Richard's Travel Blog

Lent, the 40 days leading up to Holy Week and Easter, is a very big deal here in Antigua. Hundreds of people, decorate their homes and business in purple. Particularly on Sundays, boys and men dress in purple robes.

For us, it’s about more photo ops. Last Sunday, there was another big procession around the streets of the city. Along the route and on many of the other cobblestone streets were very many what I call “Christian mandalas”. People carefully make these Christian designs on the street out of flowers, knowing the wind and certainly the processions will obliterate them shortly. The only effort to blunt the inevitability if impermanence is to sprinkle them with water.

Myung took those on our street, and there would have been more if her batteries hadn’t died. Some of the mandalas were really nice. I have never gotten an explanation why some where Roman costumes, except for the obvious connection between Romans and Jesus’ crucifixion.

Generally, it’s been another slow month in Lake Wobegon. It’s been especially quiet with Felix, the primary renter of our place, in England for the last month and a half. When he’s here, there is music all day and general hubbub, as he is an active kind of guy. He had a temporary job there for a lot more money than he can make here. He just got back yesterday. Meanwhile, his girlfriend and the American retiree are here. Annie is quiet and 1) has a day job six days a week, and 2) hangs out in her room when she’s at home and usually goes to her mother’s home on the weekend. Now that Felix is back, there’s already life around here again.

We have our usual routines. Myung putters around, maintaining the outside and doing housework. I chill out. We walk around town together once or twice a day. Going to the market as the excuse for that. One thing we did is go with Eduardo, Felix’s friend, and a few other guys to San Jose for a big fish and shrimp feed. San Jose is the biggest city and port on the west coast. It takes about an hour and a half to get there. Eduardo feels this is the best fish restaurant in Guatemala. He’s been here 14 years, and it was good. We had this big plate of mahi mahi (dorada, true dolphin) sushi and about four pounds of barbecued shrimp. It was not fancy. We bought the mariscos here…

… and ate them at this, coincidentally, Korean owned place.

Embarrassing for me was I fainted after lunch and four beers. I came to fine, but it was embarrassing. There are no pictures of that! You can see one from before lunch.

Really, there is not much else to say. Coming up in April will be a visa run to Tapachula, Mexico, unless we decide to just leave here. At present, my friend, Mary is talking about coming down to visit, along with our old friend Susan. That would be in June, so that’s something to stay for. Another reason to stay is our next major destination looks to be Ecuador. Though we’ve never been there, Ecuador’s residence and retirement visas offer very attractive incentives. We think we’ll check it out. Now, the tourist visas are for 6 months per calendar year. If we get there around the beginning of July we could piggyback tourist visas and see if we actually like it.

Speaking of retirement visas, I applied for Social Security and am a pensioner now. Like most US citizens my age, I’ve been thinking about his for about 40 years. For me and my life, the thing to do is to more than double my standard of living now, decrease the need or temptation to dip into my nest eggs, and chance receiving less money overall if I live past 78. That’s the age I will be when the overall amount I receive if I wait till 66 passes the overall amount I would get if I start receiving it now. I very seriously doubt I will regret the decision. Hey, I might even save some. What a concept!

That’s going to be it for a while. Be well, all of you.

It was about time we got out of Dodge for a while. I have been telling Myung about Panajachel and San Pedro La Laguna ever since I stayed there for three weeks waiting for her to leave China. So, that seemed like a good place to go. We only spent six days there, but that’s enough to get the picture.

Myung took a load of photos, most of which are very much like the ones I posted last August while I was there. In addition to the ones you will see below, you can see the ones I took last year by clicking on the August 2013 link on the right.

I got pretty bored in San Pedro by the time my wait was over, For a week, though, Lake Atitlan is a good place to go. It could be good for a longer time if you had a project like a language  Or meditation course. Or, a lot of people go and never leave, sort of like Antigua.

Like Antigua, it’s easy for people from developed countries to kick back and live the good life on the cheap. I think this photo Myung took is kinda poignant. Here we are, doing self-improvement or whatever with our seemingly endless free time. Regular Guatemalans live in poverty, too chronically malnourished to grow tall, too disadvantaged and backward to escape their existence. This woman is probably sitting there all day under the self-help signs hoping to earn a couple of dollars selling bananas.

