Monday, August 3: For the next leg of our “Living Outside of the U.S.A. for 75% of the four-year span of our current fascist administration,” we are visiting the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden for the 89 days we are allowed to stay in the Schengen Zone. We will be moving slowly through these countries, most often staying a week in each place with some exceptions in Finland and Norway.
Of course we timed our trip to be back in the U.S. in time to vote in the mid-term elections on November 3. If Democrats don’t take power in both/either the House and/or the Senate, we’ll be seriously considering moving out of the U.S. more permanently, though we will likely always have a small home in the U.S. for various financial and medical reasons.
It is my understanding that the true “Scandinavian” countries are Denmark, Sweden and Norway, while the “Nordic “countries also include Iceland and Finland. Since we’re including Finland but not Iceland on this trip, I guess you could call it our Nordic trip. However, some people broaden the definition of Scandinavia to include Finland and Iceland. Thus, I will call it our Scandinavian trip although it’s not technically correct.
I have been dreaming of visiting these countries for ages. I love the cold, although I don’t know how much I’ll care for the rain during the shoulder season when we are going, from August 4- October 30. I love the idea of “hygge” in Denmark, the coziness factor that is practiced by the Danes: cozying up under blankets with candles all around and drinking hot cocoa, playing board games with friends, cooking with others, curling up with a good book. I have always been enamored with Denmark due to the many television series and movies we have watched, especially the political drama Borgen. I am a real fan of Danish culture. I also look forward to exploring the fjords of Norway and the lakes and cool landscapes of Finland and Sweden.
INSPIRATIONAL T.V. SHOWS & MOVIES
Below are some of my favorite Danish shows and movies:
Below are books set in each location. The ones with star ratings I have already read, the green ones I own and plan to read, and the others are suggestions for future reading.
Denmark ↓
The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen
The Library of Shadows by Mikkel Birkegaard
The Midnight Witness by Sara Blaedel
The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen: Childhood, Youth, Dependency
Our itinerary focuses on living like a local as much as one can in a week. Ideally we would have stayed three weeks in each of the four different countries, but then we would have missed a lot of places in each country. Our goal is to live about a week in each place with daily excursions, giving us time to relax, cook in, and explore neighborhoods at a leisurely pace.
ON AUGUST 18: FlixBus from Aarhus to Copenhagen, then flight to Helsinki.
August 18-25 (7 nights): Helsinki, Finland
August 25-30: (5 nights) Tampere, Finland
August 30-September 4 (5 nights): Vaasa, Finland
September 4-10 (6 nights): Turku, Finland
ON SEPTEMBER 10: train from Turku to Helsinki and flight to Bergen, Norway
September 10-17 (7 nights): Bergen, Norway
September 17-19 (3 nights) : Hurtigruten cruise from Bergen to Svolvær, Norway, with stops in Alesund, Trondheim and finally at Svolvær in the Lofoten Islands.
September 20-23 (3 nights): Lofoten, Norway.
ON SEPTEMBER 23: Express boat from Svolvær hurtigbåtkai to Bodø hurtigbåtkai 6 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Tickets on REIS app.
ON SEPTEMBER 25: 10-hour train ride from Bodø to Trondheim.
September 25-28 (3 nights): Trondheim.
ON SEPTEMBER 27: Rent a car to explore around Trondheim and drive on the 28th from Trondheim to Geiranger (5 hours 41 min).
September 28-October 1 (3 nights): Geiranger, Norway.
ON OCTOBER 1, drive 4+ hours from Geiranger to Lillehammer, Norway. Return rental car in Lillehammer.
October 1-3 (2 nights): Lillehammer, Norway.
October 3, take a train 2 hours from Lillehammer to Oslo, Norway.
October 3-10 (7 nights): Oslo, Norway.
October 10-17 (7 nights): Stockholm, Sweden.
October 17-23 (6 nights): Gothenburg, Sweden.
October 23-30 (7 nights): Malmö, Sweden.
ON OCTOBER 30, Fly home from Copenhagen to Boston, Massachusetts to Washington, D.C.
Most of the time, we will be using public transportation, especially trains between destinations, except for the cruise and the car rental in Norway. We will also take buses. It is possible we may rent a car for short stints in Aarhus, Denmark and Tampere, Finland.
I have created two journals I’ll take along, one for Denmark and Finland, and the second from Norway to Sweden.
July 31, 2026: Welcome to our July cocktail hour. Let’s have a nice summer cocktail like a Gin & Tonic Sgroppino, with its scoop of refreshing lime sorbet. It has been miserably hot and humid here for most of the month, so maybe we’ll stay inside in air conditioning. Maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see the Buck Moon on the 29th. Sunset in Virginia is at around 8:25 in July and we can mingle and sip, while wallowing through damp layers of heat.
I have a variety of soda or seltzer water for those of you who don’t drink.
July marked our second of two months back in the U.S. before we leave for Europe. We started the month with Adam having surgery in Managua to drain and clean out an infection on his left hip and Mike spending time with him in Hospital MilitarEscuela for 12 days. This made for a heavy and worrisome time for our family as we all pulled for Adam to get healthy again.
Homebody stuff
On the 1st of July, I had my stitches removed from my Mohs surgery. I also had quite a bit of bruising under my left eye that eventually cleared up. After the stitches were removed, I treated myself to a pedicure and did a little shopping so I wouldn’t sit around worrying incessantly about Adam.
We spent a lot of time simply hanging around at home and playing or interacting with Allie. We have needed to replace our refrigerator for some time, so on Thursday the 16th, Mike ordered a new one. On Saturday the 18th, we had a big thunderstorm and both Mike and I nearly jumped out of our skin when a bolt of lightning hit a tree in our neighbor’s yard, sending a large branch crashing into our yard. Another day, Mike got stung by wasps from a wasp nest beside the garage, so he bundled up in protective clothing to attack the nest with spray.
Mike and I took Allie to the pool at Oakton Swim and Racquet on the 14th, where she jumped around non-stop and then zonked out for hours afterward. We went again on the 19th, this time with Alex, while Jandira was at work. On Wednesday the 29th, Mike and I took Allie to the playground at Crossfield Elementary School, where she had a grand time chasing other children, climbing ladders, swinging, going down slides, and “cooking up” a birthday cake with wood chips.
I finished 6 books in July bringing my total to 40/48. I especially enjoyed The Girl Who Played with Fire (Millenium #2) by Stieg Larsson; The Arc of the Swallow (Søren Marhauge #2) by S.J. Gazan; and The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well by Meik Wiking. While Mike was in Nicaragua, I watched a movie Alex recommended, Crazy, Stupid, Love during which I fell asleep; I had to continue watching it the next day. I also watched and enjoyed Voicemails for Isabelle, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and A Tourist’s Guide to Love. We started watching a couple of new series or new seasons of old series: Broadchurch; The Moonflower Murders; The Marlow Murder Club; La Stagiaire (The Intern); The Gift (Atiye); Trying (S5); and Las de la última fila. We finished watching Your Friends and Neighbors (S2); Imperfect Women; and Alice and Steve (S1). We continued watching The Four Seasons (S2); AnotherSelf (Zeytin Ağacı) (S3); The Bear; Sommerdahl (S1); Marriage; Thank You Next (Kimler Geldi Kimler Geçti) (S3); Grantchester (S6); Wallander (S2); Love Life (S2); Old Money(Enfes Bir Aksam) (S1); and The New Adventures of Old Christine (S4).
Independence Day and America’s 250th Celebration
I have always hated the 4th of July in the U.S. I don’t enjoy fireworks, BBQs, 100 degree heat and humidity, gnats and mosquitos, the idea of American exceptionalism, and people wearing and waving the obnoxious colors of red, white and blue. Every day of the interminable weekend, the weather service issued extreme heat warnings. Not to mention that it was the 250th celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, an event hijacked by the orange goon and made into a partisan event that attacked the majority of American citizens. I despise this embarrassing and ridiculous timeline. I abhor our despicable president and everything he stands for, as well as the bunch of cronies and ass-kissers he’s surrounded himself with and the asshats that continue to support him. This July was simply the worst of a long line of horrible Julys in the history of this country. I refused to celebrate it in any way, and I mostly stayed indoors in air-conditioning all weekend.
Alex, Jandira and Allie went to a celebration in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Mike was still in Managua with Adam. So in a stroke of luck, I had the house all to myself. Pure heaven. I love nothing better than solitude: reading good books, watching movies and dreaming of travel. And I was lucky to be able to do all of those things without having to put up with macho displays of bravado and “patriotism.”
Dining Out
On Thursday, July 2, I took Alex, Jandira and Allie out for Korean food at Maru Ramen & Korean Cuisine. We had a lovely time enjoying Bibimbop, Bulgogi, hot sake and Sapporo.
On Wednesday, July 8, I went to Cinema Arts Theatre to see The Devil Wears Prada 2. I enjoyed it because, though I’m not fashionable, I find fashion interesting. Plus Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep are just so cool! After the movie, I went to P.F. Chang’s where I sat at the bar and sipped a Prosecco and ate shrimp dumplings that weren’t very good.
While Mike was in Managua, I went with the family out to Tsunami Sushi.
Once Mike returned home from Managua, we went out to eat at our favorite Japanese restaurant, Ariake, on the 14th.
On Saturday, the 18th, Mike and I went to our favorite vegetarian Indian restaurant, Woodlands. We’ve been eating at this establishment since the boys were young. I enjoyed my favorite Malai Kofta (green peas and cheese cooked with tomatoes, onions and Indian spices) and Mike tried a new dish, Paneer Mirch Ka Salan (A favorite dish from Hyderabad. Cottage cheese and Jalapeno Chilies cooked in sesame seeds gravy and Tamarind sauce). Of course, we also enjoyed garlic Naan.
On Monday, July 20, we went out with the entire family to Mazadar, where we enjoyed Meat Mantu, Lamb Shank, Lamb Kebab, and Shrimp Biriyani. We always love the food and vibe at this cool Mediterranean restaurant with Afghan and Middle Eastern influences. Allie, once she woke up from her nap, enjoyed playing in the restaurant’s fountain.
While Mike met up with his old friends in Ohio, I went out one night to Anita’s Mexican Restaurant where I enjoyed a margarita and my favorite Chile Relleno.
Finally, we went out to dinner with our friends Karen and Michael on Thursday the 30th at Jackson’s Mighty Fine Food & Lucky Lounge at Reston Town Center. It was great to get together with them and find out about their travels and the trials and rewards of being grandparents to their little granddaughter Fiona. Of course Karen and I kept our tradition of having dirty martinis whenever we get together.
Walks
My walks have been miserable this month with temps near 100, high humidity, gnats and mosquitos. At least I encountered some pretty blooms.
Mike stays with Adam in Nicaragua during his surgery and recovery
Adam checked in to Hospital Militar Escuela in Managua, Nicaragua at 5:30 p.m. on June 30th. There the doctors examined him, did blood tests, and later took him for an MRI. The MRI determined the infection from his left hand, which he thought was healing after being infected (and drained several times) when he got a splinter in it, had settled into his left hip and he would need surgery to drain an abscess that had formed between his femur and hip; the surgeon would also explore the hip for early signs of anything else to clean up. Adam was terrified as he had never had a serious surgery before and was afraid he would never wake up. The whole operation, surgery and recovery, would take 6 hours.
He was diagnosed with Septicemia, commonly called blood poisoning, a serious and life-threatening bloodstream infection caused by bacteria, viruses, or fungi. It triggers an extreme body-wide response that can lead to low blood pressure, organ failure, and death if not treated immediately. The Septicemia led to septic arthritis, when the bacteria travels through the blood and settles inside the fluid and tissues of a joint, most commonly the knee or hip. This spreading infection causes severe inflammation, rapid cartilage damage, and is a critical medical emergency requiring immediate hospital care. Staphylococcus aureus (staph) is the leading cause of both conditions followed by streptococcus bacteria.
Mike arrived in Managua late Tuesday night the 30th after his American Airlines flight from Miami was delayed for 2 1/2 hours due to a gate change, which led to a delay in catering for Business Class. He was extremely frustrated and angrily told the flight attendants that if his son died before he could get to Managua due to this stupid delay, he would never forgive them. It was so ridiculous that they held up a whole flight for a few spoiled business class passengers who might not get to eat or drink for the duration of a 3-hour flight.
