Sunday Walk to the Beach

Life continues with its ups and downs. Bert & I went for a walk on Sunday with Chunk & Big Boy on leashes, and the escapees, Velvet & Honeybear who ran free and stayed close (luckily). We avoided the crowded Christmas areas downtown and instead went to the beach here in Jucanya. Even that is decorated for the holidays!

After almost 10 years here in Guatemala, Christmas still feels strange with the bright sun, warm weather, and no snow. But we adapt. Guatemalans love Xmas and celebrate with street parties, parades, and lots of fireworks. 

Bert is the shadowy figure in the middle. Paraglider in the sky. San Pedro volcano in the afternoon haze.

These lovely yellow flowers bloom every fall all along the riverside.

This pink grass practically glows in the sunlight. I love it!

Bert and dogs. This is the beach road in Jucanya. It is always lined with stalls selling things but during the holidays, it is extra festive! All over town, people love to string up decorations over the roads.

A fake Christmas tree and a sleigh with reindeer silhouetted by the setting sun on Lake Atitlan.

These flowers are usually orange and red, but these ones are pretty pink & yellow. They are quite small but there are many of them all over the plant, which is very tall, almost like a tree.

Bert & dogs on the beach road. Palm trees, yay!

Hard to see but those red berries are COFFEE!!

Bananas growing over a wall. My friend had banana trees in his yard and said there were too many for one person to eat!

Rob's favourite plant -- Angel's Trumpet. Smells gorgeous, but is toxic to touch!

Our Christmas Coffee Table! No tree, but stocking, gifts, and cookies for "Santa". :D

Merry Christmas to everyone! 🎄

Revisiting the Nature Reserve

Bert and I went to the Reserva Natural Atitlán just out side of Panajachel on a warm Wednesday afternoon. 

Photos won't upload, so I guess the short video is all ya get.

Bert Bechamel, Professional Mosaic Artist

Bert has finally finished this amazing commission art piece for a friend! It is spectacular!

The final piece!

There are gems that sparkle in the light.

He bought the gems from the local sewing and fabric stores. The local ladies sew them on to their traditional clothing.

The 8 ball is particularly impressive! Very difficult to make such small pieces.

 I really like how he shaped the white tiles to outline the bones in the face, like the eye sockets. Here you can also see how the black grout highlights the contours.

The details are amazing. That's a spade, diamond, heart, and club.

In the picture above, you can see more detail of the background pattern. I told him he should have just done a scattered broken tile background for a quick, easy finish, but he insisted on making this complex pattern. He took a picture of a cobblestone road in town as his template.

Three highlighted pieces -- a green and two white.

In the photo above, I've highlighted three pieces that explain why it took so long for Bert to finish this. He carves out the tiles to the exact shapes he needs to fit in the space. This is no ordinary mosaic where the artist just breaks pieces and fits them in willy-nilly! Bert is a perfectionist! He told me sometimes it takes him 45 minutes to make one piece. 😲

Congratulations, Bert, on this great artwork!

Sugar High On a Friday Night

My life is so thrilling. My Friday night is staying home playing video games and overdosing on sugar!! 

Amongst the junk food I bought at La Torre grocery store today, on a whim I bought this ginormous bottle of POP. Can you guess what the flavor is? Soda Shampan...champagne! Champagne cola is kind of a unique flavor in the Carribean and Latin America. It tastes sort of like cream soda. This one is not bad but a little weak. I realized belatedly that it has aspartame which gives it a yucky aftertaste. Oh well.

That's a lotta pop.

Another strange find in the store today, Fruit of the Forest Oreos. I can't really say they taste like much at all. I mostly taste the chocolate cookie part but I guess the purple filling tastes like...tangy sugar. Not raspberry or blackberry or anything.

Fruit of the Forest Oreos

Just in case you need more sugar for breakfast, Guatemala is obsessed with horrible sugary cereals. It was fun at first, but it's getting kind of tiresome now. I mean do you really need marshmallows in your chocolate rice krispies? I would love to have some nice lightly sweetened LIFE cereal or some brown sugar Mini-Wheats.

