We have been doing a lot of thinking on how to start this blog post… so …
Guat’s up!
This is Alan and Kendall’s blog post. We had a wild week in Guatemala! We traveled through Maya ruins, lakes and lots and lots of rain.
Lucky for us we brought safety ponchos so we won’t be getting surprised by the rain or run over by cars! Unlike Astrid…
Just kidding she is fine. Although she should really consider getting a safety poncho just to be safe.
Kendall does not like the ash.
“I didn’t like the ash very much” – Kendall
We didn’t let Fuego get us down though. We left for the weekend to go to Lake Atitlan, so we escaped the chaos of Antigua for a bit. The three hour drive to the lake was pretty windy, and our first boat ride from Panajachel to San Juan was pretty bumpy.
In our stay at lake Atitlan, we learned a lot about how traditional Maya products are made. We even got to spin some cotton into thread with the help of Delfina, a local weaver who works at the Casa Flor Ixcaco cooperative in San Juan. The next day, our focus was 100% on ceramics. We went to Maya Ken and learned about their process of making ceramics from making the molds/throwing vessels on the wheel to firing and glazing. We even got to paint our own items! And of course, we did a lot of shopping all along the way.
Overall, it was a pretty crazy weekend. We’re sure it wasn’t easy for Mily, Astrid, and Catherine.
We are sorry Catherine.
We were back in class at the Casa on Monday and got the pleasure to hear David Stuart talk about the San Bartolo murals. It was really interesting hearing about how they documented the murals with a desktop scanner from the early 2000s and then how Heather Hurst recreated the murals as beautiful watercolor paintings. David is such an important figure in Maya archeological history. We got so much out of his lecture, but were left with one last question:
Thanks for reading!
Alan & Kendall