The doctors took Adam to surgery early in the morning of July 1 and drained an infectious abscess in his hip and cleaned up another developing infection in his hip. The surgery went well without complications. But he would have a long and slow recovery as he stayed hooked to an IV with antibiotics, with blood tests every two days to make sure the infection was abating and didn’t spread elsewhere. At least Mike was there with him, as Maria had to go home to take care of the children on Wednesday. Adam had to take things a day at a time and follow the doctors’ orders religiously. We hoped he would begin to heal and wouldn’t encounter any setbacks.
The doctors said Adam would need at least a 10-day recovery time in the hospital to heal the wound and to continue getting antibiotics through IV. He wouldn’t be able to put weight on his left leg for 4-6 weeks. Slowly, day by day, he increased his food intake to regain his energy. He got up using a walker to both go to the bathroom and take a shower. Despite not being able to put weight on his left leg, the doctors expected him to do daily movement exercises with his leg and to get up and move around.
Mike stayed in Adam’s hospital room the entire time Adam was hospitalized.
On Saturday the 4th, Adam asked for a barber to come in and cut his hair. He hasn’t had short hair in ages, so I was surprised by this. He said having it short is simply easier to take care of. I think he looks handsome with short hair, but he’s handsome no matter what.
It was a long slow process with nurses and doctors coming in at all hours to take Adam’s vital signs, to jab him with more needles, and to administer the antibiotics and pain meds. He had several more ultrasounds and EKGs and another MRI to make sure nothing else was going on. He had a period of time where he had trouble breathing and found his lung had partially collapsed; this required him to do breathing exercises.
Mike had to go out to a food court to eat his meals but wasn’t allowed to bring food into the hospital. He became friendly with the guards and managed to sneak in fruits and smoothies, which Adam felt he wasn’t getting enough of. One time he was stopped and his backpack was searched, so he learned to be more cunning when he approached the guard. He would walk in as he was finishing up a drink and then would ostentatiously throw the finished drink in the trashcan as he walked by the guard. Thus the guard assumed he had finished his drink and didn’t search his backpack, which contained a smoothie or fruit for Adam. Once he figured out that this method worked, he used it repeatedly.
Mike slept every night in the hospital on a pull-out bed. Most nights were restless as nurses were in and out constantly. When Adam started to get off of the opioid pain meds, he started having night sweats and was utterly drenched. He felt the doctors should have weaned him off slowly because his body wasn’t handling the withdrawal well. Mike patiently helped him to change out of his drenched hospital gown, dry him off with a towel, and change the sheets.
On Saturday, July 11, the doctors agreed that Adam could return home to Ometepe as long as he followed certain protocols for his recovery. The infectious disease doctor said he would prefer to have Adam stay a couple more days, but Adam felt he could recover better at home being with his family. He took a taxi for around 3 hours to the port in San Jorge, where Maria met him with a wheelchair provided by the ferry. This newer ferry also had a room where he could rest for the 1 1/2 hour ferry crossing to Ometepe. Adam finally made it home late in the evening on Saturday, July 11.
Meanwhile, Mike moved out of the hospital room and checked into the Best Western across from the airport so he could catch an early flight home on Sunday, July 12. He enjoyed dinner and two beers while watching the World Cup, topped off by a Tres Leches dessert. He hadn’t been able to have a drink the whole time he was in the hospital with Adam.
Adam has been home since July 12 and is slowly recovering, having periodic blood tests to make sure the infection has cleared, getting his staples removed from his surgery, and doing exercises to build strength. He gets exhausted easily but knows when to take it easy. He’s supposed to be able to put weight on his left leg on August 5. He said he has learned a lot from this experience, which has humbled him considerably.
Mike’s annual “Ohighlander“ get-together in Dayton, Ohio
On July 22nd Mike headed out to Centerville, Ohio for his annual July “Ohighlander” get-together with eight of his George C. Marshall High School (Falls Church, VA.) class of ’72 and ’73 buddies. They have been gathering here since 2004, descending on Mike Chanatry’s house from seven states and the UK. A four-night scotch tasting competition, local beer contributions, backyard cookouts, City Barbeque and Skyline Chili fare, a golf outing, a disc golf outing, backyard games, trivia games, and a set of Casey Chanatry’s music at a local club kept the old guys busy and thinking they were young for four days. Mike missed last year’s gathering because both of us were living in Costa Rica.He enjoyed reconnecting with his mates.
He sent some photos of the gang now compared to when they were younger.
Here are a few shots of the gathering this year.
A Visit with Sarah in Richmond
On Wednesday and Thursday, the 22nd and 23rd, I drove to Richmond to visit my daughter Sarah. As I was driving down the highway a couple of rocks hit my windshield from a passing truck full of gravel. One bounced off without causing damage, but the second put a ding in the windshield just to the right of my sight line. This meant we’d have to replace the windshield before we left the country.
Sarah was thrilled to get the cheap butter dish of ours that she had admired in Costa Rica. She must have reminded me 10 times not to forget to bring it home in our luggage. She gave me a cowboy t-shirt from Bozeman, Montana, where she had gone for her brother Nick’s wedding.
We promptly went out for a carry-out sushi at Yellow Umbrella Provisions, eating outdoors in front of the market. Then we went on our regular shopping spree at Short Pump Mall, getting some stuff at Gap, H&M, Anthropologie, and dropping in to Madewell and Free People.
Later, we relaxed in Sarah’s apartment and then went out to dinner at Stock Bistro & Bar, a Nordic restaurant located in a restored railroad freight terminal that is also home to a stylish modern furniture gallery – Txtur. It was a delicious meal and a lovely setting in the midst of the furniture store. We enjoyed complimentary Fried Green Tomatoes (with house smoked salmon and dillsås), as well as Swedish Meatballs (Lamb and beef meatballs, gräddsås, cucumber salad and lingonberry jam), Smoke In Chimneys Trout (Pan seared Smoke In Chimney Rainbow Trout, herbed potato hash, braised leeks, “everything seasoning”crème fraîche and purple dulse), and finally, Smørrebrød, a traditional 0pen-faced rye bread sandwich served with Cucumber Salad (topped with Roasted Mushrooms, braised leeks, Goat Lady Dairy chèvre, crispy shallots). It was fun to get a preview of what Mike and I might encounter food-wise in our upcoming Scandinavian trip.
On Thursday morning, we enjoyed coffee and chit-chat and then went to Forest Hill Park for a walk and a run for Sarah. It was rather hot and humid, but we enjoyed the lotus blossoms and the heron at the pond on the property.
After showering, Sarah prepared a delicious burrata with sliced fresh peaches and tomatoes from her local farmer’s market, drizzled with a balsamic vinegar glaze, and served with warm crusty bread and watermelon. It was a lovely light lunch to top off our short time together.
Friday Night Live! in Herndon
On Friday, July 31, we went with the family to Friday Night Live! in Herndon. Allie had a blast running around with the other children and throwing beach balls randomly about.
Two bands played: The opening set by 8 Track Jones played favorite pop/rock tunes from the ‘80s, ‘90s, and today. The second set featured keeton, a northern Virginia cover band; the band played ’90s alternative hits such as Pearl Jam, Weezer, Foo Fighters, New Radicals, Eve 6, Better Than Ezra, Green Day. We left about a half-hour into their set because it was getting close to our bedtime! 🙂
Family Happenings
After Mike got bitten by a dog in Managua when we were there in late April, he didn’t worry much about rabies because Adam and his friend Manja had never heard of anyone having rabies on the island of Ometepe. Also, the clinic next door to the police station said it was a superficial wound and immediately cleaned it and gave Mike antibiotics. When we got home, our daughter Sarah mentioned that if someone is infected with rabies, it can lie dormant for 1-3 months, and even for years in rare cases. Because of this unpredictable timeline, it is critical to seek medical attention for immediate post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) if a person has been bitten or scratched by a potentially rabid animal. Once symptoms appear, rabies is almost always fatal.
This information disturbed Mike and when he got home, he went on a quest to find out whether he should get the post-exposure rabies vaccine. Apparently nowadays the shots are not given in the stomach, but are given in the arm over a period of weeks. However, after calling his doctor, emergency care clinics and the Fairfax County Health Department, he found the only place to get the vaccine is in the emergency room at a hospital. He talked with the Health Department and was told that he should find out if the dog is still alive; he was told that if the dog was infected with rabies, he would have died within 10 days. Before Adam went to the gymnastics event in Managua he tried to make some calls to find if the dog was still alive, but he couldn’t get any information. So, after Maria returned to Ometepe, she took a taxi to Altagracia and got a picture of the dog, which is luckily still alive.
Thus, Mike decided he won’t bother getting the post-infection vaccine.
We got some other photos of the family, with one adorable one of a fashion show in which the girls dressed up Mikey in different outfits. Alex and Jandira went on a few outings without us and shared photos of Allie sitting in a police vehicle in the City of Fairfax. They also went for a day outing to Calvert Cliffs State Park and Solomon’s Island.
My Summer BINGO card
This month, I completed a few more things on my Summer BINGO card. We didn’t get many of the things I hoped to get done while home in Virginia, as Mike was in Managua for almost half the month, and I was too worried and upset about Adam to feel like doing much of anything.
Pedicure: Lavender (“sassy enough for you”) (July 1) ✓
Pedicure: Bright coral (MOD-ERN GIRL) (July 31) ✓
Pool dates with Allie ✓✓
Hair straightening with Jian. ✓
Visit Sarah in Richmond ✓
Haircut with Tisa (no highlights). ✓
Book Norway: Bodø ✓, Trondheim ✓, Geiranger ✓, Lillehammer ✓
Out with Karen and Michael at Jackson’s Mighty Fine Food & Lucky Lounge ✓
Attend a music festival or outdoor concert (Friday Night Live! in Herndon on July 31) ✓
Finalize sale of Mitsubishi with Suzanne in Costa Rica (Received final payment but she will close on August 3 when she arrives in Costa Rica) ✓
Read 6 books: Lonely Planet Norway by Gemma Graham; The Girl Who Played with Fire (Millennium #2) by Stieg Larsson; The Arc of the Swallow (Søren Marhauge #2) by S. J. Gazan; The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well by Meik Wiking; Alan Opts Out by Courtney Maum; and The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller. ✓
My Summer BINGO card as of July 31
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I hope you’ll share how the year is panning out for you, and what plans you have for the summer.
How did your July go? Did you have any special family gatherings? Have you welcomed any new additions to your family? Did you celebrate any birthdays or anniversaries? Have you read any good books that can inform your worldview, seen any good movies, binge-watched any television series? Have you planned any adventures or had any winter or holiday getaways? Have you dreamed any dreams? Have you gone to any exotic restaurants, cooked any new dishes? Have you been surprised by anything in life? Have you created a Winter Bingo Card or dream list? Have you made any new friends? Have you learned anything new, taken any classes or just kept up with the news? Have you sung along with any new songs? Have you undertaken any new exercise routines? Have you marched or otherwise participated in political protests? Have you been battered, or alternately, uplifted by any news?
Please share your July with me by giving me the plot below, or a link to a post in your blog that tells about your month.
June 30, 2026: Welcome to our June cocktail hour. Let’s have a nice summer cocktail like a Hugo Spritz, which takes me back to memories of Italy and the Via Francigena. If we’re lucky, we can venture outdoors as the weather has been warm, humid and mostly sunny with some clouds tossed in. We’ve arrived back home right in time for the typical miserable Virginia summer, so if it’s too sticky and uncomfortable outdoors, we can easily wander inside into air-conditioning. Maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see the Strawberry Moon on the 29th. Sunset in Virginia is at around 8:35 in June and we can mingle on our screened-in porch and sip our drinks.
I have a variety of soda or seltzer water for those of you who don’t drink.
June marked our first of two months back in the U.S. before we leave again, hopefully this time for Europe. However, Adam has developed a serious infection and is being moved today (June 30) from a “hospital” in Moyogalpa, on the island of Ometepe, to a hospital in Managua. We are very concerned about this infection, so Mike got a flight from D.C. to Managua and will arrive there at 7:30 p.m. tonight, the last day of June. (see below under Family Matters for more details).
Returning home from Costa Rica
We made it through steps 1-4 of departing from Costa Rica on Monday morning, June 1. Mike moved our Mitsubishi up to Edificio 2 at Lake Arenal Condos, where our buyer Suzanne will arrive at the end of July to take possession of the car and live for 1-2 years. We vacated the condo (except for things we were told we could leave behind), and then squeezed our 6 suitcases into Chuli’s car. Chuli drove us safely 1 1/2 hours to the Liberia Airport, where we checked 4 of our bags and went through security. Finally, we took our 12:35 American Airlines flight to Miami.
