Somehow three weeks had gone by and it was our time to leave our homestay family, our language school, eco spanish school and our beloved San Juan La Laguna. In the states when you get just a week or two vacation and you have to jump in and out of a place, you get lucky if you just get a taste of a place. We thought we’d get to go deeper having three weeks, but instead, we feel like we barely scratched the surface.
Our last week in town was spent recovering from food poisoning in Xela, thank god for being in latin america where chicken soup is easy to come by. Here they call it Tzutujil soup (the local indigenous language) and visiting all the things we hadn’t gotten to yet. Like the tours in town for weaving and mayan bees (did you know Mayan bees don’t have stingers?).
Weaving is a central part of life in the towns around Lake Atitlan. Each town has their own unique style of weaving, which is how you can tell the differences of where someone is from. The techniques are passed down from generation to generation. Maria (pictured above) teaches the teachers at her language school the art of weaving as well as what the colors and placement stands for so these traditions are not lost. Many of the youth in town are losing their Mayan understanding, she is working hard to keep them in tact and continue the process. Her sister also owns a Weaving shop, Batz Textiles, in town and exports all of her products to international markets. All their dyes are completely natural and hand done.
We also spent a day to head over to Santiago La Laguna, one of the biggest towns in Lake Atitlan. The murals and art around the lake have been breathtaking, but upon arrival in Santiago we immediately came upon a street called Ruta de Murales, an artist collective spanning the length of 12 blocks with 12 artists. Santiago is a working town, not a lot of tourists come here, so it was easy to just observe the town go by. markets carrying fruits and vegetables you can’t get anywhere else on the lake (this is my teacher’s greatest outing from San Juan. The only other place she goes is Pana on the opposite side of the lake, if she has to).
We are going to miss our sweet town of San Juan La Laguna. Where the kids would walk to school or home or to go get snacks without us and without any worry. Where the tienda owner knew Peter and called him by all the familiar names “Pedro” his name is spanish, “Tocayo” the name you say when you share the same name as someone else, in this case, the tienda owner was also Pedro, and then “Lu” the Tzutujil indigenous name for Pedro. The kids next door coming over to play any form of ball game with our kids. Our brains fatigued from 3 hours of spanish everyday, but Maria’s big smile welcoming us back in for more spanish over dinner. All the street dogs who were strangely so friendly (but won’t miss dodging their poop constantly or their middle of the night turf war battles of howls and thrashing). Pedrocito and all the kids finally accepting Peter’s nickname he’s been trying to get stick for decades, the scorpion. Which in spanish translates to El Escorpion. Which made little pedrocito, escorpioncito. To solidify his new nickname, peter got them matching scorpion bracelets.
We’ll miss the rooftop of our house and the views it provided of the nearby El Rostro Maya mountain peak as well as the viewpoint to watch all the tuk tuks and traffic come and go through town. Where the kids flew kites and drew pictures of the mountain, where we’d go at night to look at the stars and catch a lake breeze.
we’ll miss the lanchas and using them as our main source of transportation. It is certainly not something we’re used to doing in LA. We’ll miss the water splashing alongside the lancha, sometimes into our faces. We’ll miss being able to sit on the front of the lancha when there’s either nobody in the boat or when the boat is too full and there’s nowhere else to sit. We’ll miss the views of the various volcanos at every turn on the lake. We’ll miss being able to swim in San Marcos in heavenly cool volcanic water. We’ll miss taking the lancha to soccer practice and games 3x a week in neighboring Santa Cruz.
We’ll miss finding the best spot to find wi-fi with the best view. Our faves ended up being Utz food and Xe kuku'Aab'aj (which translates to San Juan La Laguna in Tzutujil & also makes the best margarita) during the day. And then walking down the street to El Gato perdido or El Artesano (both incredible places to eat when you’re looking for a break from Guatemalan food and need a european fix) they also have their wi-fi turned on at all times, so you could find us lingering in front of their closed doors with the glow of our phones to connect to people back home. I’ll even miss being disconnected. A forced pause of disconnection was actually nice. It allowed us to really sink into where we were. (note here, we subsequently got one of our phones connected to google fi, which apparently you need to set up before you leave the states. We learned this the hard way when mine just wouldn’t connect. They say they turn it off after three months if you’re only using it abroad, so we’ll see how it goes! meanwhile, i’m still connected to T-mobile which doesn’t appear to actually work that well, so i’m pretty much relegated to wi-fi when we stay at hotels or when a restaurant has connection).
We’ll miss all the beautiful street art throughout San Juan. There is pretty much a mural at every turn in town. If someone is not weaving, they are painting. We will miss the kindness this town has offered to us and all the views.
Until next time San Juan La Laguna, you were so great to us as our first stop on our trip!
As always, Peter and I both are updating our travels daily over on our instagram pages @marisavitalephoto and @Peterdjames
♥️♥️♥️