Author: Weatherly Sawyer

Antigua was amazing. After only being there for a few weeks, the city, its people, and its environment already have a piece of my heart. There is so much I could say about the city and my experience there, I don’t even know where to start. I could talk about the daily surprise thunderstorms and how you would have to be crazy to go anywhere without a poncho, rain jacket, and umbrella all stuffed into your backpack. I could tell the story of my first homestay lunch, where a language barrier caused complete silence until the tablecloth caught on fire. Or I could talk about being confronted by a group of rambunctious school teachers on Cerro de la Cruz, who gave me hugs and laughed at my inability to speak Spanish. Another particular favorite of mine is when my homestay and I were insulted through song in the garden by our house.

My incredible homestay family.

Another thing about the city, how absolutely stunning the city itself and the surrounding environment are. The streets are lined with colorful walls that hide homes, schools, and restaurants alike, not to mention the secret life of the rooftops. I made many friends on the rooftops.

The Casa rooftop is fabulous.

Then there were the churches. My heart almost stopped every time I walked into any of the historic cathedrals, although this also happened whenever one of them would spontaneously set of a firework on the next street over. I found myself attending mass for fun.

Staring at the mountains around the city never got old, and honestly became a favorite pastime of mine. They were jagged and unpredictable, and covered entirely in jungle. They made for some interesting architecture too. I learned that there was no fear in building your house-complex on the side of a cliff. The neighboring town at the base of Agua made a pretty nice example of this, and at night it almost looked as if it were a bunch of floating lights.

There’s so much I want to say about Antigua and the other places in Guatemala and Belize, but no matter how much I do write, there will always be more to say. I even tried to keep a journal that I will probably never get to the end of. So I decided, after some aimless sketching on Cerro de la Cruz, that maybe documenting and talking about my experiences by drawing them would be a better plan of action. I made this decision a little late in the trip, so I am still working on them and many of them will be from pictures. I have been (and still am) drawing different scenes that stood out to me as characteristic of the places I went and my experiences there. They are of landscapes, people, and even mundane scenes that I had simply gotten used to seeing. Sometimes they include color, if I think the scene needs it. I write the date and place on the picture as if it were a written journal entry, making it a visual journal. It may not recount the events the way a journal usually would, but my hope is that these drawings will be just as effective, if not more. After all, they say that a picture is worth one thousand words, and the events of this past month are worth one million.

I have a lot of words to catch up on.

-Weatherly

Two days ago marked three weeks of me pretending to speak Spanish for the purpose of my survival, and I would say I have been doing pretty well so far. Despite the fact that my last attempt at Spanish was four years ago, I have discovered that I remember just enough of the language to survive* in a predominantly Spanish-speaking country. (*exist) That is, just as long as the situation at hand is of minor importance.

This was not the case when I was trying to get to my hotel in Guatemala City.

Natalie and I had just gotten off of the plane and were nearly done with what couldn’t be any better described than us blindly slamming our way through the airport. Everything was spinning by the time we reached the exit to the arrivals lot, and my main objective was to find out how to get a hold of our ride. His number was online, so I would need wifi (at this point, I did not have wifi or a cell plan). Learning that there was wifi in the cafe to my left, I went out in search of it and landed myself at the cafe counter, trying to order a Coke – if you wanted access, you had to make a trade. I would have been fine, if I had understood the exchange rate from American dollars to a foreign currency whose name had escaped me. I could find both of these things and translate all of my questions had I had wifi. Unfortunately, I had to know these things to get wifi. It was kind of like a riddle, except the words were in a different language and the answer didn’t exist. I was able to get around this, but only through a long and painfully awkward sequence of failed beginnings to sentences, wild gestures, and stares at the two women working behind the counter, who would occasionally laugh at me and then point at something (which would usually just confuse me more). Finally, after twenty minutes, I had my $3 Coke and 5 minutes of well-earned wifi access!

Same day, different Coke.

Everything turned out fine – I found the number for our driver about thirty seconds before the wifi expired, I called him using Natalie’s cell phone, and we found a way to split the Coke so that we could both handle our fear of germs. The next hour was spent waiting around the cafe and doing the different cafe activities like looking at cute stray dogs, avoiding middle-aged men trying to sell us bug-zappers, and talking to my new friend Miguel, who made a living selling homemade orchestral mixtapes. By the time our driver arrived, I was well equipped with eighteen Quetzales and an hour of intensive Spanish practice, ready to start new Spanish adventures with other unsuspecting souls.

Me, triumphing over my fears of communicating in Spanish!