Somehow a toucan stowed away in Mike’s backpack. I think it wanted to meet little Allie.
We flew to Miami and made it there by about 5:20 EST, with just enough time to go through immigration (luckily we have Global Entry), unload our luggage and then recheck it to go onward to Reagan in DC. We only had a 1 hr 40 minute window to do all that so I was worried we wouldn’t make our next flight. Our flight was at 7:17, but sadly because of thunderstorms in Miami we got in a traffic jam that held up our departure until 8:05.
We took a very expensive taxi to our house from Reagan National, and arrived at the house at 11:45, well after the family had gone to sleep. We quickly zonked out ourselves. We were happy to be home!
As usual when we return home from a long time abroad, we have to take care of a lot of business. We knew there was a problem with our garage door before we left Costa Rica; Alex had informed us that it wasn’t working and when Academy Garage Door came out to look at it, they told us that the problem wasn’t with the door itself. It wasn’t working because the ceiling drywall was falling down on the garage door mechanism. Mike had been talking about drywalling our garage for probably 10-20 years, but we had never done it. So, he arranged for our contractor José to drywall the entire garage on June 8.
When the contractors were working on the drywall, they tried to close the garage door and it somehow came off the track and came crashing down; coming to a stop, partway to the ground, in a lopsided manner. Then, a piece of the glass in the upper part of the door came crashing to the ground. This time Academy Garage Door had some fixing to do. Somehow the repairman singlehandedly managed to replace the track and reset the garage door to straighten it out.
Finally the drywall was finished and Alex and Mike were pleased with the results. Mike spent a lot of time cleaning out junk from the garage and now there is a lot of space there. Alex uses it as a gym for now. We haven’t used it to actually store our cars in decades. We can consider parking our cars inside only after Alex and Jandira move out.
Besides that house project, we had a big mess in the living and dining rooms where Alex and Jandira had moved a lot of our stuff when they moved their household into ours. Our house is not big enough to store two households’ worth of stuff, so we tried to organize as best we could to clear out the clutter from the main level. That meant of course that a lot of stuff went into the basement, and much went to Goodwill or the dump.
Then of course were the medical appointments. I found out immediately, when I went to see my dermatologist on June 4 that I had two Actinic Keratoses (rough scaly patches caused by sun damage), one on the end of my nose and one on my upper lip. The doctor froze those two off. These are precancerous lesions found on the skin, and many experts believe they are an early form of Squamous Cell Carcinoma. In addition, the doctor did a biopsy on a spot on the bridge of my nose; the biopsy showed it was Squamous Cell Carcinoma. We scheduled a Mohs surgery on June 24 to have the cancer removed. I was stressed for almost three weeks as I had to wait for the procedure; I had no idea how extensive it would be.
On the 24th, I showed up in the office, preparing myself mentally for a long stay. I wore a “GOOD GOOD VIBES” t-shirt, trying to visualize a positive outcome. The doctor Jeffrey Scott, who looked like a very young Ed Sheeran with a buzz cut, cut out the cancerous piece of skin and sent it to the lab. I waited in the waiting area for the results, which they had told me could take 1-2 hours. If any area on the edge of the piece they cut had cancer cells, they would map and follow the cancer, cutting more skin until no more showed on the edges. They had told me to schedule the whole day in case I had to go in multiple times.
I was lucky that in a half-hour they called me back and said they had gotten all the cancer on the first cut. It turned out to be a small spot. The doctor, after jabbing me with more local anesthesia, put in internal stitches, which would dissolve, and external stitches, which I’d return to have removed on July 1.
The day after the first dermatology appointment, I went to renew my driver’s license/Real ID, and my face was swollen and askew from all the things the dermatologist had done. That was before the Mohs surgery, which was more disfiguring.
I went to see a new doctor for my Annual Wellness Check because I had so much trouble with the billing last year from my old doctor. One of the things they did was to give me three words to remember. Then they had me draw a time, 11:10, on a blank circle. After drawing the clock, I had to repeat the three words back. The words were village, kitchen and baby. After drawing the clock successfully, I only remembered two of the words: village and baby. The nurse said, “That was good!” I said, “That was good?? I only got two words right.” She said, “Most people have trouble drawing the clock face!” It’s funny that now, almost three weeks after the appointment, I can still remember the three words, but I couldn’t immediately after drawing the clock face.
We babysat Allie on Saturday, June 6, taking her to the pool where she showed no fear and bounced around happily in the pool in the midst of older boys playing war with water guns.
On the 15th, Mike and I both had appointments with the ENT doctor. They cleaned out our ears and did hearing tests. I have mild-to-moderate hearing loss and the doctor recommended I get hearing aids. But when I found that the cost isn’t covered by insurance and can be anywhere from $2,000-$7,000, depending on the model, I decided my hearing is not impacting my life enough to warrant those just yet. I’ll wait to return to the doctor in two years and see if the deterioration warrants hearing aids at that time.
One night we played Code Names. Alex treated us to some homemade bread. I made snack plates for lunch inspired by a Substack post and bowls with kale, salmon, chick peas and farro. We spent a lot of time simply hanging around the house with the family and little Allie. Allie is talking up a storm, although we can’t always understand what she’s saying. But she is so easily entertained, especially by her silly Dido (what she calls Mike). Allie has a tendency to put food into her cheeks like a chipmunk and simply hold it there for a while before chewing and swallowing. One day she helped Dido in the yard, using a small toy earth-mover. On Sunday afternoon, the 28th, we played a game of Ticket to Ride and I won!
I finished 7 books in June bringing my total to 34/48. I especially enjoyed Something Wild by Hanna Halperin; The Dinosaur Feather by Sissel-Jo Gazan; and The Searcher (Cal Hooper #1) by Tana French. I also enjoyed The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly by Margareta Magnusson. We watched three movies: the idiotic film The Breadwinner (what a waste!), The Travellers, and Hamnet, which was excellent. We started watching a couple of new series or new seasons of old series: The Four Seasons (S2); Alice and Steve; AnotherSelf (Zeytin Ağacı) (S3); When Life Gives You Tangerines; The Bear (S5); Sommerdahl (S1); and Marriage. We finished watching Finding Ola (S2); Made with Love(Luka, Makan, Cinta) (S1); Grantchester (S5); Paradise (S2); and Virgin River (S7). We continued watching Thank You Next (Kimler Geldi Kimler Geçti) (S3); Imperfect Women; Your Friends and Neighbors (S2); Grantchester (S6); Wallander (S2); Love Life (S2); and The New Adventures of Old Christine (S3).
Dining Out
We took the family to Artie’s on June 3. It was fun to go back to the place where we took them while Jandira was pregnant with Allie on August 12 of 2023. Below are the pictures from our earlier visit, while Allie was still inside of her mom.
We sat in a booth right next to the one we sat at the first time; this time 2 1/2 year-old Allie was bopping about in the booth. We enjoyed our fabulous meals at Artie’s; the food is dependably delicious.
Mike and I went by ourselves to eat at Yama Chen’s Sushi after seeing the horrible movie The Breadwinner on the 10th. The sushi was just as bad as the movie, and we definitely won’t be returning there.
On Friday the 12th, we took the family to Enatye Ethiopian Restaurant, where Allie had a grand time chasing and being chased by two other little girls in the restaurant. There was a lot of screaming and squealing. I’m sure the patrons in the restaurant weren’t too happy with all that screeching!
Mike and I enjoyed a Thai lunch at Saao Thai and Sushi after our ENT appointment on the 15th. We hadn’t been able to get Thai food in Costa Rica, so it was a real treat.
On Sunday, June 28, we met Mike’s sister Barbara for dinner at Sweet Ginger in Vienna. We hadn’t seen Barbara since we were home in October. Since then she had taken a nasty fall off her patio step, but she seemed mostly healed from that. It was good to catch up and of course we had to commiserate about the degraded condition of our country under the orange goon.
Walks
I took up my old walks upon returning home. Some days were miserably hot and humid and definitely NOT enjoyable, especially a few days when the temps were in the high 90s and very humid. At least some of the walks are flatter than what we encountered in Costa Rica. I was trying to make a goal of walking 91 miles from April 1-June 30, but I missed the goal, only walking 84.6 miles by June 30.
Father’s Day
On Saturday the 20th, which coincided with the first day of summer, we took the two dads, Mike and Alex, out to Flying Ace Distillery & Brewery in Loudoun County. It was a beautiful day, in the 80s and not humid. We had fun watching Allie play on the playground and enjoyed drinks and delicious food. It was a great celebration of two wonderful fathers.
On Sunday, we babysat Allie while Jandira and Alex went out to a movie and dinner on Father’s Day.
Finishing up my Spring BINGO card
my Spring BINGO card
This month, I completed a few more things on my Spring BINGO card.
Read 6 books: The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly: Life Wisdom from Someone Who Will (Probably) Die Before You by Margaret Magnusson; Something Wild by Hanna Halperin; The Dinosaur Feather by Sissel-Jo Gazan; The Searcher (Cal Hooper, #1) by Tana French; All Fours by Miranda July; Travel with Style: Master the Art of Stylish and Functional Travel Capsules by Anastasia Pash. ✓
Summer BINGO card
Family Happenings
We found out Adam and his friend John fenced in his entire farm so the animals can’t escape.
On June 21, Adam got a splinter in his left hand that got horribly infected; he eventually saw a doctor to have the hand drained (twice) and was put on a course of antibiotics. He seemed to be improving and went with the family to Managua for a gymnastics competition for the girls on the last weekend in June. While he was in Managua, Adam started having pain in his hip and femur and brushed it off thinking it was just some pulled muscles. But by Monday afternoon, he was in severe pain, had developed a fever and was having trouble breathing. Someone came to his home to give him an IV with antibiotics and painkillers; before long, he and Maria took a taxi to the hospital in Moyogalpa because he was having trouble breathing. We were extremely worried about him because the facility in Moyogalpa seemed rather ramshackle; it ran out of water in the middle of the night Monday. When Adam called us on Tuesday morning, his breathing sounded labored and he was upset because the doctors said, according to the pulsometer, he didn’t need oxygen. He felt he definitely needed oxygen. They hooked him up to an IV with antibiotics and pain killers.
We are panicked over this situation, of course, and began to push for them to arrange transport for Adam to a hospital in Managua. Maria and Adam’s friend Clinton rented a car to take Adam to Hospital Militar Escuela in Managua. Of course this involved taking the ferry and Clinton driving them two hours to Managua. Adam was taken off of the IV to be transported and was given an oral antibiotic. We got a message that he had slept for two hours in the car and his body hurt all over. He arrived at the hospital in Managua at about 5:30 Managua time, was admitted to a room, and the doctor began tests on him by 6:30 p.m.
We worried that he was in sepsis due to the original wound on his hand that had never fully healed.
Mike decided to take a flight this afternoon to Managua; because of a 2-hour delay in Miami, he arrived in Managua at 9:30 p.m. (Managua time) today, the 30th. By then Adam was settled into the Managua hospital and was on painkillers and antibiotics. The doctors scheduled an MRI and believed the infection had settled into his hip, but they wanted to confirm that with the MRI. If it was confirmed, they would take him into surgery to drain the infection in the hip and proactively clean up any other spots where the infection had spread.
I couldn’t travel because I was told I was not to travel for 2 weeks after my Mohs surgery; I am due to have the stitches removed on Wednesday, July 1. I also have another medical appointment on Thursday that I had to wait nearly a month to book. I will see how things go in Managua and will decide if I should travel down there later this week.
While Adam and Maria were making their way to the hospital in Managua on Tuesday June 30, Cristy and her siblings and friends were busy celebrating her 15th birthday, known as Quinceañera, a significant cultural celebration in Latin America which marks a girl’s transition from childhood to womanhood. I hope she’ll get a more formal celebration once her family is back together.
Most of the pictures below of Allie are from outings to the bookstore and the mall with her mom.
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I hope you’ll share how the year is panning out for you, and what plans you have for the summer.
How did your June go? Did you have any special family gatherings? Have you welcomed any new additions to your family? Did you celebrate any birthdays or anniversaries? Have you read any good books that can inform your worldview, seen any good movies, binge-watched any television series? Have you planned any adventures or had any winter or holiday getaways? Have you dreamed any dreams? Have you gone to any exotic restaurants, cooked any new dishes? Have you been surprised by anything in life? Have you created a Winter Bingo Card or dream list? Have you made any new friends? Have you learned anything new, taken any classes or just kept up with the news? Have you sung along with any new songs? Have you undertaken any new exercise routines? Have you marched or otherwise participated in political protests? Have you been battered, or alternately, uplifted by any news?