Chocolate Rice Krispies with Marshmallows

Poor Bert is subsisting on Cream of Wheat, yogurt, bananas, and pudding. He's getting his teeth fixed, which basically means he's getting most of them pulled out. He's had four done already. After they're all done being pulled, he will get fitted for partial dentures. Ack, that sounds like such an old man thing, doesn't it? Ha ha!
For reference, getting a tooth pulled (extraction) costs Q150 each. That's roughly $26 Canadian or $20 U.S. dollars. Pretty cheap!

Heart of Wheat -- the closest to Cream of Wheat we've found here.

Look at that face! 😍

Bert is being comforted in his dental pain by a new puppy. Yes, we know. Not another dog! Well, he wasn't supposed to stay but he's just so darn cute! His name is Chunk! He's about three-and-a-half months old and he already weighs almost 20 pounds. He is a big boy. His coat is super shiny and black with brown undertones. He is very handsome and laid back and adorable.

So life is pretty normal. Nice and warm here, a bit cloudy in the evenings but no rain.
It's pretty quiet in town because we're in that peaceful time between Christmas and Easter. A few months of calm and then tourists will come pouring back in.

I hope you're all well and enjoying life wherever you are. Peace out from Guatemala!

Christmas in Guatemala 2019

This Christmas in Panajachel was unfortunately soured by many little troubles. But I am focusing on the good things that happened and not the bad, and I am especially thankful for all my good friends here in Pana who made my Xmas very special.

I had a wonderful trip across the lake to San Pedro to visit a friend.
I had a delicious potluck Xmas dinner.
I enjoyed the midnight fireworks on Christmas Eve.
I received thoughtful, generous, and unexpected gifts.
I am blessed with a house full of adorable cats and dogs.
I got to video chat with my family in Canada on Christmas Day.

One of the most special moments was small and simple. I was walking home from the potluck and feeling a little down. I saw three young girls playing with some firecrackers, just little ones that spit and sparkle. I walked over to them and gave them each a huge two-foot-long sparkler that I had in my bag. Their faces lit up with excitement! They ran quickly to a nearby tienda to tell their mother. They said (in Spanish), "Look what the gringa gave us!!!" 😄 There was one more child in the store that got the last of my sparklers and I wished them a Feliz Navidad and walked away with a smile on my face.

Below are some photos and videos from the last few days. Christmas here is very special, full of family and traditions, and it's just like home in that way.

Bert got a Christmas basket from one of his dogwalking clients.

This is Coco. She is staying with us for Xmas while her mom is in the States.

The J sound in Spanish sounds like H.

A family selling moss, lichens, pine boughs by the road.
Guatemalans use them to make nativity scenes.

I bought a stick & moss deer for only Q10. The pets love it!

Leo has killed the deer!

There are a lot of parades at Christmastime. Random Santas on motorcycles one night.

A beautiful mural painted on the wall on the way to the docks.

The docks in Panajachel. We went to visit a friend across the lake in San Pedro.

The old Mikaso hotel.

The church in San Pedro.

Some lovely gifts from my friends.

A cute card from my friend.

The "tree" and church in Panajachel

Olafs at the bakery.

My friend built this beer tree for the bar!

The giant sparklers. Only Q10 a pack and 4 sparklers per pack.
That's about $1.71 Canadian or $1.30 American.

Bert and his sparkler at the potluck dinner on Xmas Eve.

Bert's creative Christmas wrapping of my gifts!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas or other holiday celebration! 🎄🎅🎉

Belated Photos of our Xela Xopping Trip

We went to Xela (pronounced Shay-Lah) for Xopping (shopping -- get it??) on the last weekend of December and hit up some big fancy malls for Black Friday sales. It was a lot of fun and exhausting at the same time! One of my friends said, "Well, I've had enough of consumerism for a while." 😆

As usual, we rented a private minivan and driver thru my friend, Gustavo. The van seats 12 and we had 8 people with room for all our packages -- although we really tried to fill all that room up!!

Our first stop was Interplaza Mall. It was super fancy! It's always a bit of a shock to go from rural Panajachel to Xela, which is so much more of a big city with all the amenities of home. The streets are a bit dirtier and of course everyone is Guatemalan, but being in a shiny mall feels kinda like Canada.

Me in the Barbie photo booth. So hilarious!

