Guatemala, Part Ten: My Hat

This post is out of chronological order, as usual. It begins on our third full day in Guatemala, when I bought myself a hat.

On New Years Day we five went into the center of Antigua to see things and do things. Up to that point some of us had been out on an errand or two, while others had not strayed far from the house. The affair of the empty cistern and the overheated pump had run its course. It seemed like time to start behaving like tourists.

It was almost noon. We piled into the Jeep. (I don't think we had yet figured out how to get into the back seat without contortions. That would come later.) Tesi drove. We parked near a pedestrians-only street that looked like a good place to start. The mid-day sun was beating down, and I bought a hat. We entered an old church, with its shrines and chapels and elaborate Nativity scene, trying not to intrude on the believers. (I took my hat off.) We bought two wooden flutes (one for Gerry, one for Asa) from a man who showed them off by playing old Simon and Garfunkel hits, including "El Condor Pasa" of course but also "Sounds of Silence" and I forget what else. We wandered through a big store full of lovely woven fabrics, oddities, and tacky tourist things, but we were not yet ready to buy much more than postcards.

Then it was time to make our way, hot and tired and hungry, on cobblestoned streets (Ha! Now I'm thinking of another S+G song, "For Emily Whenever I May Find Her", because it has cobblestones in it. Except that it doesn't have any explicit cobblestones in it -- I just looked up the lyrics -- isn't that funny?-- in my mind that song is set in cobblestoned streets) toward the square, the Parque, in the center of town, beyond which was the place we had chosen to have lunch. Actually, the heat and the cobbled bumpiness were such that, on second thought, we decided to travel those few blocks by car rather than on foot.

Let's look at the restaurant's website: "Cafe Flor is a beautiful Thai restaurant and piano bar located only 1/2 block from Antigua's Central Park. Our delicious menu, friendly service, and our unmistakably warm and intimate atmosphere are what makes us famous." That was all true, except no piano at lunch. I half-expected to see our faces at the site when I went there just now, because the owner snapped a few publicity pictures with our permission, but we don't seem to be in their current slideshow. I wonder if we ever were. Oh! Asa has found us on the restaurant's Facebook page!

After a brief encounter with an ATM, we split up, Tesi and Asa walking to La Bodegona while Gerry, Amadi, and I waited at the Park. We watched people and stray dogs, and I got at least five shoe-shine offers in 15 minutes. I wasn't even wearing the kind of shoes that you're supposed to use shoe polish on. They're sort of sneakers. They're really old and beat up. They used to be shiny. Hey, what do I know about shoes, maybe I should have been shining them all those years.

Then the food shoppers returned and we piled into the Jeep and went home, to nap or do crossword puzzles or walk around the neighborhood as the spirit moved us.

I have a lot more to say about the hat.

Guatemala, Part Nine: Singer-songwriter

(continued from Part Eight)

In a corner was some equipment -- stools, microphones, and so forth -- and it was clear that there was going be some kind of performance. Eventually a scruffy lanky man of the Anglo type, neither young nor old, started tuning his guitar and making other adjustments. Then it began.

I'm not sure of the sequence. I think he started right in with a song, and the stage patter didn't come in until later. The first song was an unfamiliar one. It might have been the one about Minnesota girls, or women. There may have been trains in it, too. I think the song expressed admiration for the tough people of that cold northern region. I'm afraid I wasn't listening closely to the words. I didn't have a high opinion of his guitar playing, or of his singing either, but I remember thinking that strictly speaking, by some standards, his singing wasn't really worse than Bob Dylan's. I later learned that Asa (who, unlike me, has a very low tolerance for Dylan's singing) also thought of Dylan right away.

My best guess is that this song was one of his own, because fairly soon he did tell us that he is a songwriter. He told us a number of things about himself. He said that he was from Texas. He explained that he is a "I'm a, um, I'm a [pause], um, I'm a [longer pause], what do you call it? a songwriter." It's not clear whether he was pretending that he had never described himself that way before, or pretending that he'd been living in Guatemala so long that he was starting to forget his English, or really losing his word-finding ability through some natural or unnatural process, or what.

The second or third song that he sang was an actual Dylan song: "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues".

