Guatemala, Day 2 - Antigua

Antigua is Guatemala's crown jewel.  It was founded in 1543 and served as the capital until it was razed by an earthquake in 1773.  After that, the seat of government moved 45 minutes away to Guatemala City and Antigua was left to become a gorgeous little tourist's paradise.  Lonely Planet says it's what Guatemala "would look like if the Scandinavians came in and took over for a couple of years."  The granola guidebook probably meant that to be a criticism, but I still love the town.  (As I said, I'm a bad hippie.)

It's nestled between three big volcanoes (Pacaya, Fuego and Agua), which contribute to its seismic instability, and is a lovely collection of paved cobblestone streets lined with brightly colored stucco houses. 

The central plaza has some lovely churches and other colonial buildings.  I explored them more fully the first time I visited, so we didn't spend much time

My favorite element of Spanish architecture is the courtyard.  You can't see them from the street, but if you can get inside, they're usually gorgeous.  Private courtyards, of course, are off limits, but hotels are easier to get into.

In addition to courtyards, some of the hotels also have ruins.  This hotel is built on the ruins of a Dominican monastery.

The crypt

The dearly departed

This cloister and fountain was my favorite area in the ruins

This flowering vine is amazing -- it makes for awesome trellises

Nestled among the ruins and hotel rooms was a little candleshop.  Most of the candles were too much in the Spanish Catholic aesthetic for my taste, but the colors were lovely and it was neat to see the vats of boiling wax.

After wandering through the town, we were STARVING, so we stopped for lunch at Bistro Cinq.  Trendy, French, and absolutely delicious, this was my kind of restaurant.  We feasted comfortably and then went happily on our way.

Bistro burger with frites

P.S.  If you want to read about my visit to Antigua in 2008, click here.

Guatemala, Day 1 - Chez les Kelly

Last time I was in Guatemala, I was backpacking on the last few dollars of my student loans.  The budget was tight and my agenda ambitious, and I stayed in some dreadful lodgings.  This time, you'd think I was in an entirely different country.  Jennifer and Mark live in a spacious condo in a swank modern high-rise with a giant living room, sitting room, three bedrooms, four-and-a-half bathrooms, a kitchen, pantry, servants quarters (!!), floor-to-ceiling windows and a wrap-around balcony.  It feels like a palace compared to my badly lit, 680 square foot, one-bedroom apartment.  Kudos to Mark for picking it out, and to Jennifer for putting it together.

View of the living/dining area from the entryway

Jennifer and Mark in the living room

Sitting room

Guest bedroom

Kitchen

The views around the apartment are amazing.  I'm told they're even better when the air isn't hazy and you can see the row of volcanoes marching along to the west. 



Living room balcony, to the left

Living room balcony center

Living room balcony to the right



Someday I want to live where I can grow bougainvillea



Guatemala, Day 1 - Guatemala City

Guatemala City is only 2 hours and 19 minutes from Miami.  Aside from an obnoxious woman's stealing my aisle seat and refusing to give it back without making a scene (which meant that I was stuck with her middle seat because I wasn't willing to make a scene), the flight went well.  I read the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (a fascinating series of historical-theoretical articles about the strengths and weaknesses of democratic capitalism and its fascist/marxist/authoritarian alternatives) while listening to the Mediaeval Baebes on my iPod (yes, it's trash, thanks for judging me) and drinking Diet Coke (they gave me the whole can, again!).  By noontime we had landed in Guatemala's capital city.



View of downtown from the tarmac


I wended my way through passport control and customs, collected my bag (which, thankfully, had made it to Guatemala just fine, despite the overnight layover), and met Jennifer and Mark outside the terminal amidst the crowd of welcomers, peddlers and beggars.  It was great to see them -- a tad surreal, given that I was used to seeing them in DC, not in a third world country.