Please share your June with me by giving me the plot below, or a link to a post in your blog that tells about your month.
May 31, 2026: Welcome to our May cocktail hour. Let’s have a nice spring cocktail like a Vodka with SanPellegrino Peach & Clementine (Mike’s concoction). If we’re lucky, we can venture outdoors as the weather has been warm, breezy, and mostly sunny with some clouds tossed in; some days it has been rainy and windy but still warm. Maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see one of the month’s two full moons: The Flower Moon or the Blue Moon. You can meet our son Adam, who came for a short visit. You’re welcome to come along on our last short trip to Hacienda Guachipelin where you can soak in the Oropéndola waterfall or the Río Negro thermal pools; you can also watch the Montezuma Oropendola build and tend their lantern-like nests or enjoy a relaxing massage. You can come along with us to the Desfiles de Boyeros (oxcart parade) in Tierras Morenas or simply relax at the pool. Sunset is now at around 5:58 every night and we can mingle on the balcony and sip our drinks while watching painterly skies at sunset.
I have a variety of soda, seltzer water, or bebida de aloe for those of you who don’t drink. I also have some kombucha made by my friend Farida. Mike can also whip up some excellent smoothies. Thanks for joining us in our escape into a peaceful corner of the world.
May marked our twelfth and last month in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Even though our last month was quiet, it was still lovely just to enjoy our temporary home for our last month in the country.
The last few days of Adam’s visit to Costa Rica
The first of May was our last day with Adam in Costa Rica. We took him to the Subasta Ganadera Tilarán (Tilarán Livestock Auction) as he had never been to a cattle auction before. Sadly, we took our sweet time going there, so we missed the auction because of a new law that requires all cattle to be tagged on both ears; many cattlemen hadn’t had time to properly tag the cattle under the new rules, so the auction had been short because there weren’t many cows. He still enjoyed seeing the set up.
On our way back from the auction, we stopped at Lake Arenal Brewery to have a few brews and play some pool.
Later that evening, we went to Tilatacos where Adam was able to meet Mike’s swimming buddy Ivan.
Mike drove Adam back to the Nicaraguan border on the 2nd and he made his way slowly to his lonely house on Ometepe.
A short overnight escape to Hacienda Guachipelin
On Wednesday the 6th, Mike and I drove to Hacienda Guachipelin Volcano Ranch Hotel & Hot Springs, not far north of Liberia. We went for a one night stay. We visited the Oropéndola Waterfall on the Río Blanco, taking a short walk over hanging step bridges and then dipping in the refreshingly cool water.
After the waterfall, we went to the Río Negro Hot Springs where we soaked in hot pools, cooling off in the river between the steaming soaks. It was hot and humid in this area, so we enjoyed the cool river best. Though there were two tour groups there when we arrived, they eventually left and we had the whole hot springs to ourselves.
We enjoyed a lovely dinner at Nekajui Restaurant at the hotel.
On Thursday morning, we had coffee on our front porch and watched the Montezuma Oropendolas building and tending their lantern-like basket nests. Then we enjoyed relaxing massages at Simbiosis Spa. We showered, hung out by the hotel pool for a bit, ate lunch at the cafe, and were on our way back home.
Homebody stuff& Mother’s Day
We missed the Flower Moon on May 1 because it was too cloudy to see. We spent much of the month with me finishing up this blog and continuing to book our Scandinavian trip. We played Scrabble five times with Mike winning three times and me two.
I got sick with a bad head cold on Saturday night before Mother’s Day on May 10, so I was miserable all day on Sunday. I had a long and sad chat with Adam who was depressed as no progress was being made toward reconciliation with Maria. Sarah also called and we had an upbeat talk. As a mother, I always feel deeply for whatever my children are feeling, so I was depressed talking to Adam and then cheerful after Sarah’s call. Mike had gone for a swim with Ivan in the cove on Sunday morning and I stayed in bed sick. Mike cooked all the meals for the day, making a nice dinner of tilapia with green curry sauce, rice and shredded fresh veggies.
I got another round of lowlights on my hair with Sofía Barrientos on Wednesday the 13th while Mike went to the dentist for a filling. On Thursday, I had a turquoise pedicure with Paulina Miranda of S.O.S. Beauty Center for the last time; she has done all my pedicures in Costa Rica.
And we finally ran into Cilantro Man, the deaf-mute man from Tronadora who sells fresh cilantro in front of the MegaSuper; we hadn’t seen him in about a month and were happy to find he was okay. He was happy to pose for a picture with Mike.
I finished 6 books in May bringing my total to 27/48. I especially enjoyed Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. We watched four movies: a silly Italian movie called Buen Camino and the adorable movies Je m’appelle Agneta, Remarkably Bright Creatures, and Faraway, set in Croatia. We started watching a couple of new series or new seasons of old series: Thank You Next (Kimler Geldi Kimler Geçti) (S3) and Imperfect Women. We finished watching Big Mistakes (S1), Love Life (S1), Lincoln Lawyer (S4), and Wallander (S1). We continued watching Finding Ola (S2); To Love, To Lose; Made with Love; Love Life; Virgin River (S7); Your Friends and Neighbors (S2); Grantchester (S5); Wallander (S2); Love Life (S2); and Paradise (S2).
Dining Out
Friday night the 8th, Darrell and Farida came by our house where we enjoyed beers and wine and then we drove to Nuevo Arenal to have dinner at Restaurante Tinajas. We have only ever been there at lunchtime, and it was a bit strange being there at night because we were almost the only patrons there and our lake view was obliterated by darkness. Still. It was fun as always.
Once we got the deposit for the car from Suzanne on Thursday morning the 14th, we felt relieved of a huge burden. To celebrate, we went out to lunch at El Corral just to get out of the house and away from our worries. I had shrimp with rice and Mike had a grilled chicken fajita-style.
On Saturday night we drove to Nuevo Arenal to try one of the few remaining restaurants that we’d never tried, Restaurante la Casa de Doña Celina. What a pleasant experience. For one, the weather was refreshing and breezy. The Costa Rican family who ran the restaurant was super friendly and the food, though typical Costa Rican food, had little twists that gave it a one-up on most comida tipica.
We met our friend Bruce for dinner at a place he recommended but we’d never tried. We wanted to say goodbye and thank him for all the help he gave us when we first arrived and when we lived in Buena Vista Condos. He said he enjoys helping people; his parents taught him that if he could help other people, he should “get off his lazy ass” and help them. We had lunch at Lava Lake Cafe in Tronadora to enjoy “American food at American prices” (according to Anne), and said goodbye to Eden. Finally, we went out to dinner with Darrell and Farida at Ginger Indian Restaurant, where, as usual, we shared a lot of laughs.
On Monday the 25th, Memorial Day in the U.S. but nothing special in Costa Rica, we went with our friend Carol to Restaurante Tinajas for lunch, where we talked about grandparenting duties and boundaries. Carol told us about a boa imperator that got into her house and slithered over the “Whispering Skulls” puzzle we had given her. On Tuesday, we went to Pop’s for an afternoon ice cream cone. On Thursday the 28th, we met Farida and Darrell at Moya’s Place. And on Saturday the 30th, we had a pizza at Gutierrez Family Pizza.
Drives, walks and local explorations
We took a 3-mile walk up from Sabalito on Sunday the 3rd. On Tuesday the 12th, we walked up from Sabalito and saw the cows lining up for their morning milking. On a cloudy, windy and humid Saturday (16th), we walked for what I told Mike would be my last walk on the gravel road up above the pickleball courts, near Cinco Esquinas (Five Corners). On the 21st, we walked once again from Sabalito. On Tuesday the 26th, we walked our final walk on Peninsula 1 in Tronadora. On Saturday the 30th, Mike swam in the cove while I walked a 3.12 mile loop around Tronadora. And on Sunday, our last full day in Costa Rica, we walked uphill from Sabalito and then back down, around 3 miles, seeing some calves and some final beautiful views.
Selling our 2014 Mitsubishi ASXOutlanderSport
Most of the first half of the month was spent trying to sell our car before leaving Costa Rica. Mike got the DEKRA inspection, on Monday, May 4, which we passed, and replaced brakes and brake pads, as well as the battery. He posted the car for sale on Saturday, May 9. I was feeling a bit stressed about this as that only left us 3 weeks to sell the car!
Luckily, Carla, the manager at Lake Arenal Condos, had put us in touch with a woman from Colorado, Suzanne, who is planning to live in Lake Arenal Condos beginning in late July. She was looking to buy a car for her 1-2 year stay in Costa Rica. Mike and Suzanne have been in touch frequently; during this time, Mike gave her a lot of information about the car, general car prices and comparisons in Costa Rica, what the DEKRA entailed, everything that is known about our car, and so on. Being a finance guy, Mike is very detailed and thorough in these kinds of transactions. He had numerous online face-to-face conversations with Suzanne.
Finally, on Thursday the 14th, we agreed to the terms of the deal and she gave us a decent deposit on the car. At first, we had hoped to get Suzanne to give a POA to Carla so we could close the deal before we left, but we found out that for someone in the U.S. to give a power of attorney to a Costa Rican for Costa Rican legal matters, they must do it in a Costa Rican consulate. As Suzanne lives in Denver, where no consulate is nearby, that plan of action was impossible.
On Wednesday the 20th at noon, we met with Ximena Sánchez Castro, an attorney who lives right next door to us in Lake Arenal Condos. She had drawn up a special power of attorney in which Mike and I granted power to Carla Alexandra Rojas Murillo, the manager at the condos, to finalize the sale of our car for us. Carla will be here on July 29, after we are long gone, and will sign in our stead to turn over the car to our buyer from Colorado, Suzanne.
Until the car has actually been transferred to Suzanne in late July, I will feel a bit uneasy, although I think Mike and Suzanne have established trust for one another. It’s hard to buy a car sight unseen, but we did it when we arrived in Costa Rica (or at least we committed to it with a deposit before arriving). And we didn’t have even a fraction of the information that Mike has provided to Suzanne.
Traditional Desfile de Boyeros (oxcart parade) in Tierras Morenas
On Friday at noon, we went to Tierras Morenas, not far from our condo, to see the traditional Desfile de Boyeros (oxcart parade). The celebration combines faith, culture, and agricultural work, and represents one of the most vibrant expressions of the canton’s rural identity.
Tierras Moreas is a rural community where agriculture and livestock have been the foundation of the local economy. The oxcart parade tradition is celebrated as part of the patron saint festival of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers, usually around May 15. Residents pay homage to their patron saint, giving thanks for the harvest and blessing the animals that have been part of their daily work.
An afternoon at the condo pools
After the Desfile de Boyeros in Tierras Morenas on Friday, we hung out by the pool at the condos and enjoyed playing around with the friendly resident iguana (by splashing water on it, which it didn’t seem to mind), dipping in the cool pool, looking out over the lake, and reading our books. I was reading the interesting Japanese book, The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki.
My Spring BINGO card
This month, I completed a few more things on my Spring BINGO card.
Book Finland: Tampere (✓), Vaasa (✓), & Turku (✓)
Book Norway: Bergen (✓), Cruise with Hurtigruten from Bergen to Svolvær (✓), Hotel in Svolvær (✓), Ferry from Svolvær to Bodø (✓) (Do the rest in June)
Book Sweden: Malmö (✓)
Sold our car (part 1 with deposit on Thursday, May 14) ✓. Final transfer to take place at end of July.
Celebrate Cinco de Mayo (sort of) ✓
Finished our “Succulent Plants” puzzle ✓
Overnight trip to Hacienda Guachipelin ✓
Dentist appointment ✓
Pedicure: Bright Turquoise ✓
Tried the third of 3 new Costa Rican restaurants” – Restaurante la Casa de Doña Celina ✓ as well as a 4th, Marisqueria Guayo ✓
Try a new ice cream flavor at Pop’s: Crema con almendras (cream with almonds) ✓
Read six books: Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World by Steve Crawshaw; The Places in Between by Rory Stewart; Anxious People by Fredrik Backman; Pachinko by Min Jin Lee; My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman; and The Makioka Sisters by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. ✓
Spring BINGO card as of May 31.
Family Happenings
Here are a few pictures of the family with some great photos of little Allie. I can’t believe we will be home to see her soon. Alex and Jandira’s third anniversary was on May 18.