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez, and it's Easter time, too ...

I thought it was an interesting choice of song for a US expatriate to sing to tourists in Latin America.

Sweet Melinda, the peasants call her the goddess of doom ...

He sang "doom". I think some people sing "gloom". I think maybe Judy Collins sang "gloom" in the version we had at home when I was growing up.

I'm goin' back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough!

His stage patter also included some almost completely incomprehensible (to me) remarks about Texas statewide politics. And he let us know that he runs a music school for children. I couldn't help thinking of the scene at the end of "School of Rock" when Ned Schneebly is teaching the beginning guitar class ("all right, your fingers are almost in the right place ...")

His wife was there with him: mostly for moral support, but she did join him for one number. She stood in front of a mike (do I have to spell it "mic"? I mean, a bicycle isn't a bic), and while he sang a song about a train she made train sounds. Not whistle sounds, but "choo choo" sounds, or I should say "ch ch" -- and in a rhythm that neither Asa nor I could really get a handle on.

I looked up the Dylan song later, on Wikipedia, because I couldn't remember the name of it or some of the lyrics and it was running through my head. I learned that "Tom Thumb" is a reference to something by Rimbeau, and also that some critic called the song a comic tour de force. I always thought of it as more sad and dreary than funny, but maybe that's because Judy Collins sang it that way. Now it's running through my head again.

Guatemala, Part Eight: Out on the Town in Pana

After the long drive to Panajachel on Friday the five of us checked into our hotel, had lunch outdoors overlooking the lake, and spent the rest of the afternoon in various combinations napping, trying out the hotel pool, or exploring the neighborhood a little.

Amadi and I began with the pool. It had a water slide -- not a very long one, but you did have to climb quite a few stairs to get to the launch point. When I first went up there, I was disappointed to find that the water was not flowing. (I don't think we can count this as one more example of our family's bad plumbing karma.) It seemed like an admission of defeat to climb back down the stairs, so I took the slide down -- not so much sliding as inching. This got the attention of a hotel employee, who rushed outside, leaped over a narrow strait in the pool, disappeared into an underground chamber, and turned on the works. (If the works had then exploded, that would have counted as an example of our bad plumbing karma.) Later on, Tesi and Gerry both joined us at the pool. There were also a few other families around, including a youngish couple from California with a lively and loud baby. He stared at me, as babies often do, and he was definitely amused when I made weird sputtering and trumpeting noises for him by exhaling through puckered lips at the surface of the pool.

At some point Tesi and Asa began to explore the central touristy street of the town, the Calle Santander. Their main goal was to identify a place to have dinner later: a restaurant serving decent food in pleasant surroundings, with some good vegan options for Asa, preferably cheaper than the hotel restaurant.

The place that they chose, Las Chinitas, offered mixed Asian cuisine. It had an indoor-outdoor feel, with big hanging plants and tasteful strings of lights. One booth had a stuffed-animal-strewn bed around it instead of benches, but we passed on that and took a table in the corner.

The food was just fine, and I'm not saying we didn't have a good time, but there were a few things about the ambiance that could not have been predicted.

One, the steady stream of vendors. Women selling woven bracelets and such would come right up to the table, and their response to a polite refusal would be either to try again with a different member of the party, or to tell us that they hadn't sold anything all day, or just to stand silent in hopes of being paid to go away. Sad and disturbing.

Two, that loud baby again. The California couple showed up, and their kid yelled a lot during dinner. (We would have a third chance to hear him again later on, in the middle of the night, since their hotel room was right next to ours.) Tesi actually took a turn quieting him at dinner, carrying him around the room and pointing things out to him. She is a keen observer of human beings, and especially babies, both by nature and by training, and she was pretty sure that the parents needed a break and that the baby would tolerate being entertained by a stranger for a few minutes.

Three, there was the live music. This gets a post of its own.