I went up to the second floor to take pics looking down at my friends in the Barbie booth. :D

The bunch of us were like gawking kids in a candy store. It was fun! You would have thunk we'd never been to a mall before. 😃

Bert beelined it to Wendy's! It had been four and a half years since he's had good fast food.

There was an outdoor balcony at the food court. You can see the "perky" volcano and the Dollar City.

The Dollar City is everyone's favorite stop and we shopped HARD. Cheryl won the prize for biggest cart with Elle a close second! The "boys" graciously offered to help the ladies carry their packages.

Bert helping Cheryl carry her bags.

After Dollar City, we went to Cemaco, which is kinda like a HomeSense or HomeGoods plus they also have tools and gardening and flooring and paint and everything basically. Well, no clothes actually, which is nice. If I was richer, I'd buy so much stuff at Cemaco!

Look at all the Christmas stuff!

Going into the Juguetón toy store was super crazy. It was a HUGE store and there were kids running everywhere, even at 10am. I went in specifically to find Guatemalan UNO cards, but it took me a bit to find them...and then of course they were right at the checkout counter when I left. Duh. Should have checked there first!
It was very festive in the toy store but also strange because it was so clean and seemed expensive. It's hard to reconcile this big white heaven of toys to the poor kids living on my street who share one half-deflated ball. Every now and then, I buy my neighbour kids some bubbles and they laugh with delight! I wish I could afford to buy them more toys or ice cream or something. I really have no clue what toys kids want these days though. Good news though -- Juguetón does a toy drive for kids every year at Christmas. Yay! 

One other strange thing -- all the Barbies were white. Huh? Why weren't there Latina Barbies?

Holy Christmas Tree, Batman! (And Bert to the side there.)

After Cemaco, it was off to our "usual" mall, the Pradera, where there is a Walmart. We stopped and got MORE food -- cuz we're gluttons like that -- and then I hit up Walmart while others went around to the Megapaca for second-hand clothes and stuff, and others wandered the mall to browse the shops. Pradera mall is super nice and has more reasonably-priced stores than Interplaza, the first mall. By the time we got there, it was just past noon on a Saturday so it was PACKED. It really felt like Christmas shopping! I had to wait for almost 30 minutes to use the washroom. Ugh.

Everyone was all shopped out by late afternoon so we hopped back in our minivan and headed home. The ride home is always a lot quieter than the ride there! We made it back to Panajachel in time for Cheryl to catch a boat back to her home across the lake in San Pedro. Her husband didn't even chastise her about all her purchases! 😆

Some of my Dollar City haul.

For those who are interested in the prices of things in comparison to home, below is a chart of the stuff in the picture above and the approximate equivalent in Canadian and American dollars. The Dollar City stuff is identical to the stuff back home. Sometimes they even have Dollarama price stickers on them still.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season and remembering that it's not all about buying gifts. Sure, I love presents as much as the next person, but I love more that I have a wonderful family and great friends! ☮️

Big Boy Is a Star!

A short while ago, a lovely Canadian woman named Jess posted in a Facebook group that she was looking for a dog to do a commercial. Of course, I jumped all over that and sent her a tonne of photos of all the doggies. Jess and her husband, Greg, came to our house and met our pack of lunatic puppies and we all agreed that Big Boy would be the best dog for the job because he is big, handsome, and well trained.

Bert posted on Facebook: "Well, it is about time one of my fury freeloaders got a job. Big Boy is going to be in a video ad for a nice couple that I met here that have a pet business in the U.S. They work with local artisans here making collars, leashes, and other accessories. So proud of my Big Boy! The money he makes will go towards helping other street dogs! (like he used to be)"

At 6am on a Sunday morning, Bert and Big Boy went across town to meet everybody -- Livvy the photographer, Jess & Greg, and two human actors.

They filmed in front of some random person's house because it had a nice doorway.

In the picture above, you can see that Hank (our former dog who voluntarily returned to the streets) decided to come along and hang about with the team! Bert said that Hank was Big Boy's "entourage". LOL!

Bert commented: "Big Boy taking 5 because he is such a diva."

Big Boy had a bit of a crush on his co-star.

It took 3 hours of filming to make this 1-minute commercial but I think it turned out great!
Congratulations, Big Boy, on your first job!

If you'd like to check out the lovely collars and dog accessories, click here --> RUFF ON THE ROAD