This was a busy month for the Nicaraguan family. Adam & Maria’s third anniversary was on May 13. Luckily we felt some relief as Adam called us on Monday the 11th to let us know he and María had finally had a two-hour talk with their mutual friends Manja and Horacio moderating. It was the first time they’d talked face to face since they separated three weeks before. He said it was very emotional and that Maria wants to return home but Cristy said there was no way she would move back.
On the 13th, their 3rd anniversary, Adam, Maria and Mikey spent time at the beach and Adam said it went very well. On Thursday, Adam said he and Maria had a good talk with the girls. Little Mikey turned two on May 15. On the 15th, Adam sent videos of Mikey’s birthday party with friends and family. The family got together for a cookout with Adam’s friend John and Adam on the last week of May after Adam and María had another two hour talk with Manja and Horacio. As of Sunday the 31st, the entire family has moved back in and so far, things seem to be going well. Keeping fingers crossed.
On my Costa Rica blog, you can find my weekly recaps of our lives in Costa Rica for the month of May:
I hope you’ll share how the year is panning out for you, and what plans you have for the spring.
How did your May go? Did you have any special family gatherings? Have you welcomed any new additions to your family? Did you celebrate any birthdays or anniversaries? Have you read any good books that can inform your worldview, seen any good movies, binge-watched any television series? Have you planned any adventures or had any winter or holiday getaways? Have you dreamed any dreams? Have you gone to any exotic restaurants, cooked any new dishes? Have you been surprised by anything in life? Have you created a Winter Bingo Card or dream list? Have you made any new friends? Have you learned anything new, taken any classes or just kept up with the news? Have you sung along with any new songs? Have you undertaken any new exercise routines? Have you marched or otherwise participated in political protests? Have you been battered, or alternately, uplifted by any news?
Please share your May with me by giving me the plot below, or a link to a post in your blog that tells about your month.
April 30, 2026: Welcome to our April cocktail hour. Let’s have a nice spring cocktail like a Basil Cucumber Gin Cooler, or a frisky glass of Prosecco. We can finally venture outdoors as the weather has been beautiful, warm, sunny and breezy. Maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see rainbows or the Pink Moon. If you like suffering, you can even come along vicariously on our last trip to Ometepe, Nicaragua, where we took Adam a carload of stuff from our Costa Rica home. We had hoped to visit the family but instead supported our son after his wife moved out with all four children. After our difficult visit, we brought Adam to Costa Rica with us for a change of scenery and a bit of relaxation time. Sunset is now at around 5:52 every night and we can mingle on the balcony and sip our drinks while watching painterly skies at sunset.
I have a variety of soda, seltzer water, or bebida de aloe for those of you who don’t drink. Mike can also whip up some excellent smoothies. Thanks for joining us in our escape into a peaceful corner of the world.
April marked our eleventh month in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Luckily, we finally experienced some wonderful weather, and even though it was quiet, it was still lovely just to enjoy our temporary home for our next-to-the-last month in the country.
Homebody stuff
We caught a glimpse of the not-so-pink Pink Moon on April Fool’s Day. We spent much of the month with me finishing up my Guatemala posts, Mike completing our tax returns, and me starting to plot out and book our Scandinavian trip. We booked our return tickets to and from Copenhagen, an onward flight to Helsinki, and a flight from Helsinki to Bergen, Norway. We also booked our Denmark stays: a week in Copenhagen and a week in Aarhus, as well as a week in Helsinki. We went to the eye doctor here, Dra. Ana María Álvarez at Optical Murano, to get eye exams and order glasses, which are much cheaper here than in the U.S. We played Scrabble three times and Mike won twice. We also played Scrabble against Adam when he came to visit, and each of us trounced him.
I finished 7 books in April bringing my total to 21/48. I especially enjoyed The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Jennifer Steil, Deacon King Kong by James McBride, Delirium by Laura Restrepo and Lab Girl: A Memoir by Hope Jahren. We watched six movies: Is This Thing On?; The Sunlit Night (Norway); The Best You Can; Off Track 2 (ute och cyklar) – a Swedish movie; The Threesome, and Sonunda Sen (Love at Last – Turkish). We started watching a couple of new series or new seasons of old series: Love Life (S1), Paradise (S2), Wallander, Big Mistakes, Made with Love, and To Love, To Lose (Ayrilik da Sevdaya Dahil) (Turkish). We finished watching Ripple (S1), Leanne (S1), Ponies (S1), Shrinking (S3), and Entre tierras (Between Lands), which I loved. We continued watching Virgin River (S7), The Lincoln Lawyer (S4), Grantchester (S4), Finding Ola (S1), and The New Adventures of Old Christine (S1).
Celebrating Easter
On Easter Sunday, we made a beeline for Chafi’s Restaurante to eat lunch. Mike had grilled chicken with jalapeño sauce and I had camarones con arroz (shrimp with rice). Their servings are gargantuan, so we only ate half our meals and took the rest home. After lunch, we took a Sunday drive up to La Piedra del Indio Waterfalls, where we had beautiful views of the surrounding mountains.
Dining Out
In early April, we tried out the delicious Ginger Indian Restaurant in Nuevo Arenal on April Fool’s Day. The restaurant is cutely decorated with colorful hanging umbrellas and other Indian decor and the menu was unusual in that it offers many items without tomato-based sauces. I enjoyed my dish of Paneer Do Pyaza (paneer cubes, onion, chopped masala, yellow gravy, Indian spices). Mike had Murgh Korma: chicken, brown onion, cashew pesto cream, garlic, onion and green cardamom. After lunch, we went to Tinajas and enjoyed mellow tunes, sweeping views of the lake, and glasses of wine. On the 3rd, we went to Cevichera la Pasadita, where they messed up my order and gave me a mixed shrimp and fish ceviche (I hated the texture of the fish and left that half behind). We sipped on beers and chatted with Anne and Jack on their last night in Costa Rica as they headed off to Spain for at least 3 months; we won’t see them again unless we run into them somewhere in the world.
I had on my Spring BINGO card to enjoy a “spring-themed” cocktail, so we went to DrinKing at Paseo del Viento on the 9th where I found the closest thing I could find: a mojito frutos rojos. I thought it would be a strawberry drink, but it was only a mojito with a sickly sweet red fruit syrup. Oh well, the night was lovely, we saw a sunset and we ate some huge hamburgers because the sushi restaurant was closed.
We enjoyed sunsets and pizzas with Darrell and Farida on the 14th, ate at Restaurant Guacamole in Liberia after Mike visited Dr. Ugalde to follow up on his carpal tunnel surgery, and then had pizza with Carol at Restaurante Cielo’s Pizza after enjoying a sunset and wine from her front porch near Quebrada Grande.
Drives, walks and local explorations
We took two 3-mile walks up near Sabalito and on the Saturday before Easter, we walked up near the pickleball courts where we found they’ve created a new gravel road, which we explored. We found some beautiful views there. On Good Friday, it finally looked warm enough to swim in the cove, so Mike and I both swam. I swam further than I’ve swum before in open water; I still get nervous doing it, so I did one lap about 2/3 of the way across the cove and back; while Mike did 2 1/2 laps. On the 17th, we enjoyed another calm lake day by swimming again; this time I made it all the way across the cove and back (713 yards in 27 minutes). I stop a lot to rest and to see where I’m going, and I also change strokes often – from freestyle to breaststroke to backstroke. Mike swam further and faster as always. We walked one day on Peninsula 1 in Tronadora, and one day at Parcelas, on the ridge near the wind turbines.
Our last trip to Ometepe, Nicaragua to visit the family while in Costa Rica
On Friday the 17th, we got a call from Adam telling us that Maria was moving out of his house with all the children. They had had a huge falling out with all of Maria’s family involved. So we were heartbroken and didn’t know what to expect on our upcoming final trip to Nicaragua. We had to go to drop off our household goods from Costa Rica with Adam and we also saw it as an opportunity to support our son through a difficult time, even though we had no idea if we would even see our grandchildren.
Wednesday, April 22: We crossed the border into Nicaragua with a car full of household items we’d bought in Costa Rica. This time we had to pay a handler $60 to avoid waiting in a 3-hour line with an endless line of trucks to have our car scanned. After crossing the border, we spent a night in San Juan del Sur since it is difficult to make a reservation on the car ferry without knowing how long the border crossing will be. We stayed in a new place for us, Villas de Palermo Hotel & Resort, where we spent a lovely afternoon lounging by the pool and having a nice dinner at the hotel restaurant. This was our first and last pleasant day in Nicaragua.
Thursday, April 23: We took the 10:30 ferry to Ometepe. We had lunch with Adam at Pan de Mama, where Adam filled us in on the whole story. The details are in my Costa Rica blog post (see the link below). Adam had fully expected the police to be called but at that point they hadn’t shown up. We had a nice lunch but we could see Adam was devastated. We took the household goods and dropped them at his hollowed-out house. Adam came to our hotel and chatted more with us on our porch and then he and Mike took a dip in the lake. Later Mike and I ate dinner on our own at Xalli, serenaded by a playlist of Jack Johnson songs and topped off with a brownie and ice cream.
Later in the night, the power went out on the entire island. With no air-conditioning, no fan, and no breezes at all, we slept fitfully and were drenched in sweat. Adam had experienced the same in his house and on top of that was hit with horrible stomach pains, possibly due to stress.
Friday, April 24: We woke up to a miserable, humid and heavy atmosphere; there was still no power on the island and now we were deluged with swarms of chayules, tiny non-biting midges. It was like a plague of biblical proportions. I told Mike, “This place is a hellhole. How am I going to survive five more days of this?” Once the power came on, I stayed in the air-conditioned room much of the day, reading and doom-scrolling and thinking we were in the world’s final days. I was so depressed by the whole family situation, the poverty of Ometepe, and the travails of the world at large.
Because Adam was sick and exhausted, we ate lunch on our own at Bûstavö and then, after some stress-reducing massages at 3:30, we went to Café Campestre for dinner.
Saturday, April 25: It was still hot and humid but Mike and I took a walk on the beach. I immediately stepped on a dead branch covered in thorns, puncturing my heel. I continued to walk to the end of the beach and back and by this time was hobbling. Adam came by the hotel to hang out and then we went to Totoco for lunch and a dip in their pool.
Adam and Maria had set up a meeting to talk with their friends Manja and Horacio but while at the pool Manja called Adam with a double dose of bad news. First, Maria had cancelled the meeting and second, the police were looking for Adam. Adam was hit hard by this news, and we immediately drove him to Manja’s house. Manja agreed to come with Adam to the police station in Altagracia, so Mike drove them all after dropping me at the hotel. It turned out that when Mike stepped out of the car to go into the police station, he was bitten by one of the police dogs. The police shrugged as if it was no concern of theirs. Mike went next door to a a clinic where Freddy Espinoza gave him a tetanus shot, iodine, bandages and antibiotics. The police said the dogs were required to be vaccinated against rabies yearly. Manja and Adam said they’d never heard of rabies on the island.
Adam made a statement to the police that he never laid a hand on anyone during the family altercation. They seemed satisfied but they asked that both Adam and Maria come back to the station on Sunday to talk to the police together.
Adam felt good that he had been proactive with the police and we talked a while at Xalli and then went to dinner together at Pizza Mediterranea, where we shared two pizzas between the three of us.
Sunday, April 26: Mike went to help Adam clean up his kitchen which had been left a mess when Maria left. Then Adam came by the hotel and we had lunch together there. Then Mike drove Adam to the police in Altagracia while Manja came with Maria and they all met at the police station. Mike gave Maria a hug when she arrived. They had to wait a good hour to see the police, and then they gave their statements to the sergeant. Maria reamed out Adam for mentioning that the only people throwing punches during the altercation were Maria’s adult son Johnny and her brother Dennis, who had both punched Adam in the face (he said they punched like little girls and he never punched them back). Dennis had been arrested before so the police were familiar with him.
Adam and Mike came back to Xalli where we talked some more and then we all went back to dinner again at Pizza Mediterranea, where this time we shared two pastas.
Monday, April 27: Mike went to Adam’s to finish cleaning the kitchen and despite my misery at being in Ometepe, I got an affirmation in my inbox: “I am right where I am supposed to be.” Adam came by and we had lunch together at Bûstavö; later, we all played several games of pool at Xalli. Adam had decided to come back with us on Tuesday to Costa Rica for a change of scenery and to clear his head. He went to the house to coordinate the care of the animals with a neighbor and to hand over the balance of cash he owed to the person he’s buying land from; he wanted to avoid leaving any cash in the house.