Guatemala, Part Seven: Tom and Asa Finish Shopping

(continued from Parts Five and Six)

We headed east in search of bread. The idea had been to go to either (a) Organica or (b) Sabe Rico, but I had a third idea: (c) the Italian bakery that Tesi and I had discovered a week earlier, when we were having trouble finding Organica and Sabe Rico. (Tesi and I had had trouble trouble finding them because, although I marked them on a map before we left the house, the map that I marked them on was not the map we took with us in the Jeep.) We were closer to (c) than to (a) or (b), and (c) had really great bread. I thought I knew what block it was on, but I was wrong. We could have asked someone, but I didn't know the name of the bakery. We bought bread at (b).

It had become clear by this point that we were not going to be home by 5:30. When we spoke with Tesi on the phone it also became clear that it really did matter when we got home, because Nancy was waiting to serve this meal to us. So Tesi grabbed the keys to the Jeep and headed downtown to rescue us from the consequences of our folly. In hindsight I would say that, in addition to underestimating how much time it would take to walk to La Bodegona and overlooking the fact that it takes longer to go to two stores than to one, we had also failed to allow some leeway for how long it might take a couple of people like us to choose some fruit.

In spite of some guilty feelings about how much trouble we had caused, I was perfectly prepared to rattle away about the fun we had had, until Tesi stopped us in our tracks when she heard what we had bought:

"Now don't flip out, guys, but you know Mum and I can't eat grapefruit."

Well, I used to know that about Tesi. Grapefruit (and no other citrus!) interferes with some prescription medication that she takes. And Gerry takes the same one, it seems. I could have said "Hang on, we're not absolutely sure they're grapefruit -- let's look up 'toronja' when we get back to the house", but I didn't think of it. Another thing I didn't think of until later is that if we had only been watching the time -- if we had only known while still in La Bodegona that we were going to be getting a ride home -- the melon decision would have been a no-brainer.

I should also mention that the next day, when Tesi finally happened to look at the bananas we had bought, she kindly pointed out that they were not banana bananas but plantains -- those starchy ones for cooking. Well, as soon as she said it I could see it. I mean, I've seen plantains before: they tend to be not just larger but angular -- very much like the ones we bought. No excuses. Though, you know, it's not like there are only two kinds of bananas in the world: I mean, given that there are grapefruit here that don't look like the grapefruit at home, why shouldn't there also be bananas here that don't look like the bananas at home? But no excuses. Though I am still wondering why anybody would put cooking bananas in the stand-alone fruit section of the store!!! Okay, maybe I did flip out a little.

Somebody also pointed out that when La Bodegona didn't have a lot to offer in the way of fruit we could have gone to the mercado. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I had heard of that place, but I never knew where it was. Too bad. Yeah, too bad we didn't go get our fruit at the place where everybody says don't ever eat any of the fruit or vegetables from that place no matter what!

Sorry about that outburst.

The grapefruit were actually quite good. Amadi loved them. I liked them. Asa tried them, but the verdict was no, he really doesn't care for grapefruit.

Guatemala, Part Six: Tom and Asa Buy Fruit

(continued from Part Five)

We headed into town by the western route, on the busy road that runs past the building supply places. This would take us straight to La Bodegona, and afterward we could go east in search of good bread and then continue in the same direction to Fifth Avenida, the other main way back to our neighborhood. I had a nostalgic urge to walk Fifth Ave, the road full of surprises that Tesi and I had traveled by Jeep a week earlier, on the first morning, still disoriented and excited by the newness of it all. It was a little longer and dustier than the western route, but also freer of heavy traffic and the horrible fumes of trucks and buses.

As we went along, we talked of this and that.

Tom: There’s a Spanish word I keep running into. One of those connective words that doesn’t add a lot of meaning to a sentence. Sort of a signpost word.

Asa: Are you going to tell me what it is?

Tom: I keep not quite figuring out what it means, and I keep not getting around to looking it up or asking someone.

Asa: Are you going to tell me what it is?

Tom: It’s pretty long for one of those little words.

Asa: Are you going to tell me what it is?

Tom: entonces

Asa: I wondered if it might be entonces.

He told me that it functions much like “so” or “then” at the beginning of a sentence. Then he went on to muse about the nuances of the word, to explore his own understanding of it. Is it more like “then” in a chronological sense, or like “then” in a logical sense, or is it both? He drew parallels with some words in English. It was a nice glimpse of a thoughtful mind at work.