I don’t want to dwell on it, but in some countries, once you leave your sheltered vacation or retirement situation, the reality of life for the vast majority sometimes gets to you. The interesting looking people in my pictures look interesting for a reason. As the old Kingston Trio song, Poverty Hill, said:

“They say we have beautiful faces as grainy as wood. Yeah, they’d like to live here of all places if only they could.
Well, we don’t get those wood, grainy faces from livin’ too good.  It’s the rocks and the sun and dust and the heat. It’s too much of work and too little to eat.”

Of course, we went to the Chichicastenanga market. There was a funeral at the church where the flower sellers are.

Here are good pictures of the folks with those wood, grainy faces around the market.

Here’s out on the street.

Back in Panajachel, it’s still a nice place for us to be.

For me, San Pedro was basically good for a selection of good places to go out to eat. I enjoyed the Saturday morning all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet for five bucks, and a nice place serving Guatemalan and Thai food. Again, go to August 2013 for many pictures. Here’s a couple of pics I like just ‘cuz I like ’em. First is the approach to the San Pedro dock from the boat yhou take from Pana. The second is just some ladies washing clothes and some people hanging out on another pier.

One day we strolled around San Marcos. That’s the hippie dippy new age spot (also where the woman in the very first picture was selling bananas). It’s nice, for sure. This would be a good table to have some of he French food this restaurant has.

Or, you could go to this Japanese place for a Full Moon party/kimbap (sushi roll) fest. These Japanese people are rolling them up for later.

Here’s the Pyramid Garden Meditation Center. I am not kidding when I say visitors here have bought the ranch. When I was here before, they were still mining the end of that Mayan calendar tunnel. There are some faded remnants around town from that phase.

We came back today. It’s a basic three hour chicken bus ride from there to Antigua. It took about three minutes to settle back in. Felix is doing a job in England for a few weeks. Annie works days at the chocolate factory. Norm bets on horse races online. Bisquit chews things. He especially likes big bones.

And we’re fine, just too cute for words.

Be well, all of you.

Happy Lunar New Year and Super Bowl Weekend, neither of which is of interest anywhere in Guatemala except maybe here in Antigua. What is of interest is it’s Candelmas on February 2, celebrating the  apparition of statue of the Virgin Mary with miraculous powers on the Canary Islands in 1392. Our neighborhood in Antigua is called La Candelaria. You can read about the Virgin of Candelaria here:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_of_Candelaria

Antigua has all kinds of foreigners, many of whom are Americans or Asians, so the Super Bowl and Lunar New Year are known to some extent. I may go out to a sports bar and watch the game.

Myung may look excited at that prospect…

… but really she was just shading her eyes while we had lunch on the terrace of a nice restaurant with a nice view.

As I’ve mentioned several times, Antigua is full of ruins. There are still a few we haven’t looked around in. The other day, we walked around in these ruins of this 18th century monastery/convent which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1751, rebuilt, and destroyed again in the 1773 earthquake, never to be rebuilt. The capital was moved to Guatemala City after that. The Spanish empire was rapidly coming to an end at that time, anyway, and was gone when Napoleon took over Spain in the early 1800’s. So that was that. Antigua was left as a crumbling vestige of the past.

Actually, as I have also mentioned, vestiges are all over town. Just down the street from that monastery is one of the entrances to the public market.

Speaking of Korean New Year, the people we live with really like Myung’s cooking. Annie especially goes for the pot stickers.

Overall, it’s been a slow month at Lake Wobegon. I have some pictures of a macadamia plantation. That was pretty interesting. The zillions of macadamias…

… are fed onto a ramp with gradually separating rods. The nuts roll down and fall through into bags when the rods are far enough apart, thereby selecting them for size.

Then they are crunched under this car wheel and tire to get the shells off. That woman was the guide.

We were thinking of getting out of town for a bit. Maybe next week I’ll take Myung to San Pedro de Atitlan. It’d be something new for her, even though I hung out there for three weeks while she was getting out of Chongqing. It’s nice and I’m sure we could entertain ourselves for a few days, maybe go up a volcano, go to the Chichi market, walk around the lake, all that. Meanwhile, I don’t have much to say. Talk to you later. Be well, all of you

I said I’d post pictures next time one of the volcanoes around here was visibly active. This morning a few puffs were coming out of Volcan de Fuego (Fire Volcano). It’s like this two or three times a week, not much really. This is the view from the little park on the other side of the neighbor’s house next door.