All of us were hungry, so we drove over to a new upscale development of shops and restaurants called Cayala, which offered great views over the city...

tasty lunch options (we went Mediterranean and were served by someone who may have been Saddam Hussein's brother)...

and a good-faith attempt at a French patisserie.

I skipped the depressed-looking macarons and opted for the mini lemon tart.

By the way, I promise that my wearing a white shirt and blazer while on vacation in a third world country was an accident -- I hadn't realized until too late that while I would be laying over in Miami, my bag was checked all the way to Guatemala City.  So I'm wearing what I wore to work yesterday.  (It is, however, yet another example of what a bad hippie I would be.  If I wanted to fit in with the American backpackers, I should be wearing a dirty tunic and "indigenous" pants that no one who is actually indigenous would be caught dead in.)

After lunch we headed back to the apartment so that I could change clothes and freshen up.  Then we headed out to "O", a new design center nearby.  On the outside, it looked like a cross between a nightclub and a billboard.

On the inside, it had over-the-top showrooms full of all sorts of awesome furniture, much of which was familiar to me from the design magazines I read.  The chaise featured below is an example.  (Unfortunately, photography was strictly forbidden, so I wasn't able to play with the shot enough to capture the full glory of the pink-and-black-and-gold motif in this room.)

We'd originally planned to spend only about ten or fifteen minutes in the store -- that's how much time we had before they closed.  Over an hour later, however, we were still wandering through the labyrinthine showrooms.  Turns out billboard-comme-nightclub had more in common with the layout of a haunted house.  We worked our way ever deeper into the maze, upstairs and downstairs, past marble slabs and cow-hide-covered credenzas and "ethnic" (code for "Asian") cabinets -- and the further we went, the more disoriented we became.  I was certain that we'd eventually run into the Minotaur or David Bowie (preferably both).  That or the search and rescue would eventually find our huddled bones somewhere in the bathtub department.  Needless to say, by the time we found the Exit sign, it reflected our feelings exactly.

Once we'd escaped the clutches of awesome furniture, we headed to Jake's restaurant for dinner with some of Jennifer's and Mark's friends -- all of whom, I was assured, were "normal."  One couple's last name was "Outlaw", which is both awesome (because, really, who doesn't want to be able to say that they're having dinner with the Outlaws tonight?) and ironic, because the guy works for the Drug Enforcement Agency and therefore spends his time chasing down bigtime outlaws.  He entertained with stories about catching the cocaine runners who try to smuggle the stuff in from South America on its way to Mexico.  The other couple (whose name was long and vaguely Italian) had a less adrenaline-filled life -- he worked at USAID with Mark and had just moved to Guatemala City from Nairobi (which apparently is less nice than Guatemala City).  It was fun (and frankly very appealing) to hear about the lives of expats my age.  Such a different milieu from where I currently am, but one that I could easily see myself enjoying.

The light was bad for photos, but the food was delicious.

Priosciutto and mozarella

Steak with gorgonzola and rosemary with a side of vegetables

Guatemala

Just a quick status update, lest my devoted readers worry (it occurred to me that posting a link to that New Yorker article on a blog that my mother reads may have been better done after I'd returned home).

In any case, I am here in Guatemela. I have NOT been murdered or forced to be a drug mule or caught malaria. Instead, I've been having a great time with Jennifer and Mark eating good food, meeting some of their friends and getting lost in a high end furniture store (more on all of that to come).

Internet connectivity has been tricky though -- this IS a third world country -- so my blogging capacities are somewhat limited at the moment. So far Blackberry seems to be working; I may have to follow up later with expanded stories and pictures.

Stay tuned.

Miami Layover

I flew out of Guatemala City in October 2008 after two months of intense Spanish study and adventurous traveling in Central America.  As we lifted off the tarmac, I thought, “Well, that was fun.  I probably will never come here again” -- and by “here” I meant, partly, the country of Guatemala (so many countries in this world!  so little time!), but mostly I meant the city.  “Guate Ciudad” is not a great place.  It’s a Central American capital, which means it’s chaotic, dirty and dangerous.  My Spanish teacher in Xela explained repeatedly that it was full of ladrones who would murder me (which seemed like hyperbole until I read this article in the New Yorker), and even the Lonely Planet couldn’t muster much enthusiasm.