He went on to talk about a song they sang in Mads. That’s the Amherst College Madrigal Singers, a huge part of his life. They don’t just sing madrigals; they sing a cappella music from the Olden Days, the Renaissance give or take. One of the songs they learned last year was from Catalonia, and it had a three-word phrase in it that had given him the idea that the Spanish word entonces might have been formed by smooshing together essentially those same three words. I forget the details, but maybe he’ll remind me and I’ll edit this. [Or maybe not. See his comment below.]

We kept walking. His phone rang. It was Tesi, saying “and a small bottle of olive oil, please”. We kept walking.

When we got to La Bodegona, Asa initially took the lead, because he knew some things. He had been there before. He knew where the dairy section was, and that it was organized oddly. I chose a large plastic shopping basket, of the kind that converts into a wheeled vehicle with a long handle. The handle was a little short for me, so I picked the basket up. This made for a certain amount of tricky maneuvering, lifting it over people’s heads and so on, where the aisles were narrow. At one point Asa looked up from his search for milk and yogurt and thought he saw me dancing with the basket to the piped-in music, but I wasn’t dancing exactly. I wasn’t exactly not dancing, either. We explored the most relevant-looking dairy case until we had what we wanted, though many things were not quite what we expected and some things were not quite what they seemed. Asa took his time with one plastic jug, reading the fine print several times over. “I just wanted to be sure," he said "that it was whole milk and not whole something else.”

Then on to the fruit.

There was a gleaming array of neatly stacked bright red apples. Well, apple is a fruit. But, hey, we can get apples at home. Besides, these look like a kind of apple that we would turn up our noses at at home: probably all shine and no flavor. And anyway we’re not supposed to eat the fruit here without either peeling it or soaking it in a bleach solution for a good long time. Do we really want to buy apples if we can’t eat them like apples?

What else is there? Aha: right here, a sort of little table divided into three bins, full of various fruits.

The first bin held melons, nice-looking big melons, sort of like what we call honeydews at home. And big. I wonder what they’re called. Did you know that there is no Spanish word for melons in general? There’s a word for watermelon. Yes, I know. There’s got to be a word for this kind. Is there a word “cantalopa” or something? Wait, who cares what they’re called? They’re melons. They look big. They might even be ripe. Yeah, but they’re big. Do we really want to carry them all the way back? I’ll carry the melon if you carry everything else, ha-ha. No, listen, last week we got a melon when people were coming over, and we couldn’t finish it even with all that help. Forget it. We’re flying out of here in like 36 hours. No, I think we could finish it. Remember: we had a pineapple, too, that other day.

Yeah, but it’s so big. Do we really want to carry it?

The second bin held bananas. Some were green. Some had too many brown spots. Some looked good. I guess we’ll take a couple of bananas.

The third bin held several round things which suggested grapefruit. They were citrus, and they were the right size, but on the other they were lumpy and blotchy. Also, on top of the pile there was something else, one unidentified oblong fruit.

We looked around for more options. We looked all over the store. Nope. We asked an employee: is there any more fruit elsewhere in the store? Nope. We postponed the fruit decision and went looking for other things.

Here are some onions. They're not red, but they'll do.

Tom: I was guessing the sugar would be somewhere near the salt.

Asa: Yes, but it’s not.

Asa got a text from Tesi suggesting we pick up a bottle of red wine. Unnecessary: I had already had the same thought. Asa found paper napkins. I found red wine. I pointed at a giant bag of Froot Loops. This was good for a laugh. Thirteen and a half years ago, when we went to Guatemala to adopt baby Amadi, six-year-old Asa discovered Froot Loops at the hotel’s breakfast buffet and ate them every day for a week. There are pictures of this. He had never heard of them before that week, and he has never had the urge to eat them at any time since.

Tom: Hey, I found the sugar. It was near the salt.

Asa: Oh, I thought you meant really near the salt.

The fruit question. Right. We’ll get back to that.