Maria and the kids came down the street to meet us briefly at Adam’s request, so we got to see the grandchildren briefly. We gave Maria and all the girls hugs, but Mikey was clinging to Maria and wouldn’t really interact with us. We then took Adam for one last dinner at Café Campestre and I ate the green chicken curry, which did affect my stomach the following morning.
Tuesday, April 28: We got to see Maria and Mikey when we picked up Adam from his house. Then we drove to the port in Moyogalpa, took the ferry to San Jorge, and crossed the border in a record time of 1 hour and 15 minutes. Back home in Costa Rica, we ate a roasted chicken and relaxed in our condo.
Adam comes to Costa Rica
Wednesday, April 29: Adam stayed with us in Costa Rica for four nights. On Wednesday, we took him to Monster Gym where he overexerted himself with the kettle bells and paid dearly for it the next three days. We took him to Liz’s goat farm; we have been buying her goat yogurt every Friday since we arrived in Costa Rica. Liz speaks a rapid-fire Spanish that I can’t understand, but Adam with his fluid Spanish was able to ask her a million questions about her operation and understand most everything she said. She was happy to have someone so interested and Adam was thrilled to have the experience of seeing a fully functioning goat farm.
After visiting the goat farm and showering, we went to Soda La Macha for lunch. We were able to enjoy the almost-Flower Moon two days before the actual full moon.
Thursday, April 30: When Adam left the U.S. in 2020 just before the world came to a grinding halt due to COVID, he landed first in Costa Rica and stayed in hostels in La Fortuna. Ultimately he found Costa Rica too expensive and crossed the border into Nicaragua with a new group of friends. He has been in Nicaragua ever since, six years now.
I had suggested we could go to La Fortuna together to soak in some thermal pools and he remembered a rope swing he had loved there called El Salto (the jump). We found it and he spent an hour swinging on the rope swing while Mike hung out with him and took pictures. I went into La Fortuna to my favorite store, Wandering, where I had fun shopping without anyone looking over my shoulder.
We all met at Kappa Sushi at noon, and enjoyed sushi rolls together.
Then we went to Relax Termalitas Hot Springs to hang out in the thermal pools. It was a less expensive place than others we’ve been to but it had a nice jungle setting. Mostly Costa Ricans were there. It was just the kind of place Adam loves, nothing fancy with a more natural setting. Some of the pools were very hot; one marked at 38C (100 F) seemed a lot hotter than the posted temperature. We had fun going from pool to pool and soaking and chatting. At the end, we sipped beers in one of the cooler pools.
My Spring BINGO card
I checked off a few things on my Spring BINGO card in April:
Got a lilac pedicure ✓
Easter Celebration (of sorts) ✓
Tried Ginger Indian Restaurant in Nuevo Arenal as the 2nd of 3 new Costa Rican restaurants ✓
Visit Nicaragua family ✓
Eye doctor in Costa Rica ✓
Enjoy a spring-themed cocktail ✓
Make a strawberry recipe: strawberry shortcake ✓
Booked plane tickets to Scandinavia: round trip tickets to Copenhagen, Denmark; onward ticket to Helsinki, and another onward ticket to Bergen, Norway ✓
Book Denmark: Copenhagen and Aarhus ✓
Book Finland: Helsinki ✓
Read 7 books: Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman; Delirium by Laura Restrepo; Deacon King Kong by James McBride; The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: An American Journalist in Yemen by Jennifer Steil; The Rabbit Factor by Antti Tuomainen; Lab Girl: A Memoir by Hope Jahren; and Lonely Planet Sweden by Anna Kaminski. ✓
Spring BINGO card as of April 30
Family Happenings
We got a few pictures of Allie this month. I also took some screenshots of pictures Maria posted since we didn’t get to see much of our grandchildren in Nicaragua.
On my Costa Rica blog, you can find my weekly recaps of our lives in Costa Rica for the month of April:
I hope you’ll share how the year is panning out for you, and what plans you have for the spring.
How did your April go? Did you have any special family gatherings? Have you welcomed any new additions to your family? Did you celebrate any birthdays or anniversaries? Have you read any good books that can inform your worldview, seen any good movies, binge-watched any television series? Have you planned any adventures or had any winter or holiday getaways? Have you dreamed any dreams? Have you gone to any exotic restaurants, cooked any new dishes? Have you been surprised by anything in life? Have you created a Winter Bingo Card or dream list? Have you made any new friends? Have you learned anything new, taken any classes or just kept up with the news? Have you sung along with any new songs? Have you undertaken any new exercise routines? Have you marched or otherwise participated in political protests? Have you been battered, or alternately, uplifted by any news?
Please share your April with me by giving me the plot below, or a link to a post in your blog that tells about your month.
We stayed in Guatemala City for three nights (1 1/2 days) during our trip. Our first night on Wednesday, March 11, was after returning from Antigua and Lake Atitlán, before catching a flight to Flores, Petén. On that afternoon, we were able to explore one museum, Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología (National Museum of Mayan Art: Archeology and Ethnology).
After visiting Flores and San Ignacio, Belize, we flew back to Guatemala City on March 16, where we stayed two nights. We had one day to explore two more museums: the Museo Popol Vuh and the Museo Ixchel del Traje Indigena, both on the beautiful campus of Universidad Francisco Marroquin.
Guatemala City: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología
Wednesday, March 11: Our friendly hired driver Eliseo drove us 3 hours back to Guatemala City from Panajachel and we arrived at the Barceló Guatemala just before 1:00. We checked in and then immediately headed out.
Our early arrival time gave us an afternoon to explore one museum, Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología (National Museum of Mayan Art: Archeology and Ethnology).
Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología (National Museum of Mayan Art: Archeology and Ethnology)
We learned about Mesoamerica, a cultural melting pot that started at the Sinoloa River in Mexico all the way to the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, depending on the period: Preclassic, Classic and Postclassic. Different pre-Columbian civilizations cohabited in Mesoamerica. Though they spoke many languages, they shared cultural traits. The Maya, Aztecs and the Olmecs shared practices and customs:
grinding corn with ashes or lime
use of grinding stones or metates
use of carved obsidian tools
making of pyrite mirrors
similar clothing: sandals, turbans, feather costumes worn by warriors and use of blowpipes as weapons
architecture: staggered pyramids, stucco flooring and coatings, Maya ball game fields, and steam baths, used for ritual and medicinal purposes
buildings arranged around plazas
complex organizational systems with clear social stratification and political heirarchies
The cultures boasted outstanding scientific developments: a glyph writing system, a numeral system, books or codices, calendars containing both 260 and 365 days, ritualistic use of paper and rubber, the flying pole dance or voladores, human sacrifice and self-sacrificial ceremonies, some widespread deities and a system of specialized markets.
The Classic Period (AD 250-900) revealed an abundance of hieroglyphic inscriptions that provided detailed information about ruling dynasties. They recorded historical events such as warfare, marriage alliances, and family relationships among Maya royalty.
The Late Classic Period (AD 600-900) was a period of great demographic growth with intense political rivalries among the principal cities of the lowlands.
Guatemala’s ancient Maya are known for continuous engagement in rituals, ceremonies, textile traditions, and gastronomy. These were transmitted through generations and blended with Spanish traditions.
In the museum, we found cultural artifacts such as polychrome vessels and plates, lintels, vessels with lids, a jaguar heads necklace (Post Classic 950-1524), mosaic masks, anthropomorphic figurines, mosaic vessels of jade from Tikal, along with obsidian and shell, zoomorphic bowls, incense burners with zoomorphic effigies, a huge crocodile sculpture, devil and jaguar masks, textiles and indigenous clothing.
The museum has numerous stelae from various Mayan sites throughout the country and monuments from Tikal.
We were impressed by the huge model of Tikal: The City of the Voices. We saw this before we actually went to Tikal.
We learned about Jasaw Chan K’awil (682AD- 734AD), known for bringing about the resurgence of Tikal after defeating the commonwealth of Calakmul. His remains were found deep in the Great Jaguar Pyramid at Tikal, wrapped in fabrics and jaguar hide, surrounded by pyrite, metal mirrors, ceramic offerings and bone collections, seashells, pearls, and an ostentatious funerary jade trousseau.
One section of the museum displayed cultural items such as clothing and masks.
We learned about Semana Santa in Guatemala (Holy Week), which was inscribed as an Outstanding Universal Value by UNESCO on November 30, 2022. It represents a celebration of culture and religiosity in all 22 departments of the country as it has been celebrated for centuries.
Semana Santa contains multiple representations of ancestral Maya, Afro-descendent, and Mestizo worldviews, which have undergone numerous transformations and show the sociocultural diversity of Guatemala.
Semana Santa in Guatemala (Holy Week)
Encircling the final room in the museum are painted panels created by Roberto González Goyri which show “spiritual syncretism” based on the sacred book of the Maya, the Popol Vuh, the events of the Spanish conquest, and the fusion of present-day manifestations. Another panel shows the ancient Mayan world.
Kyoto Restaurant at Barceló Guatemala City
We enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Kyoto Restaurant in the Barceló Guatemala City, a huge hotel not far from the airport. We shared hot sake alternated with cold sips of Sapporo along with some gyoza. I had a King Dragon Roll (roll with tempura shrimp, crab meat, avocado, cucumter and masago with spicy mayo). Mike enjoyed the Spicy Tuna (roll with tuna, avocado, cucumber, and spicy mayo). My roll was heavy and I vowed when we returned to Guatemala City on the 16th, I would order the Spicy Tuna Roll that Mike had ordered.
Thursday, March 12: This morning, we flew to Maya Mundo International Airport in Flores on a 6:00 a.m. Avianca flight.
We were in Flores by 6:45. From there, we explored Flores/Tikal in Guatemala and San Ignacio/Xunantunich/Cahal Pech in Belize.
Monday, March 16: We arrived back in Guatemala City late at night on Monday, March 16 and didn’t waste any time going right to bed.
Tuesday, May 17: On our last day in Guatemala, we spent the morning going to two museums on the beautiful campus of Universidad Francisco Marroquin. We were greeted by jubilant hordes of jacaranda trees in purple bloom and greenery everywhere.
Museo Popol Vuh is one of the major collections of Maya art in the world. The museum is known for its extensive collection of pre-Columbian and colonial art of the Maya culture. It is named after the Popul Vuh, a book written soon after the Spanish conquest of Guatemala, that narrates myths and pre-Columbian history of the K’iche’, whose kings dominated a great part of the Western plateau of Guatemala. The collection at this museum includes many objects related to the narratives of the Popol Vuh book in which the Maya world was conceived as being populated by numerous gods and spirits that interacted with human beings. The Popol Vuh was originally preserved through oral tradition until about 1550, when it was recorded in writing.
Museo Popol Vuh
“Beauty, Ritual, and Power”
The main exhibit was titled “Beauty, Ritual, and Power,” focused on pre-Hispanic concepts or standards of beauty. For the Maya, beauty was closely tied to ideals of harmony, proportion and a connection with the divine. Physical appearance had a central role in this world.
The pre-Hispanic Maya practiced a series of permanent bodily modifications to conform with their society’s ideals of beauty. Cranial modification was foremost, usually carried out in infancy by women using rigid tools such as a cradleboard or a pair of loose splints, accompanied by constricting bandages. Imagery shows this being performed by elderly women (possibly midwives), but colonial accounts suggest it was carried out by the mother. Women wore elaborate hairstyles to emphasize their cranial modification.
The Mayans also modified their teeth through filing and inlaying, typically performed on the most visible (labial) surface of incisors, and less frequently on the canines. Tooth filing was a deliberate abrasion of specific areas of the tooth to achieve distinct shapes. Some teeth were inlaid with precious stones or minerals. This practice dates to the early Preclassic Period and continued possibly for centuries, until the arrival of the Spanish.
Tattoos, marks and body painting were widely used; they marked people as brave and valiant because they were painful processes.
Bodily modifications and garments reflected prevailing ideals of beauty, religious beliefs, and ritual practices, as well as personal rank, wealth and prestige.
Ceramic figurines show what men and women looked like: most represented courtiers, members of royal families and nobility, or functionaries like priests, warriors, and ball players. Many are figures of women, often accompanied by children or animals. Some depict gods or personages dressed as gods; likely these had religious significance.