But here I go:  off to Guatemala City for a long weekend!  Woot!

I’ll be visiting my good friend Jennifer (from Kennedy Center days) and her husband Mark (whom I’ve gotten to know since their wedding, and who I think is great).  Mark has a PhD in agriculture (or something related) and works for USAID.  They’ve been sent to Guatemala City for a two-year stint, and so I thought it would be fun to visit and see what this version of expat life is like.  (Plus, since the next assignment is likely to be something like Afghanistan or Iraq, I figured that now was the time to do it.)

Today was the first leg of my trip -- DC to Miami.  I’m currently holed up at the Marriott near the airport; my flight to Guatemala leaves tomorrow morning.  Since I’m still buzzing from all the caffeine I drank on the plane (they gave me the WHOLE CAN!), here are some thoughts raised by the trip so far:

FIRST

Amanda says she likes teenagers.  I’ve been agnostic on the subject for a while (ever since I was one, I think), but tonight they scored some points in their favor: 

The flight was packed with teenagers -- probably a quarter of the plane was under 18.  Mostly a large school group but also a handful of families with kids.  As we waited at the gate, I was mesmerized by the school group.  The closest analogy I can draw is to a swarm of gnats:  Constant motion, a buzz of noise, obliviously self-contained, a little annoying to walk through but otherwise completely harmless.  And I really mean that last part to be a compliment:  Yes, the crowd of boys (they were all boys) was large and very social, but they were also collectively very well-behaved.  I observed them for about half an hour and saw none of the horsing around that I’d initially expected. 

We started boarding in groups and, by the time we’d gotten to Group 3 it was clear that the big group of boys was in Group 4 -- because they were all waiting in a clump reminding each other that they weren’t supposed to go until Group 4 was called.  I was toward the end of Group 3 and was about to hand my ticket to the agent when two extremely pushy parents yanked their own three teenagers into the line, cutting right in front of me.  The three kids looked at them and said, “But Mom and Dad, why are we getting in line now?  We’re in Group 4 --don’t we have to wait our turn?”  To which the parents responded, “No way, we’ve got to beat that” (referring smugly to the large group of boys).

At that moment I loved those kids and despised their parents.  Couldn’t they see that they were engaging in precisely the sort of inconsiderate, immature behavior (line-cutting, pushing) that they were trying to avoid with group of boys (who were waiting their turn)?  More importantly, couldn’t they see that they were  TEACHING THEIR KIDS TO BE THE SAME WAY?  That they were ACTIVELY UNDOING whatever good parenting lessons or other positive socializing forces had taught their kids that courtesy and waiting one’s turn are desirable social behaviors?  Gah!  Bad parents!

Amanda has said many times that while teenagers may look like adults, they don’t always act or think like adults.  To which I say, sometimes that’s a good thing.

SECOND

Why on earth would Marriott store pillows in the cornice over the window?

No rest for the wicked

This was a busy weekend.  Not only did I have a six-hour opera, a modern dance concert, and a Shakespeare play, I also:

• worked;
• went to church;
• hometaught two new families (both of whom are going to be a challenge -- one is a newly baptized Haitian who doesn't speak English and barely any French; the other is an inactive single mother from Bolivia who recently lost her job and now cannot pay her rent);
• hosted a small-group dinner in my apartment for three families in the ward (which meant I was baking cakes at midnight last night after the dance concert and throwing together a glazed ham with cheesy potatoes and steamed asparagus this afternoon between the marathon hometeaching visits); and
• did all the other cleaning and errands that have to get done on a weekend (especially if people are coming over).

