of vegitables. Another favorite had a recreation od the famous archway in Antigua complete with a working clock. Sarah planned our alfombras using exclusively recycled components. We did a St. Andrews cross in shredded chip bags, a cross made from cigarette cartons wrapped in aluminum foil, a free-form cross made from accordioned bumpersticker backs, a crosshair (I dont't think Sarah knew what it was) from ash and impatients, and a peace dove made from business cards. All of these, like all of the alfombras, got summarily destroyed by the processions (but some people circled back around to get the cigarette boxes).
During our time in Antigua we visited a lot of churches, both standing and in ruins. In many the vaults opened to the sky and the rubble lay scattered where it fell nearly 250 years ago. Apparently the wave of Evangelical Christianity broke somewhere short of Antigua. Either that or they wear the disguise of good Catholics well.
We also visited the market - a warren or stalls and corridors where you could buy anything from a pirated cam-copy of 300 to fish heads. It seemed to go on forever, but I sucessfully returned to the same place on two different days, so I knew it wasn't like Hogwarts.
Buying most things in Guatemala requires bargaining. I have had mixt results. On one hand, I dont't mind paying a bit more to support the local artisans and economy, on the other I detest getting ripped off. At one point I had a vendor offer to sell a length of cloth that he said others sold for 4000 quetzales (a beautiful tropical bird as well as the currency of Guatenala) for a mere 50 Q.
Generally I'd have a small comida tipica breakfast, a small lunch, and then we'd go somewhere for dinner. One night Chad and Erik took us to an Argentienian steak house. We got the lomito, which came as three pieces of meat in an aluminum serving tray, and nothing else - no veggies, no sides, no garnish. This was a Texan's idea of a steakhouse. You could visit the salad bar if you wanted, and they had an assortment of salsas on the table, ranging from a mild cilantro to something that would carry the label "Biohazardous" in the US, but clearly they focused on the meat and they did that well.