I was fascinated by this exhibit which showed me two things: that people have been modifying their bodies for centuries to meet some random ideas of “beauty” conceived by the societies in which they live; and that no matter what the time period, people have always stratified themselves into some kind of caste system, in which people are ranked by imagined hierarchies: in other words, people are always trying to make themselves better than others, and to dominate others they see as “other” or “lesser.” I don’t have hope that these aspects of human nature will ever change.
The Permanent Exhibit
The rest of the museum showed the Mayan culture through various periods.
Throughout the Early Classic Period, the urban center of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico maintained close contact with the Maya Region. It influenced Tikal culturally and politically. The presence of a Teotihuacan governor in 378AD and immigrants from the city spread the culture to Tikal. Domestic and ceremonial ceramic objects attest to Teotihucan’s influence. Most significant were incense burners and tripod cylindrical vases decorated with Teotihuacan warriors, gods and figures.
By the end of the Preclassic Period, the city of Teotihuacan had become one of the largest cities in the world at the time.
One diorama showed the building of Tikal, which required large numbers or specialized workers or artisans. These workers quarried stone, cut trees for wood, made lime, and transported materials to the building site. This was all done with human labor using stone instruments. Buildings were often built atop older ones. Temporary walls and stairs were built, and layers of fill were carried up and deposited in an orderly manner. Facades faced with cut-stone masonry were covered with stucco. Then decorative elements were added and buildings were painted in bright colors.
building of Tikal
Río Azul in the northeast corner of Petén once belonged to the city state of Tikal. It may have served as a fortress or military outpost. There is also evidence it was a commercial center.
Río Azul
The ancient Maya made books from the inner bark of a native fig tree, called amate. Long strips of paper were made from processed bark, covered with fine layers of stucco and folded like screens, so it was possible to open the books and read several pages at once. The Dresden Codex is the oldest and finest example of the three Maya books still preserved from the the pre-Hispanic period. It is estimated to have been written in the 13th century. It includes a series of omens and calendars with predictions for each date based on the actions of the gods. Tables track the cycle of the planet Venus and solar and lunar eclipses, and prescribes rituals for celebrating the New Year.
Cacao was one of Mesoamerica’s most prized products. Cacao gods and goddesses personified the cacao tree with abundant pods.
The museum had a display of artistic depictions of Mayan symbols on fabric that were quite beautiful.
Before going to the Museo Ixchel, next door to the Museo Popol Vuh, we stopped at an outdoor student cafe where we gobbled down some Ramen noodles and admired the pretty campus.
Guatemala City: Museo Ixchel del Traje Indigena
Museo Ixchel del Traje Indigena presents the evolution of Guatemala’s textile tradition from pre-Hispanic times to the present. It illustrates the origins, variations and continuities that the costume has experienced over time, as well as the weaving tools, materials and techniques. The museum’s four rooms present the history of Maya clothing and weaving in Guatemala going back to 200 BC. The collection comprises thousands of weavings.
Museo Ixchel
Clothing reflects the way different eras, cultures and technological advances are linked to the construction of identity. Dress is considered a “second skin” that can denote heirarchy, economic standing of the wearer, whether from a village, municipality, region or country. The elite wore prestigious feathers such as those of quetzal birds and macaws, and fur from rabbits and hares. Jade was made into neck ornaments, earrings or earplugs, and pendants; they also used shells and other materials. The top ranks of the military wore garments of jaguar skin and capes from strips of bark.
Men wore máxtlatl or loin cloths, hip-cloths, belts, military shirts (xicolli or xapot), and cotton cloths or capes; women wore skirts, hip-cloths, sashes, and huipiles or native blouses. Construction was simple: garments were not cut out but were simple squares or rectangles. The elite decorated their heads with complex headdresses and wore high-heeled sandals as foot wear.
The key instrument in Mesoamerican tradition was the backstrap loom from 200 BC to 1531 AD. Cotton was the main fiber, as well as the fibers of agave. Dyes and colorings were extracted mainly from seeds, flowers, leaves, roots, bark, and fruit, with which threads were dyed or superficially painted.
A bobbin winder from the Cantel Factory, Quetzaltenango (1926) was incorporated into the final process of winding the thread for the fabrics. This Guatemalan firm started operations in 1874 and was a major enterprise in the manufacture of thread and fabrics in Central America. The factory closed in 2008.
bobbin winder from the Cantel Factory, Quetzaltenango (1926)
The Ixchel Museum’s collection includes examples from 126 towns and 30 hamlets, the majority of which are situated in the highlands of Guatemala.
One display features the backstrap loom technique, which is an ongoing ancestral practice, as well as huipiles made with modern technologies. It also includes skirts made with the jaspe (ikat) or resist-dye technique, mostly designed by male weavers who use the treadle loom. These sets express the ethnic identity conveyed in traditional and ceremonial attire. They follow the display of threads, which in weavings take on a life and shape of their own. Threads have always been the key link to begin the weaving process. Together with the skilled hands of weavers, they give distinction and texture to each piece.
Andrés Curruchich (1891-1969) painted the traditions of his town, San Juan Comalapa, first on pieces of wood and gourds, and later on cotton cloth, using paints he prepared himself with vegetable and mineral dyes. Around 1960, the Guatemalan government recognized his merits by granting him the Order of the Quetzal. The paintings on display show the town and nearby villages, the Comalapan attire and different everyday and ceremonial activities from decades ago.
Another exhibit displays apparel worn by the cofradía members organizing religious ceremonies devoted to a patron saint, who is celebrated by a mass and then carried in procession through the streets on the feast day, accompanied by marimbas, dancers and the faithful. These rites, for which blessings will hopefully be received, help participants to bond with each other.
Carmen G. de Pettersen (Guatemala, 1900-1991) painted detailed watercolors in which she portrays people wearing ceremonial, cofradía, and everyday indigenous attire from different Guatemalan regions. Women and men are pictured in different locations, adorned with traditional silver jewelry and complemented with insignias and other luxury items. In addition to the paintings, some of the original garments depicted in the artist’s paintings are displayed.
Carmen Gehrke was born in 1900 in Guatemala. Her father was a London merchant and her mother was born in Mexico to German-Spanish parents. After going to London with her parents at the age of 4 and taking up painting, she returned to Guatemala in 1923 and a short time later married Leif Lind Pettersen (León), originally from Norway. They moved to a coffee and quinine plantation in Guatemala, where they lived the rest of their lives.
Seeing that the Maya textile tradition was changing rapidly, Carmen dedicated five years to a new project. She started it at the age of 70 after losing the sight of one eye. In a collection of 61 watercolors, she depicted the distinctive dress from communities mostly located in the Highlands of Guatemala. She documented the costumes worn between 1940 and 1975.
I especially loved these last two museums set on the beautiful university campus I learned much from both of them.
Dinner at Kyoto Restaurant
On our last night in Guatemala City, we ate dinner once again at the wonderful Kyoto Restaurant in the hotel. It was a good ending to our two weeks in Guatemala and Belize.
**Most information presented above was gleaned from the museum’s displays and informational plaques, which luckily were in English as well as Spanish.**
Saturday, March 14: We went to Belize in search of the exotic, but it took some digging to find it. Mostly, I came up empty-handed. I had included it on our itinerary because we would be so close to the country when we went to Tikal that it seemed a shame not to visit it and check off our last remaining Central American country (except Honduras, which we didn’t intend to visit).
What I didn’t know when I first conceived of the idea was that Belize was once known as British Honduras (from 1862-1973). It was a British Crown Colony before changing its name and gaining independence in 1981. The name was changed to Belize to establish a distinct identity and to declare its sovereignty. However, Belize’s official language remains English. We found in actuality that most Belizeans speak English, but feel more comfortable conversing in Spanish, their native language.
The history of the British involvement in British Honduras (now Belize) mostly revolved around the wood they could extract from the land. The first was a swamp-loving tree known as logwood, whose heartwood could be boiled down to a blue-black dye, an alternative to indigo. When demand for logwood died off, the British moved on to mahogany, spurred by demand from Chippendale’s high-end furniture. So, the British “came for the wood, and when they took the last tree, they left.” (The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird” by Bruce Barcott).
We took an early morning shuttle to the Belize border, where we crossed easily and quickly. Then we were on to San Ignacio, a small town about 20 minutes from the border at Melchor de Mencos.
Saturday marketin San Ignacio
Now that I was in my 43rd country, I could search out the exotic. What, I wondered, would delight me? What would the evidence be that I was elsewhere? Unlike Guatemala, there was no traditional dress like the women’s huipil (traditional blouse worn by indigenous women there). The colors were more muted. People wore regular Western clothes: jeans, shorts, t-shirts. I think of traditional dress I’ve found in other parts of the world: the sari, kalwar sameez, and kurta in India; the djellaba and kaftan in Morocco; the traditional kimono in Japan as contrasted with the black or navy suits and white shirts worn by almost every Japanese man and woman when going to work; the dishdasha and mussar for men and the burqa and colorful headscarves in Oman; the kebaya and sarong in Bali.
The first thing I noticed as we walked through the Saturday farmer’s market was that the people were more mixed than Guatemala’s indigenous Mayans. The country is mostly made up of Mestizos (53%) but 26% are Creole and 11% are Mayan. Garifuna and East Indians make up almost 10%. The Garifuna are an Afro-Indigenous people of mixed free African and Amerindian ancestry that originated in the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent and traditionally speak Garifun, an Arawakan language. Creole can refer to a diverse array of backgrounds, including Afro-Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Sub-Saharan Africa. There were even a group of Mennonites at the market; apparently there is a large community. So, the people of Belize seeemed diverse.
The fruit and vegetable offerings looked similar to those in many Central American markets: varieties of peppers and squash, potatoes, mangos, plantains, pineapples, watermelons, and turmeric. The market seemed rather tired and shabby. The prepared food stalls didn’t look appetizing and there were no souvenirs worth perusing. It lacked the color and vivaciousness of many of the world’s markets. I think of Barcelona’s amazing central market, and Moroccan, Thai, and Turkish markets, which offer huge arrays of exotic spices, foods, textiles, and beautiful items such as lanterns, ceramics, silver and gold jewelry, swords, and paintings.
The Iguana Project at San Ignacio Resort Hotel
Someone on our shuttle told us of the Iguana Project at the San Ignacio Resort Hotel. Maybe we would find the exotic there. It was rather exotic to see iguanas up close, but we see many iguanas in Costa Rica, even on the driveway leading up to our condos on Lake Arenal. The exotic thing was being able to touch them and hold them, which I would never consider doing to one of the wild ones wandering around in Costa Rica. They felt scaly and these, who see humans every day while in captivity, didn’t shy away. In reality, they were not that exotic, considering they were for the most part domesticated. The iguanas we could pet and hold were Black Iguanas that couldn’t be released back into the wild because of injuries or other problems.
What we found most exotic were the facts that people told us or that we read about. Iguanas were called Itzamna by the ancient Mayans. The guide told us that all snakes in Belize are poisonous and that there is little serum to treat snakebites available in hospitals. That sounded scarily exotic. I knew I didn’t want to encounter any snakes.
Two ecologists, Miriam Roberson and Daniel Velasquez, launched the Iguana Project in 1996 because they were concerned about the alarming decrease in the numbers of iguanas. The purpose is to conserve and look after the endangered Green Iguana species in Belize. Green iguanas are hunted in Belize but like all game species there is a closed season (February 1- July 1) to allow for breeding season and thus protect them from extinction. There is no faster way to bring a species to extinction than by killing pregnant females.
Maya Mountain Lodge
We were finally able to check into the Maya Mountain Lodge at 2:00. Our room was weathered but clean. Dark curtains covered the windows. There was no way to open them until Mike finally figured out on our last day that he could tie them in knots to let the sunshine in. We hung out by the pool in the afternoon, where we were able to commandeer the only two hammocks. Not many chairs were available and the few available weren’t lounge chairs, but uncomfortable slightly reclining plastic chairs. Mike had asked our last taxi driver to stop at a market where he bought some local beers: 501 Stout Break Loose, which we sipped while reading in our hammocks.
So far, I didn’t feel that we’d found anything super delightful or exotic. The only thing that caught me off guard was when the people spoke to us in English, which was always a surprise. And the price of taxis was outrageous. No Uber was available in the small town, and the taxis charged a whopping $8 for every trip, no matter how long or short. We paid an Uber driver about $5 to drive us in Guatemala City, sometimes for half-hour drives through heavy traffic. For such a small town this was outrageous. Exotic? Certainly not, but it was aggravating, especially since our hotel was not within walking distance of town.