And now it's 1:30am, which means I have four hours to sleep before I have to get up to go to the gym before heading to work.  Sheesh -- I'm tired already! 

Two Gents

A few weeks ago I saw the Shakespeare Theatre Company's "rock opera" version of Two Gentlemen of Verona (and I didn't like it).  Tonight, I saw them do the actual Shakespeare play -- and I liked it much better.

Given the current hour (it's past 1:00am already!), I won't take the time to write out a synopsis -- especially since you can get one here.

What I liked about this production was the following:

First, it was set in an edgy, hipster version of the modern day that made the play feel current and emphasized the fact hat this is a tumultuous romantic comedy about teenagers figuring out love, friendship, ambition and loyalty.  

Second, it had very dark undertones and provided an interpretation of the final scene that finally made sense to me.  Suffice to say that there are two men vying for the same woman's love.  The first guy has been loyal and honorable; the second guy has been disloyal, dishonest, violent and kind of a creep.  And yet in the final scene, the first guy relinquishes his claim to the lady's love, giving her to the second guy -- a move that I've always found entirely implausible.  This production, however, pushed the conflict between the to men to serious violence, to the point where the second guy was on the verge of committing suicide after realizing how despicable he'd been.  So the first guy's offer to give up his fiancee was an act of desperation to stop further atrocities, rather than a magnanimous gesture of forgiveness (and macho horse trading).  I hadn't thought of that reading before, but I liked it.

Alvin Ailey

Last night after the opera, I headed down to the Kennedy Center to see a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. 

They're a remarkable modern dance company -- predominantly African American, with a tremendously positive vibe at their performances and exquisitely talented dancers (which makes up for sometimes less than stellar choreography).  This is the third time I've seen them since 2005 and the first time since Robert Battle came on board as their new artistic director last year.  I was excited to see what he'd done with the group -- his pieces were vibrant and strong, giving a valuable update to the company's repertoire (which can sometimes feel dated). 

Of course, they didn't devote the whole evening to new works -- they ended the show, as they almost always do, with Revelations, their iconic piece set to African American spirituals.  It was first performed in the early 1960s, but it's a classic that I love to see.  One of my favorite pieces within Revelations is a duet between man and woman to a song that pleads "Fix Me Jesus."  It's a prayer that so many of us sing every day.

Wagner and the anatomy of the heart

Grandpa Davis -- who found his calling in life as a radiologist -- likes to joke about peering into the black-and-white world of x-rays in search of the colloquial "cockles of the heart."  As far as I know, he never found them. 

I'm starting to think that x-rays may not be the right place for the secrets of the heart.  The more I listen to Wagner's operas, the more convinced I am of his genius:  Outside of certain spiritual experiences, his music touches my heart more intimately than anything else I've known. 

On Saturday the Metropolitan Opera broadcast a live performance of its new production of Gotterdammerung, the final episode in Wagner's epic, four-part Ring Cycle.  I had hoped to see the broadcast in the theater -- but with work demands I couldn't afford to devote seven hours of my Saturday to the opera alone.  So I stayed home and listened to the radio broadcast while dutifully drafting financing contracts for a major league hockey team. 

The opera is long and complicated and, frankly, exhausting.  I remember my first encounter with Wagner was seeing Tristan und Isolde in Londong in 2003 -- I characterized it as wading through five hours of mud in search of a few diamonds.  I've moved well beyond mud and can now appreciate the power and artistry of the work.  The singers and orchestra were magnificent throughout, and it was wonderful to hear them perform.  Chalk up another powerful performance that I wish I could have seen live.