Ice packs? We were looking for either the reusable ones that go in the freezer or else the chemical ones that you activate by hitting them. We had a little  fantasy about the hilarious conversation that might ensue if we asked about things that get cold when you hit them. That sounds pretty funny in English, and we didn’t even know the Spanish for “ice pack”. But Asa got a few sentences lined up in his head and summoned the nerve to politely bother a busy-looking employees with our question. She informed him that the phrase he was looking for was “bolsa de hielo”, and she got on her walkie-talkie. While we waited for the answer, we wondered aloud whether this was going to end with somebody showing us a nice bag full of ice cubes.

No, no ice packs. On to the kitchen towels. We found them, but none were distinctively Guatemalan.

There was no more avoiding it: it was time to face up once and for all to the fruit decision. We went back to the three-part bin and considered our options. It seemed to me that we could use a little more information. Of course Asa, as the Spanish speaker, was going to be the one asking the questions; my role was mainly to goad him into bothering somebody. At this point my increasingly heavy basket was on the floor, on wheels, handle extended, never mind if it was a little short.

After some slight hesitation, he managed to flag down an employee and ask her about the things that looked sort of like grapefruit. We knew the word for “orange”; in fact, I believe Asa had used it in his question. We did not know the word for “grapefruit”. As she answered, we were pretty sure that we were now hearing the word for “grapefruit”. “TOR-onja”, she said, coming down very slowly and heavily on the first syllable as if to make it clear to the meanest intelligence that this was not the same word as “naranja”, and repeating herself several times for further emphasis. She let us know that they were not as sweet as oranges, that they had a bitterness. Although she was being quite friendly and helpful, we could not help feeling just a little bit condescended to. Anyway, we figured they were grapefruit.

Asa remarked that he doesn’t really like grapefruit. I remarked that in that case he could eat bananas. We seemed to be getting close to a decision, but I had a sudden curiosity about the oblong thing.

After some further hesitation Asa found someone — the same person, actually — to ask about this. “Papaya” was the answer, delivered with a certain look. (Well, to tell the truth, papaya would have been my first guess.) At this point she was fairly close to openly laughing at us — not in a mean way but in a “what planet are you people from?” way.

I happened to know that Tesi cannot eat papaya: it does something bad to her. So we chose three of the probable grapefruit and three of the biggest bananas and stepped toward the checkout.

“Wait!” said Asa. He had remembered the one thing on the list that we never wrote down — the thing Tesi had called him about. But when I say “remembered” I don't mean that either of us could remember what item it was. We stood there staring, thinking, muttering for a minute. It was Asa who got it (oh, for a young brain!): olive oil. And there it was, right in front of us! (No, Asa, we are buying the smallest bottle. We are not buying the second smallest even if it’s cheaper by the liter. You need not bother with that computation.)

Our business at La Bodegona was done.

Guatemala, Part Five: Tom and Asa Decide To Go Shopping

Our departure for Pana was supposed to mark the beginning of the "true vacation" part of the trip. Up till then we had been renting a house and fending for ourselves: buying groceries, cooking meals, washing dishes, doing laundry -- and when I say "we" I mean above all Tesi. Add to that the water/plumbing fiasco and a somewhat busy social schedule, including emotionally laden meetings with Amadi's birth family, and you have a week that was long on satisfaction but short on relaxation.

I have to say about the grocery shopping that, although it was different from home in some respects (bumpy roads, hard to park, hard to find things in the store), it was just like home in one way: in spite of our best efforts to plan ahead there was always at least one more thing we needed, and I don't think a day ever went by without a trip to La Bodegona, the supermarket.

The next 48+ hours were to be different. On Saturday we were to be driven to Pana, where we had rooms reserved at a very good hotel. On Sunday we were to have a private tour of Lake Atitlan by motorboat (lancha). On Monday we would be driven back to Antigua. In between, we would be free to choose between swimming in the hotel pool, napping in a hammock or in the room, doing a little gift shopping -- whatever. We would have meals in the hotel or in some nearby restaurant. In short, it was time to take it easy. Furthermore, Tesi had arranged for someone else to prepare dinner for us when we got back to the house Antigua on Monday: Nancy, who cleans the house twice a week. Tesi even had a plan for Tuesday dinner, which was to save us from another trip to La Bodegona before leaving for home on Wednesday.

And that's basically how the weekend went, except for a couple of us getting a pretty severe case of the kind of gastro-intestinal trouble that sometimes affects visitors to that part of the world.

