Ending in Antigua

After leaving the heat in Livingston, I made my way down the eastern border of Guatemala towards Antigua. It was a good place to end my time and to ready myself for the transition back to life in the States. I had been in Antigua before, but had not ever really had the time to enjoy it or take in the more touristy spots. There are so many incredible ruins of old churches, monasteries, schools, etc., and I spent a couple days taking in the most spectacular of them. Tina joined me a day after I arrived. 

The day before she met up with me, though, I headed over to a huge artisan's market where you can buy textiles, woodwork, coffee, jewelry, and all kinds of other souvenirs. They have a back garden, where I saw this:

It was an altar to San Simon or Maximon (the 'x' in Mayan languages makes a 'sh' sound), a mix between a Mayan deity and a traditional Catholic saint, and another example of religious syncretism. He can only be seen in a few communities in Guatemala, and I was surprised to see 

him in Antigua. The Catholic Church does not recognize him as a saint partly because of his questionable origins, but partly because you can pray to him for both good and bad to happen, so while you can pray for health or success, you can also pray that your enemy will break his leg or lose his job, etc. In the communities that have a San Simon, he travels from house to house every couple of years, staying as long as ten years in one family's home. People offer money, candles, cigars, and liquor to San Simon, all of which his host family keeps to live off of. It's not such a problem for families that have him for just a year or two, but for the families that have him for up to ten years, alcoholism and difficulty reentering the workforce are common.

When Tina joined me the next day, we headed out for two of the more popular ruin sites, the San Jeronimo school and the church of San Francisco. The school was built in 1739 and has incredible gardens, and beautiful masonry and crumbling walls. It is often used for outdoor concerts, and there were signs posted at the entrance with fees for family and wedding photos, all of which is understandable. See for yourself.

After the school, we headed over to the church of San Francisco. It is one of the oldest and most extensive set of ruins in the city. Built in 1579, it once included a school, a hospital, music rooms, a printing press, and a monastery. Its nave had beautiful mouldings and sculptures, but they were destroyed by earthquakes and never restored. Central America's first saint, Hermano Pedro de Betancourt, canonized in 2002 by John Paul II and credited with powers of "miraculous intervention", is buried here. The ruins are spectacular, but they are also interspersed by large lawns and sitting areas where people can picnic and relax.

Before we entered, we saw this large cross to the side of the sanctuary that includes many elements of the Passion:

Then we entered the ruins.

That night was our last official night in Guatemala before spending the next day in Guatemala City waiting for our flight, so we treated ourselves to a nice dinner.

The next day, before leaving for the City, I went to visit the ruins of a convent called Las Capuchinas (Tina had seen them during an earlier visit to Antigua). The Capuchin nuns are still a bit of a mystery, and their ruins are some of the least understood in Antigua. They came from Spain and formed the fourth convent in the city in 1726. It was an incredibly rigorous order, its number limited to 25 women who slept on wooden beds with straw pillows with almost no contact with the outside world - food was passed to them using a turntable and they spoke to outsiders through a grille. The ruins are quite extensive and very beautiful.

Above is the nave. Below is the central courtyard.

Down some stairs, there was this model of a dead nun laid out. The combination of the dark stairs and the unprefaced dead nun was a bit creepy.

This is an older version of something we saw all over the country, especially in the smaller villages where running water in the home is rare. It is a public or common area for doing laundry.

Above is the view looking into one of the nun's cells. Below is the courtyard that held all the cells. There were 18 cells surrounding this court, though the convent held 25 nuns at a time, so I'm not sure where the other seven women lived. Below the picture of the courtyard is a picture of one of the cells reconstructed as they think the nuns lived.