We were down to the last five minutes of the opera.  The story was over -- Siegfried was dead, Brunnhilde had ridden her horse into the pyre, and Valhalla and all the gods had gone up in flames -- and I was already bustling about getting ready to leave to go downtown for another event.  I was in the closet changing clothes and listening distractedly while the closing refrains continued on the radio.  Then something happened:  The soft, ascending line of the melody, carried by the violins, split for a moment into a surprising harmony before resuming its quiet climb.  The effect, literally, was heart wrenching.  My chest constricted and I burst into tears.  There were no words, no video, nothing happening other than music that affected me in the most physical way I have ever experienced.  It was totally unexpected and left me rather shaken.  (Even my last experience with Wagner, which left me feeling like a different person, hadn't affected me quite like this.) 

Then it was over -- the end of the world had come and gone, and Wagner had placed me gently on the other side.  I dried my tears, took a deep breath, and headed out into the night.

The heart may not have cockles, but it does have strings -- and Wagner knows how to pull them hard.

Poetry, Painting and Photography

On Thursday, I attended a poetry reading about the photography of painters. 

The Phillips Collection, one of Washington's leading art museums, is currently showing an exhibit focusing on 19th Century post-impressionist artists' use of the then-newly-invented Kodak camera. (The Post reviewed it here.) 

I found it fascinating.  The photographs gave almost magical glimpses into a long-lost world of the 1890s:  A number of snapshots were smaller than a credit card and yet were so exquisitely clear, and the scene so fully realized, that I felt I was looking into a fairy land where everything was miniature and perfect.  In most cases, I found the photographs much more captivating than the paintings.  There's a haunting quality in old photographs.  To me, the subjects, smiling or grim, are just an anonymous flash in the river of history, and yet, to them, the moment of that flash was as complicated, vast and uncertain as the flash that I'm living through right now.  It's the feeling of infinity perched on a pinhead.  I think it's the feeling of mortality. 

The paintings, on the other hand, were generally less compelling.  The loveliness of the impressionists gave way to a grittier, more "realistic" aesthetic in the post-impressionist movement, and I frankly don't care for it much.  Especially not when there are there are intriguing little photographs at hand.  But the juxtaposition of the paintings with photographs of the same models was fun to see.  The pairings threw into relief the strengths of each medium.  For example, in the images below, I love how the painter was able to open the girl's face in a way that the photographer could not (keeping in mind that the painter and the photographer are the same person).

Apparently anticipating that the exhibition might trigger thoughtful ruminations on photography and painting, the Phillips Collection joined with the Folger Shakespeare Library's Poetry Series and invited poet Yusef Komunyaka to view the exhibit and respond in the form of a public poetry reading. 

I had never heard of Mr. Komunyaka before.  His biography is impressive, and I liked the poems I read before hearing him speak.  Unfortunately, a talent for writing poetry is not the same as a talent for performing that poetry.  I found his readings to be very boring and nearly unintelligible.  On the other hand, the cadences of his growly Louisiana drawl had a wonderfully calming effect after a long day at work, sending me to that sweet spot between sleep and wakefulness as masterfully as Richard G. Scott ever did.

Gastronomical Happiness

I got home from work today and -- lo and behold -- waiting in my mailbox was The Michelin Guide to New York City restaurants!

I was surprised and delighted but also a tad baffled -- I hadn't ordered the book, and the birthday/holiday season is well past.  Then I saw the note:  "Wishing you gastronomical happiness! Will and Susan"

Aha!

Last week one of my clients was in town and wanted to thank me for the work I'd done for him during the past year, especially during a particularly painful stretch on New Year's Eve.  He took me to a very nice lunch at Tosca, a fine Italian restaurant near my office (which happens to be a favorite of Justice Scalia, who was dining at a neighboring table).  In addition, once we were seated, this client handed me a very generous American Express dining gift card.  I was totally caught off-guard by the gesture -- I've never had any client go so far out of his way to say thanks.

That night I asked Amanda if the Michelin Guide her parents had given her covered New York -- because she and I are meeting there in March to see Juan Diego Florez sing L'Elisir d'Amore at the Metropolitan Opera, and I couldn't think of a better occasion to redeem the gift card.  Amanda said no, her guide only covered the major cities of Europe, which meant we'll be eating well this summer in Berlin and St. Petersburg but would be on our own for New York.