Volcan de Fuego last erupted big-time in 2012, forcing evacuation of 35,000 people just west of Antigua but not Antigua itself. You can google those pics. If you go down the street, you can see it’s bigger sister volcano, Acatenango, on the right. It last erupted in 1972. Here’s older picture we have.

I don’t have anything else to say. I was just posting a pic when something happened, as I said I would.

I hope you all had a happy holiday season. We don’t have connections here and Christmas is no big deal in China, so it was pretty low key for us. We don’t give each other presents, so there wasn’t even any shopping. It seems Christmas in Guatemala is just about right, not so commercial as in America. Guatemalans take the religious aspect very seriously, they do give presents, but mostly it’s a time to get together. It’s always nice to be away from the drumbeat of the buy buy buy you experience in America. The Christmas music isn’t so pervasive that you can’t enjoy it anymore.

The closest we came to getting into the swing of it was being around when Annie’s family came over to make tamales, which is traditional at Christmas. They mostly did their thing while we laid low around here, but we participated a bit.

These tamales aren’t the Mexican kind. The rice meal, instead of corn meal, is soft and they are wrapped in banana leaves. Here’s the pot of rice meal cooking over a fire out back.

These were made with a lot of love.

They were sure good, too.

We’re kind of on top of it financially now, so we’ve been out too nice places to eat a couple of times. It’s possible to spend a hundred dollars on fine dining here. We did just that, by candlelight by the fireplace one night.

There were religious and quasi-religious events everywhere during December. In one of the surrounding towns was this morality play in the plaza. The gist of it was we have temptations all around us, and we can find shelter in the presence of the Virgin Mary, whom we honor and defend.

There was also a feast day of some sort where they burned an effigy of the devil. Now, this soiree was basically an excuse to have a street party. It was sponsored by Gallo beer and was part religious and part Burning Man.

The food stalls are always good at these kinds of things, though. Not fine dining this time.

Our main activity is still walking around. Here is a farm near a town a few kilometers from Antigua. The lower peak on the left is a very active volcano which glows and puffs smoke regularly. I’ll try to capture it in a photo next time.

Here’s the pleasant central plaza.

People ask me what my New Year’s resolutions are. I can honestly say I don’t have any. I’m fine hanging around here for a while. Myung asked me, “Then, what about your bucket list?” I suppose it’s to see more places. I rattled off Bali, Iran, West Africa and Norway. It’s like I have this reputation for being a traveler. Well, I’m that, but I have lots of time, I hope. Meanwhile, this is comfy and I am enjoying this moment without needing the next big thing right now. Myung would just as soon be really settled, so she’s enjoying this while it lasts. She’s got a garden going, likes to cook a lot, likes the dog, likes shopping and walking often to the “same old places”. So, here we are, maybe resolved to just be where we are.

Until next time, be well, all of you.

I’m about three quarters through a New York Times bestseller called The Geography of Bliss by former (US) National Public Radio correspondent Eric Weiner. It’s about the author’s travels to several countries to see if and why they are happy or unhappy. Some of the time he has enough experience in the country to have insight, and sometimes he is just an average bloke with a contact or two, and enough money to venture around for a couple of weeks picking up some of the culture. He did study up on the science of what makes people happy, and picked his destinations based on what he learned. His observations make a lot of sense. It got me to thinking why I feel differently about this place or that. In particular, it is making me think about why I decided to stay in Antigua for a while.

Some of the components of a happy life I have, sometimes in spades. Some things, particularly regarding this place, are lacking. Without going into it all, suffice it to say my psychology and situation with Myung makes it good to be here now. What is less than great about my experience of  Antigua and Guatemala is made up for by my “having seen it all” and internalizing some of life’s lessons that make for happiness. Some people might not associate me with contentedness, but it’s there. There’s a close connection between happiness and contentedness. That’s why I’m good to go here. I’m really enjoying that book. The Bhutan and Thailand chapters resonated with me. I haven’t gotten to India yet, but I suspect it will also. That’s one place Eric Weiner and I have spent a lot of time.

For me now, being able to be happy means being able to kick back and not feel like I have to do anything. Being an American, aversion to emptiness is bred into me. It’s taken decades to be able embrace “things are fine, you don’t have to do anything”, to live in the present without being in such a hurry to get more whatever. Actually, the long term backpacking hasn’t been all restlessness, inquisitiveness or impatience. Quite the opposite, I think. There is a lot of detachment in wandering. With detachment comes perspective, and with perspective comes equanimity, a well known path to contentment and happiness. I am finding, so far, that this place and this situation let me settle into a comfortable mental space.

