During the evening after our second day working on the mural at Santiago Zamora our group went to a building called Casa Herrera in Antigua. The building is the Guatemala branch of University of Texas at Austin. The building is used by students and faculty studying Mesoamerica as a home base while working in Guatemala. We got a tour of the facility from the director Milady, who also told us about their first undergrad program they were preparing for for the fall. She mentioned that UT at Austin had extended its deadline to apply to the program until April 1st. That evening I talked to Prof. Turner about whether or not I should try applying to the program. The more we talked about it the more interested in the program I became.
The next evening we met a different group from Antigua. We met two amazing young women from Antigua who have started a program called Ninos Artistas. the program brings contemporary artists together with young art students in Antigua to go projects and learn more about art.
Both Milady and the two woman from Ninos Artistas came to Santiago Zamora after we met them to help us paint the mural, so we got a lot of time to get to know each other.
Lake Atitlan is a beautiful volcanic lake surrounded by three volcanoes. Our first night at the lake we did a home stay with native families. I roomed with one of my classmates, Erica. We stayed with a large family in a cute little place that had a beautiful view of the lake.
The home stay was a wonderful experience, as I mentioned in the earlier home stay post. Neither Erica nor I spoke Spanish, but we made do communicating mostly with our hands. The night we had dinner and tried on traditional clothing and in the morning we had a wonderful breakfast and took a lot of pictures with the family.
After the class met up the second day at Lake Atitlan, we got into the back of some pickup trucks and rode standing up along the winding roads leading around the lake to Panajachel, one of the main tourist cities around the lake. The truck ride was extremely exciting and everyone enjoyed it.
At Panajachel we dropped off our luggage at our hotel then we went on a boat ride on the lake. we went around to several of the small towns around the lake and had lunch at a hotel with a view. We also stopped at another woman's weaving cooperative and they showed us how they dye their threads. The lake was beautiful and we all took pictures during the trip. When we got back to Panajachel we all went shopping then that evening we had our final dinner in Guatemala. We stayed in our hotel that final night and go up really early the next morning to to drive to Guatemala City for our flight. At the airport we said goodbye to our fantastic tour guide and got on our flight home.
No comments:
Post a Comment