Not so anymore!  Thanks (indeed, many thanks!) to Will and Susan (Amanda's padres), we now have a complete guide to the gastronomical paradise that is New York City.  I can hardly wait.  I've been devouring the reviews all night, feeling pleased with myself for having already eaten at many of the restaurants and flagging all the new ones that I want to try.  When I came to La Grenouille, which is described as "the Judi Dench of French dining," I literally started giggling.  I am SO the right audience for this book.

Mark Morris Dance Group

I love dance.  In the eight years since I moved to the East Coast, I've seen a lot of it.  As with anything, the more you see and know, the better you can judge the quality.  If you'd asked me this morning what I thought were the best dance performances I'd seen, I would have listed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's performance of Revelations that I saw at the Kennedy Center in 2005 and the Paris Opera Ballet's performance of Prokofiev's Cendrillon that I saw last November. 

Now, I would add tonight's performance at the Kennedy Center of Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato by the Mark Morris Dance Group. 

The history of this piece is as follows:  John Milton wrote two poems, L'Allegro (Mirth) and Il Penseroso (Melancholy), that were published as companion pieces in 1645.  In 1740, George Friedrich Handel and his librettist interwove those two poems into a single poem, added a third poem called Il Moderato (Moderation), and set the three poems to music in a pastoral oratorio for solo voices, orchestra and chorus.  In 1988, while in residence at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, Mark Morris choreographed an evening-length dance to the oratorio.  That is what I saw tonight. 

It was perfect.

The music, performed live in the orchestra pit by a strong orchestra and excellent baroque singers, was very lovely and had the best of everything I love about Handel -- delicate melodies, lively choruses (including one similar to the Hallelujah chorus), lots of ornamentation. 

The set and lighting were breathtaking.  There was a series of rectangular arched panels that framed the stage, spaced evenly from front to back, and between which sheer scrims could be lowered and raised.  The panels and scrims were lit with rich and various colors and, when the scrims were moved, the effect was of being immersed in a moving Rothko painting.

Through that landscape the dancers moved with incredible grace, lyricism and expression, performing lovely choreography that was neither quite narrative nor entirely abstract.  It was beautiful and moving and sometimes whimsical -- and it captured, in an astonishing way, the essence of mirth and melancholy that Milton had sought to convey in his poetry. 

During intermission, I heard the man behind me say the choreography was like a painting, and I couldn't have agreed more (obviously, art already was on my mind).  The tableaux that emerged through the movement seemed to be what might result if you mixed a Rubens with a Seurat and then framed it in a Rothko.  It was, to my mind, the best sort of performance, where all the art forms combine to create something so lovely that, for a moment, you forget the rest of the world and want for nothing but what you have before you.

Have a heart!

I did.  Literally.  It was on the menu.

Beef heart with onions and potato

A Peruvian delicacy called anticucho, skewered beef hearts were common on the street vendors' grills that I passed in Peru.

I'd never been brave enough to eat them, though, preferring to chicken out and (ar, ar, this pun wasn't planned) eat the chicken instead.  Tonight, however, I decided to give it a try.  I was eating at El Chalan, a highly praised Peruvian restaurant, and I figured that if any place was going to do it right (or at least safely, which might not be the same thing), this would be it.  I also appreciated that Amy (with whom I have seasons tickets to modern dance at the Kennedy Center) was willing to try it with me.

Turns out, it's delicious.  Very thin and extremely tender, it resembled a very fine steak.  But if you paid attention, you could see how the strips could be reformed into the shape of the heart's chambers, and there were holes where the arteries would have gone out.  (I tried not to pay too much attention.)

The rest of the dinner was tasty, too.  I had lomo saltado especial, which consisted of strips of filet mignon that had been sauteed with onions, potatoes and tomatoes, served on a bed of rice with a cilantro garnish.

Lomo saltado