When we got back to Antigua on Monday, Gerry mentioned that she was at a stage where she would very much like to have some fruit to eat -- the one thing we didn't have! Asa and I volunteered to go to the store, and in no time there was a shopping list: as long as you're going there, how about a couple of big red onions? And some yogurt. And a thing of whole milk, but not too big. Sugar. Paper napkins. And we could probably use another loaf of bread. You could even, instead of supermarket bread, get something good from one of those other places: Organico or Sabe Rico. And we might as well see if they have an ice pack for Gerry's back. Oh, and just see if they have any brightly colored kitchen towels to take home, with pictures of something Guatemalan on them.

It was Asa's idea to make this expedition on foot rather than by Jeep. I thought it was a great idea: a little exercise, a little adventure, a little special time together. I did stop and raise the question of timing -- I didn't want to delay dinner, especially if Nancy was sticking around to serve it to us -- but after a brief discussion it was agreed that dinner would not be until 5:30 anyway, and off we went.

Guatemala, Part Four: Outline

It's been over a week since the last installment, and we're home now -- out of the delightfully mild "tropics" and back in the bitter cold of the "temperate" zone.

This travelogue was never meant to be a complete or balanced thing, but I would like to write down a few more stories. Before doing so, here is a bare outline, to assist the memory of those who were there and the understanding of those who were not.

12/29  Travel day.

12/30  Settling in in Antigua, getting to know the house, the neighborhood, the Jeep, the roads, and La Bodegona supermarket. Visit from Luvia's family. The convite.  

12/31  Meeting with Susi. Lunch by Nancy. Tom and Amadi walk halfway to town. Water/plumbing crisis. Fireworks.

1/1      Resolution of plumbing crisis. All go downtown together (hat, church, flutes, postcards, Thai lunch).

1/2      First meeting with Jacky and kids. 

1/3      Second meeting with Jacky and kids. Lunch at Luvia's house.

1/4      Water crisis continues. Long ride to Panajachel by shuttle van. Dinner at Las Chinitas.

1/5      Lake Atitlan by boat. Dinner with friends.

1/6      Breakfast at the Deli. Long ride back to Antigua by shuttle van. Tom and Asa walk to La Bodegona. Dinner by Nancy.

1/7      A fairly quiet last day, with just a touch of water crisis. Tom, Asa, and Amadi walk to the post office.

1/8      Home.

Some stories that should be told, and maybe will be:

Tesi and Tom's first somewhat dazed trip into town in the Jeep.

The convite in San Miguel Duenas: parade floats and dance troupes.

Tesi and Asa's alarming ride with the plumber on New Years Eve.

Lost in the rain in Juarez in a Chinese restaurant in Panajachel. [done]

Lake Atitlan: geology, the grandfather statue, the Romeo and Juliet of the lake, an herb garden, and natural dyes.

Asa and Tom walk the long dusty road in quest of fruit and other things and largely fail with regard to fruit. [done]

Asa, Amadi, and Tom walk the long dusty road just to mail a few postcards.

Guatemala, Part Three: Up Early

Tesi and I were awake before dawn today, and I followed her to the roof to watch the sun come up. While waiting for it to climb above the hills on our left, we had plenty of time to enjoy all kinds of other things, including:

The slightly active volcano on our right, which the locals call "Fuego", starting to smoke, stopping, starting, stopping, starting -- at first just little clinging wreaths of ash but later a rising plume.

The inactive volcano in front of us, which the locals call "Agua", its upper reaches covered, the peak sometimes showing above the cloud, sometimes not. Most of the clouds were drifting along from SSE to NNW, but the one on Agua was just sitting there: sort of like the halo in a Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim logo, but fatter. (Added a few days later: I have learned that this kind of cloud around a mountain peak is called a "lenticular cap".)

A light that must have been Venus setting behind a ridge on our right. (You will gather that we were facing south.) 

The sky slowly getting brighter and bluer, with pinkness appearing in various directions at various times.

Birds singing and squawking and buzzing. I have to take it back about the parrots that I saw four mornings ago: I'm now sure that they were just the ubiquitous Great-Tailed Grackles. I was fooled by the fact that I was viewing their iridescent backs in flight from above, when they can look positively blue in the right light.