That’s not to say we’ll stay here permanently, whatever permanent is. A few components of happiness are missing so far. A sense of community, i.e. friends and connections, is still nearly absent. Some issues with Guatemalan culture, like the horrible crime rate, aren’t going away. I have to balance that with the truism that the grass is often not that much greener on the other side.

We’ve rented a room in the home of a British/Guatemalan couple, Felix and Annie.

There’s their dog, Biscuit. They live in the main part of the house with another renter, Norm. Norm’s a 78 year old American, about as retired as it gets. He seemed reluctant to have his picture taken, so maybe next time. We live around the corner of the house and behind, down there at the end.

From the spot that picture is taken, here is the view to the left, over the neighbor’s house.

Here’s the inside.

We all seem to be getting along fine. Myung and I like to cook. Annie cooks with Felix, who has spent much of his 14 years in Antigua and Guatemala City as a chef. Best about this is he has all this great cooking stuff. What a treat to have good pots, pans and tools of the trade! He’s also got commercial gas burners. The sink isn’t optimal, but this is Guatemala. That thing in the last picture is called a pila. You run cold water from the tank on the roof into the middle section and collect it there. At least Guatemalans do, because city water may get interrupted and the tank may go dry. Then you wash your dishes, clothes, dog, whatever on the left, scooping water from the center. If there’s water, you make a last clean rinse from the tap.

Oh, just now I went inside from where Biscuit and I are doing this blog entry….

… and there was Myung making pesto. The thing about the sink is if you are making something that requires frequent use of water, you can either go back and forth and back and forth, or do it in the pila.

One of the really good things about Guatemala is the fresh fruits and vegetables. The basil she’s using was probably picked this morning and brought to the market where we just bought it, a huge bouquet for about 40 US cents.

So, the place is good, the company is good, and the rent is very good. A half block behind us is a nice wooded hill. Up the road about 300 meters we found this ruin in the trees.

Our days here are pretty simple. They are as I described last time. We usually go to the market in the morning and for some kind of walk in the afternoon or evening. Yesterday was Sunday. That’s a good time to be out and about. Guatemala, like Mexico, is liveliest on Sundays after church. We walked to the next village, San Felipe, really only a couple of kilometers north of here and barely disconnected to Antigua. Sometimes we just blunder into things. Turns out that a famous resort is there, Filadelfia. We saw signs all over Antigua about it, but didn’t know where it was till we were walking around the outskirts of San Felipe, waiting for church to get out so we could get some lunch at the street stalls. And there it was. It’s a nice resorty place, with a faux high-end restaurant, horsey-back rides through the coffee plantation, tours, and so on. It’s mostly for upscale package tourists. We have a few pictures, but they aren’t worth uploading. What was nice, though, was taking ourselves through the plantation. Here, in the mountainous western part of Guatemala, coffee is the big industry. There are more coffee shops per capita in Antigua than in Seattle, by far. Ah, you can get very nice, high elevation shade grown coffee here, roasted today if you want.

So, then we went back to the central plaza and got some grub. She had pepian Guatemala’s answer to Mexico’s mole, chicken with sweet, peppery/chocolate sauce though served up more like a soup. I had clear veggie soup and chicken with a side of roasted squash.

Myung was across the table, of course. I like this picture of her over there.

That’s going to do it for now. There will be more from here, of course. I can tell when I think I’m going too stay, when I buy something I definitely wouldn’t carry in my pack, like a hair clipper so I can save money on barbers.

Be well, all of you, and I hope you Americans had a Happy Thanksgiving.

Just a short one this time to show the procession that came in front of our place the evening of Nov 2. This went all around town for several hours. We only watched as it went by our place. There was a novena last night and the ceremony when they burn the kites at the cemetery we didn’t go to either. It was explained to me that the basic meaning of this is to pay special attention to the Holy Spirit in the bodies of Jesus and Mary that died but live among the saved in heaven.

Time flies sometimes. I guess we’ve been busy, sort of. We walk around, go to the market, take care of some stuff and, voila’, it’s a week and a hundred pictures later.