Hawks (buzzards?) soaring in the distance.

The two great cypresses on the other side of the lane. They stand in a big estate called Las Ahuehuetes, ahuehuete being the local word for that kind of tree. According to Wikipedia, a famous ahuehuete in Mexico is either the stoutest tree in the world or in second place to a certain baobab (not that the ones across the lane are of anything like that caliber).

Getting back to the volcanoes:

Agua has not erupted in historical memory, but in 1541 it deluged the nearby town of Ciudad Vieja with a horrendous mudslide, prompting the Spanish colonial authorities to move their capital over here, to Antigua Guatemala. Of course, what they called the new capital was "Guatemala", without the "Antigua", until the province got a new new capital (the modern Guatemala City) in the 1770s. That second move was not to get away from volcanoes but to get away from earthquakes.

Fuego does erupt every few years, and even when it's not positively erupting it sometimes does more than just send up ash plumes: it let out a great booming belch on one of our first nights here, and we're told that if only we had looked over that way we might have seen some glowing lava at the very top.

I forgot to say: An animal has also been climbing on our roof -- on the tiles, not the platform that we use. A noisy nocturnal animal. Sometimes it sounds like it's chewing on the house. It stops if we pound on the bedroom ceiling. We haven't seen it, but they tell us that it must be the oversized opossum called a taqasim.

Guatemala, Part Two: New Years Eve

Asa has been very much in the front line throughout our little crisis. That’s partly because he and Tesi are the Spanish speakers in the family, but mainly because he has been acting like a grownup. I think it’s interesting to see what this kind of challenge brings out in people. What do you do with your anxiety? Can you transform it into some kind of useful energy?

In one of Wodehouse’s stories (the only Jeeves and Wooster story in which Jeeves has the narrative voice) Jeeves remarks that Mr. Wooster lacks “the gift of the unusual situation”. There have been moments in my life when I have thought the same about Asa. (There have also been moments when I have thought it about myself.)

Asa showed up well yesterday. He translated, he relayed messages, he searched for the breaker box, he rode along with Tesi when she headed off at dusk in the Jeep with Juan Jose to look for plumbing supplies. (That first time, summoned by his nephew from some party, Juan Jose had come by bus, not by motorbike. More about that scary bumpy dark Jeep ride later.)

But what set the seal upon it for Tesi and me was when Asa was selected to receive the crucial instructions. At the point when the plumber had done all he could in the dark after closing time on a holiday with nothing but hand tools and a piece of plastic pipe and a length of rope, J. B. stood in front of us all, hesitating, saying “I need to choose someone …” and picked The Young Man. Suddenly at that moment, viewed against the backdrop of a strange place and an unusual challenge, our child looked like an adult to us.

After that, Amadi, Gerry, and Tesi went to bed one by one but Asa and I stayed up. He checked on the pump from time to time. We climbed to the roof at quarter to midnight, when it was getting really loud. There were firework displays in every direction: in the center of town, in a neighbor’s yard two doors away, on a distant ridge line, everywhere — not to mention marvelous flying lanterns, small translucent glowing hot air balloons launched into the night sky one after another.

When we came back down, Asa checked on the pump again. This area was his responsibility; I was merely an observer. There was a funny moment, though, when he seemed to want my help for the trip to the breaker box to shut off the system for the night. He was just a little tiny bit afraid. ("Because electricity" was how he put it.)

Oh, and I should mention the other way that Asa was in the front line yesterday. You may be wondering why, when the firefighters had filled our cistern, that was not the end of the story. Well, the head firefighter Miguel was being thorough, and before putting hose to cistern he wanted to get a good look at the house’s water supply system. He found the covered nook in the front garden where the water, having made its way through a series of buried tanks, is pumped into a pressure tank. While contemplating it he gave what should have been a harmless gentle nudge to a PVC pipe. What happened next happened very fast: a related pipe suddenly sprang a leak and sprayed a good deal of hot water straight into Asa’s face and chest at high velocity.

Our understanding is that when (a) there was no more water coming to the pump and (b) a relay that should have shut off the pump failed, then (c) the pump, running dry, overheated, to the extent that the pipes leading to it were handling much more pressure than usual, not to mention heat. In that moment, the very surprised Asa said a word that I have rarely heard him say. We thought of keeping the bit of burst pipe as a souvenir, but I think in the end we left it at the house for the amusement of our landlord.

Tesi and I have been saying for years that we have terrible plumbing karma. This is not the time to tell all the old stories, but we have had the strangest leaks and disasters over the years. It's pretty clear that we brought our bad luck with us to Antigua. I couldn't help wondering whether it would follow us on our side trip to Pana.

Guatemala, Part One: New Years Day

January 1, 2014
Antigua, Guatemala

I awoke before the rest of the family at 6:00 and climbed the alarmingly steep and narrow stairs to the rooftop terrace. I had not been up there this early before, and I was rewarded today by birdsong and the sight of many teal-colored parrots flying in and out of a tree in the neighbor’s yard — also the usual over-sized grackles.

Looking further afield, I saw the nearest volcano, its top hidden in a cloud. Antigua sits in a bowl, circled by volcanoes. All of their peaks are in cloud right now, so I can’t tell whether the active one is puffing.

I know the shape of the horizon a little better than I did yesterday, because last night at midnight Asa and I saw many of these ridgelines beautifully lit up when we went on the roof to watch the fireworks.

I’m down on the ground floor now. I might have stayed on the roof longer except for a couple of things. I wanted to use the toilet and, ideally, to flush it, but that seemed to call for turning the household water supply back on, and that would have meant going to the meditation room next to the Moroccan lounge and flipping the correct circuit breaker, then sticking around to keep an eye on the temporary plumbing arrangements in the front garden. Asa, who received our instructions from the plumber last night and conveyed them to the rest of us, carefully explained this again at bed time last night. If you’re going to have to step outdoors every few minutes to make sure that the makeshift piece of PVC pipe is still lashed securely to the pump, then you probably don’t want to be hanging out on the roof.

Actually Asa received his instructions from J. B., the piano player who takes care of this house when the landlord is traveling. J. B. received them from the plumber Juan Jose, who made an emergency call in the late afternoon even though it was New Years Eve. Juan Jose is an uncle of one of the volunteer firemen who came to pump water into our cistern after we discovered that the municipal water supply had not been reaching this neighborhood for a few days.

To tell the truth, I still haven’t turned the water on. I could get along easily without it until Juan Jose returns this morning to make more permanent repairs, given the vast quantities of safe drinking water which the very apologetic J. B. has left us with -- I mean, I could get along without it until everybody else wakes up and starts taking showers and flushing toilets. So I just came downstairs, used a toilet whose tank was still full, went outside to satisfy my curiosity on a point which had been nagging me about the Jeep — is it really true that neither one of the front seats folds forward to make it easier to climb into the back seat ? (yes, I think so) -- and, if not, how tricky will it be for Asa, Amadi, and me to all get in the back seat if the five of us decide to visit Luvia, Wilfredo, and Daniel on Friday? (I think we can manage) — and then came in and started writing. But I think I will flip the breaker now. If anything blows up, I’ll just turn the system off again until Juan Jose arrives in an hour or two.

*****

Forty-five minutes later. No surprises when I flipped the switch. I am sitting in a rocking chair on the front stoop, with a cup of coffee and a newly charged laptop. Tesi has come downstairs and gone back up to take a bath before the water is shut off again.

I’m still hearing birds, though it’s no longer anything like dawn. I’m still hearing occasional fireworks, though it’s no longer New Years Eve. I’m also hearing a lot of church bells, though it’s not Sunday.

In front of me is the entrance gate, which I have unlocked for the plumber. I’m watching it through the jungly front garden: palm trees with their crisscrossing fronds, a potted rosemary three feet tall, some of those big-leaved hotel-lobby plants, a raspberry cane that’s climbing into a tree in the company of flowering tropical vines.

To my right, beyond the orange tree, is the other spot that I’m keeping an eye on, where the water pump is cycling on and off. I’ve just gone and looked; it’s still holding up.

*****

The plumber has arrived, on a little motorcycle, looked at the job in the morning light, and gone away to get some supplies.