Yesterday, we went to the nearby town of Santiago Sacatepeques to see the 114th annual Festival of Giant Kites, which happens on Nov. 1, All Souls Day, the Day of the Dead.

I’m going to lift what all this is about straight from the local what’s happening magazine, Revue.

On November 1 and 2, Guatemalan markets are filled with marigolds, chrysanthemums and copal—a pre-Columbian incense made from pine resin. People clean family graves and adorn them with cut tissue paper called papel picado, flowers, and candles. They also honor the dead with festive foods such as candied fruits, tamales, and fiambre (a cold meat and vegetable dish prepared only at this time of year). These dates mark the celebration of El Día de los Difuntos or “the Day of the Dead,” a very important festival throughout Guatemala, especially in the predominantly Kakchiquel town of Santiago Sacatépequez, where a colorful kite-flying ritual takes place.

Preparations for Day of the Dead begin 40 days before November 1, when youths begin the construction of the kites, a tradition dating back at least 110 years. Customarily, men did most of the work, but today women join them in creating the intricately designed kites, which may have political, religious, or cultural themes. There is now a female kite-making contingency in Sacatepéquez that competes in the annual kite-making competitions.

Before the kites can be made, the unmarried men of the village travel to the coast to hunt for bamboo for the frames. In the eyes of the town, this journey marks males’ passage from boys to men. The trip to the coast is difficult and the work of cutting the thick bamboo is laborious. They return from the coast to find the townspeople awaiting them, eager to hear of their adventures. The bamboo is distributed to the kite-making groups to begin making frames, a process that continues every day until the Day of the Dead.

Women’s role in the celebration has historically been less public than that of men, but crucial. They participate in the measurement, design, and construction of the kites, prepare the glue ingredients and kite materials, and help decide on colors and designs. Women also do the bulk of the festival food preparation, as well as the decorating of churches and public squares.

All kite materials are natural.  The glue is made from yucca flour mixed with pieces of lemon peel and water. Ropes used for kite strings are made from maguey, the plant from which tequila is extracted. Kite tails are made from woven cloth (to which people often attach hand-written messages to the spirits). Woven stalks of castilla, a plant similar to wheat, form the frames of smaller kites, while the largest frames are made from bamboo.

At this point let me say that the giant kites are not entirely natural. The frames are bamboo, but most of the ropes are nylon and the patchwork is taped together with probably a couple hundred meters of packing tape. That said, an enormous amount of effort was made to put these, which are basically giant quilts, together.

The kites display three main styles: “Crown” kites measure from three to five meters in diameter and have a circular frame around an empty center, like a donut. The inner and outer circles are connected with four bamboo stalks.

On November 1, people in Santiago begin to fill the cemetery at 4:00 a.m. While cleaning, repainting, and decorating their family tombs, neighbors fondly reminisce about the deceased, and catch up on the latest news. Community bonds are renewed and strengthened as people work side by side, sharing paint, tools, and brushes to refurbish tombs, while they water flowers, pray, and picnic together. It is a happy time.

Here’s a kite being hoisted up.

Young people await a strong wind to raise their giant kites to the skies, beckoning the traveling spirits until 4:00 p.m., when the kites are lowered and the townspeople return home to await the arrival of the souls.

Of course, these kites can’t fly. And unfortunately, the strong wind made raising them successfully sometimes unsuccessful. All that work, and about half of them blew apart as they attempted to get them upright. It made the raising exciting, and sad when it ended badly.

Here it goes, starting at the top. Everybody run!

Back to the Revue text…

People may set up home altars in honor of deceased family members, and relatives and neighbors visit each other to pay their respects. Visitors are offered boiled güisquiles (a green vegetable), sweet corn, and chilacayote (sweet squash), along with chicha, a hot fermented corn beverage.

Eventually, there is a procession through the streets, with residents playing the harp and accordion to the delight of the public. The townspeople travel with the procession from house to house throughout the night, sharing traditional foods and alcohol along the way.

At 4:00 a.m. on November 2, the procession moves toward the cemetery with candles. The townspeople raise the giant kites one last time to guide the spirits back to heaven. Later that evening, kites torn by the winds are burned inside the cemetery, the smoke guiding vagabond spirits to the skies. The surviving kites are exhibited in the local Catholic church during a novena for the deceased, after which they are burned and the ashes buried in the cemetery, completing the annual ritual for the Day of the Dead in Santiago Sacatepéquez.

So, all that is culturally interesting. For the most part, though, this appears to be mostly a secular event. A popular theme on the giant kites was to have foreign flags. America was popular on some of the littler kites that actually can fly.

Here are cute pandas on a vaguely Chinese-themed giant kite.

Fittingly, I guess, this traditionally religious event on All Souls Day is held at the town cemetery. To me, it seemed possible disrespectful for thousands of people to walk all over the graves, throwing their beer cans and food waste all around. For them, I guess it isn’t so. Maybe the feeling of communing with your dearly departed feels more real if they are included in the party.

So, what you’ll see in the following pictures is the general scene around there. The mounds are graves and the monuments are funerary, and the people are having a good time partying and flying every kind of kite. Some of the littler kites were made the old-fashioned way.

Myung says they used to dye chicks in Korea when she was little.

That’ll do it for now. Likely, I’ll post more in the coming week. Be well, all of you.

Sometimes Myung is SO cute!

I showed you the church next door.

It’s the Church of San Francisco. the part that looks decent was originally built in 1542, which makes it the oldest functioning church in Antigua. It’s been rebuilt several times over the centuries after earthquakes. As you can see, there are ruins to the right. The attached monastery was severely damaged in 1565, 1717, 1751 and 1773. They never rebuilt it after the 1773 quake. The ruins remain, little restored. We walked through there this morning.

In the first picture, you can see the side of the “new” church. The rest of it is a step back in time.

We’re trying not to get ahead of ourselves, but really, it’s pretty easy to imagine staying here another month, and another month. I’m kinda allergic to herd mentality, but there’s good reason why the herd stops in Antigua. I haven’t even gotten into the things to do. There are all kinds of music venues, lectures and tours, social activism (Remember, this is a very poor country and about 1% live like we do.), and dining/food options.

Some of the people here, especially the expats, can REALLY live it up. Alas, we have to actually make our own food most of the time. Our dining options tend toward the cheaper options, like a 10 cent papaya-cicle.

Be well, all of you. Until next time…

Some people speak with disdain about Antigua. They say it’s too touristy. Yeah, you don’t need to know Spanish, and many expats have not bothered. Yes, it does seem overrun. I can concede these points, but it cannot be denied that this is a fascinating city. It has got to be one of the most photogenic cities in the world. And the good part about it being touristy is that if you are starved for American influence, you can find it here. Nowhere, even in San Francisco or New York, are you going to find a gourmet ghetto like this is such a small space. Americans are not nearly all of who are here, anyway, so at least there is an international vibe. It doesn’t matter. We like it here and our opinion is all that matters to us.                       We rented a place for a month. The downside of this being such a popular place is the prices if many things like rent are full American price. No matter. We’re used to hostel style, so a room with a bathroom is something of a luxury. Here is the garden in front of our room.

Here is in front of our room. Our door is to her right. The communal kitchen for the six people living here is right in front of her.

Out the front door to the right, 50 meters away is this.

Antigua was founded in 1527. Some of the buildings are from that time and are ruins now. Some have been rebuilt several times, usually due to the many strong earthquakes Guatemala has endured over the centuries. Many have been completely restored, even converted for modern uses. I gotta show you this 5-star hotel down the street we walked around in today. It incorporated the ruins of a 16th century convent beautifully.

The thing about Antigua, for me, is how I seem to see something new or some new detail every time I go anywhere. Sometimes it’s yet another ancient building, usually in some state of disrepair. Sometimes it’s part of a facade. I like looking at plant life and flowers growing out of the ruins or near ruins as to dust they do return. No doubt, there will be many more photos to follow but, for now, here are some of what we have after five days. I’ll let them speak for themselves and say why we plunked down here.

This goes on and on, I’m tellin’ ya.

By the way, Antigua is surrounded by volcanoes, a couple of which are active. One glows frequently. This first picture is from a different angle of the arch in the above picture.

Here’s another one from the roof terrace of the first place we stayed in. It is one of the ones that glows. If it glows some night, I’ll try to get a picture.

And a couple of others in another direction.

I think you’ve probably had it with pictures. I’m going to quit for now. Life this month isn’t going to be too fast paced, so expect more posts in fairly rapid order. My impression of Antigua should mature as time goes on. I’ll probably have something more interesting than “Wow, what a place” to say. Well, maybe.