Sunday, March 15: Maybe we would find the exotic as we explored the Mayan ruins of Xunantunich or Cahal Pech. Maybe we would find it in the food. We were open to any surprises that might await us.
Xunantunich
We arrived with a driver to the Mopan River, where we took the whimsical hand-cranked ferry across the river. We had to exit the car and walk on to the ferry while Rodolfo drove the car on to the ferry. It only took a few minutes to get across. Then Rodolfo drove us about a mile to the parking lot, where he would wait for us for two hours. I have to say, this cute little ferry was rather exotic.
Xunantunich means “Maiden of the Rock” or “Stone Woman.” The “Stone Woman” refers to the ghost of a woman claimed by several people to inhabit the site, beginning in 1892. She was said to be dressed completely in white with fire-red glowing eyes. She most often appeared in front of “El Castillo,” ascended the stone stairs, and vanished into a stone wall.
The story seems exotic (if not the stuff of pure fantasy), and the site seems exotic, as most Mayan sites are. There are many more of such sites we could see, if we had endless time to travel — all through Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and southern Mexico. Of the three we saw, Tikal felt the most exotic because of the effusive jungle surrounds, and the pure scale of the site. For Xunantunich, the findings have been insubstantial to prove it was a site of importance.
The ancient Mayan archeological site of Xunantunich sits in western Belize, right up against the border with Guatemala. The core of the city occupies about one square mile, with a series of six plazas surrounded by more than 26 temples and palaces. It sits 183 meters above sea level atop a ridge above the Mopan River. It served as a Maya civic ceremonial center to the Belize Valley region in the Late and Terminal Classic periods (c. 700-900 AD). At that time, when the region was at its peak, nearly 200,000 people lived in the Belize Valley. There is much evidence of trade and communication. Pine was a valuable commodity controlled by elites and rulers; it was used in ritualistic and building purposes for the upper class.
The pyramid “El Castillo” is one of the site’s better known structures. It is the second tallest structure in Belize (after the temple at Caracol) at some 40 meters (130 feet). It was actually a large multi-complex building that served as a dwelling, shrine, and administrative hub for the elite rulers of the center, rather than the primary temple. A series of terraces leads to a fine stucco “frieze” depicting the birth of a god associated with the royal family, gods of creation, as well as the tree of life (which extends from the underworld, the earth and the heavens).
We were able to climb El Castillo for magnificent views of the entire site, as well as the countryside extending into Guatemala. Because we were the first people to arrive, we had the place almost to ourselves.
In 750 AD, Xunantunich was left in a state of abandonment due to an unknown violent event. It did not reestablish itself as a strong presence until the Tsak’ phase in 780-890 AD.
Interestingly, while most Maya civilizations were crumbling, Xunantunich was expanding its city and power over other areas within the Valley. It lasted a century longer than most of the states within the region.
The site was first explored in the 1800s by a British medical officer, Dr. Thomas Gann. There have been continuous excavations and restorations since 1990 by the University of California (ULA).
Here’s a short video of the view of Xunantunich from El Castillo.
Cahal Pech
Cahal Pech is another Mayan site located within the city of San Ignacio. A rendering in the museum at the site looks like this:
The Museum at Cahal Pech is chock-full of information about the Mayans, including a map of all the archeological sites in the Upper Belize Valley, a Chronology of the Mayan civilization, and summaries of all the developmental periods from Middle Preclassic to Post Classic and Colonial. The museum also had a useful map that showed where the Mayans lived in what are now numerous countries: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Belize and several states in Mexico.
Cahal Pech is translated “Place or City” from the Yucatec and Mopan Maya. The name was coined in the 1950s when the reserve was still a cattle pasture.
Cahal Pech was first occupied in about 1200 BC, in the Preclassic Period, and is one of the earliest known Mayan villages. Houses were simple low platforms with tamped clay floors and thatch roofs. The people planted corn, beans, squash, and chili peppers in the rich alluvial soils. They also hunted local game, collected freshwater snails, and caught fish, iguanas and crocodiles in rivers. Contact with other groups was indicated by the presence of obsidian, jade acquired from Guatemala, and objects produced from coastal Caribbean shell.
In the Middle Preclassic period (900-300 BC), Cahal Pech increased in size and the people began to construct monumental architecture. Obvious differences in the social status emerged. Ceramics became more standardized due to communications with other communities. Structures were built for ritual use; five of these are found at Cahal Pech.
In the Late Preclassic (300 BC to AD 300) Cahal Pech became one of the primary centers in the Upper Belize River Valley. At this time, Maya civilization, with its hieroglyphic form of writing, solar calendar, base-20 numeral system of mathematics, complex art, and monumental architecture became fully established.
In the Classic Period (AD 300-900), Cahal Pech competed with other cities for local affluence. Many violent conflicts were recorded. Most of the site’s large temples and palaces were built between 600-800 AD. An estimated 10,000-20,000 people lived in Cahal Pech during the late Classic Period, with the majority being farmers on the periphery with elites in the site’s center.
Contact with other sites such as Caracol were evident. At Caracol, about 82 km south of Cahal Pech, a common ritual involved the offering of human fingers in small bowls. More than 200 of these finger bowls were discovered in a tomb at Cahal Pech.
Despite the Mayan’s accomplishments, the Maya system in the lowlands eventually failed and people began to abandon the once-thriving cities. Scientists believe the collapse was a combination of social and environmental stresses and the inability of the political and economic system to deal with the changes. At the end of the 9th century, Cahal Pech was gradually abandoned. Strangely, other sites in the area continued to prosper after the fall of Cahal Pech.
In the Postclassic period (AD 900-1500) Maya rulers no longer enjoyed the godly stature and power they once had. Carving of monuments and building of large scale architecture ceased. New communities were founded along coastal regions and maritime trade thrived, leading to a powerful and influential merchant class.
The Colonial Period (1500-1800 AD) saw the Spaniards dominate the Maya area. Spanish friars ventured into the interior to convert the Maya to Catholicism.
Scientists and researchers have suggested reasons that the Maya developed such an advanced civilization. Guesses include many far-fetched ideas such as the following: 1) the civilization was purely the result of external forces (Phoenicians, Carthaginians, people from Atlantis); 2) extra-terrestrials taught them their astronomy, mathematics and calendrics; 3) seafarers from China, Japan or North Africa brought them more advanced knowledge. Most archeologists believe that the development of the civilization was a gradual process that combined ecological adaptation, trade and interaction with other communities, the elite’s desire for exotic status symbols such as jade, quetzal feathers, and marine products, and their use of writing and calendrics for propaganda, along with a strong belief in the power of their gods and religion.
We enjoyed walking around Cahal Pech, which is more extensive than appears at first sight. The trees growing on the ruins reminded me of the Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia, but less exotic-looking.
Food adventuresin Belize
San Ignacio Resort Hotel& The Famous Marie Sharp’s Habanero Pepper Sauce
At the San Ignacio Resort Hotel, after visiting the Iguana Project, we found something exotic. While eating a lunch of chicken salad (decidedly NOT exotic), we found a bottle of “The Famous Marie Sharp’s Habanero Pepper Sauce.” According to the bottle: “Her secret homemade recipe utilizes the potent red habanero pepper. Produced in the fertile paradise of Belize, her red habanero is considered to be one of the hottest peppers known to man.” Her factory is based on Stann Creek Valley Road in Belize. Apparently it is one of the exotic things to be experienced in Belize. We sprinkled some on our chicken salad, but it didn’t burn our mouths as we feared it might.
KO-OX-HAN-NAH(Let’s Go Eat)
We stopped at the well-known KO-OX-HAN-NAH (Let’s Go Eat) after sweating away at both Xunantunich and Cahal Pech. I felt and looked like something the cat dragged in. However, we did enjoy the atmosphere and a common Belizean dish: Coconut Rice and Stew Beans with Chicken. It was delicious, especially the tender chicken with its delicious sauce. We also ordered some deep fried jalapeños stuffed with chicken that didn’t thrill me.
Fiona’s Cafe at Maya Mountain Lodge
We were happy to find exotic food choices at the hotel’s onsite restaurant, Fiona’s Cafe. Our first night, I ordered Garifuna Sere: Coconut soup, prawn and snapper fillet with hints of cilantro and local yams. Served in an asymmetrical white bowl, it introduced me to delicious flavors that felt very exotic. Mike had a Maya Fish Fillet: red snapper with onion, tomatoes and bell peppers wrapped in an obel leaf (mint flavored leaf). It was very tasty indeed. Both were brimming with unusual flavors and textures. To top off our meal, we ordered Sweet Jacks for dessert: deep fried cinnamon fry jacks drizzled with golden plum jam on flavored ice cream. Fry jacks, a traditional dish in Belizean cuisine, are deep-fried dough pieces usually served for breakfast; they can be shaped as circles or triangles.
Our second night, we figured we would eat at Fiona’s again. After all, it would cost us $16 round trip to go into town. Plus, the food had been wonderful on the first night. We ordered the same Maya Fish dish to share but this time the fish wasn’t snapper. I can’t remember what it was. We also shared a Beet Root Salad: crispy greens, roasted beet root, carrots, cherry tomatoes, orange wedges, caramelized almonds, coco chips and citrus dressing. The beet salad was delectable but the Maya Fish somehow didn’t seem as good as on the first night. I don’t know if it was because the fish was different or the novelty had worn off.
The two breakfasts at Fiona’s were not too exotic other than the fry jacks. The first day’s Belizean Breakfast was scrambled eggs, refried beans, bacon, fry jacks and a side of fruits.
Waiting for the shuttle and returning to Guatemala
Monday, March 16: Our last morning, we took our sweet time, lingering in the apartment in the morning and going for a late breakfast. We waited until the last possible moment to check out, 11 a.m., because our shuttle wouldn’t leave San Ignacio until 2:30 to cross the Belize border and return to Flores in Guatemala.
Mike had Huevos Rancheros and I had an “Omlet con todo.” During breakfast our last day we talked to a young Belizean man who led early morning birding walks at the hotel. He told us the national bird of Belize was the Keel Billed Toucan, which we see often in Costa Rica. Then he informed us that the National Bird of Costa Rica was the boring little brown clay-colored thrush, known locally as the yigüirro. We were surprised it wasn’t something more exotic since Costa Rica has an abundance of beautiful birds. But apparently the clay-colored thrush is one of Costa Rica’s most common birds and is found throughout every region. It was designated the National Bird in January of 1977. Discovering this fact about Costa Rica from a Belizean birder was surprising, and a bit exotic!
The waitress told us on our last morning that her daughter had been bitten by a poisonous snake the day before. She gushed about her brother, who always drops everything when she needs him, as he was on a quest to get some serum for her daughter. We of course don’t know the outcome, but we hoped the best for her daughter.
We hung out by the pool until our ride picked us up until 2:00. It was hot and rather boring, as waiting for anything usually is. The ride back to the Belize border was quick and the border crossing was easy. And then we returned to Flores, where our shuttle driver dropped us directly at Maya Mundo Airport in Flores for our 8:45 flight back to Guatemala City.
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One of my intentions on this trip was to write about: What do you find exotic? What delights you? What is the evidence that you are elsewhere?
I did this above, though it was difficult since I didn’t find that much of the “exotic” in Belize.
March 31, 2026: Welcome to our March cocktail hour. Let’s have some traditional Guatemalan beverages such as Gallo beer, Ron Zacapa Centenario rum, or “Rosa de Jamaica.” We can finally venture out to our sprawling balcony as the dry season has finally arrived! Maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see Volcán Arenal or the Worm Moon. You can even come along vicariously on our trip to Guatemala and Belize where we explored colorful Guatemalan culture and Mayan ruins. Sunset is is now at around 5:50 every night and, hopefully, we can enjoy some magnificent painterly skies at sunset.
I have a variety of soda, seltzer water, or limonada con soda or horchata for those of you who don’t drink. Mike can also whip up some excellent smoothies. Thanks for joining us in our escape into a peaceful corner of the world.
March marked our tenth month in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Now that the month is over, we have two remaining months here. I’m looking forward to one more visit to Nicaragua to see the family and then returning home for June and July to see the family in Virginia and take care of some business. I hope the chaos in the world won’t ruin our hoped-for trip to Scandinavia (August-October). We’ll return to our pariah country for another two months in November and December to *VOTE* (!) and to spend the holidays with the family.
A trip to Guatemala & Belize
We drove to San José on March 3 and flew to Guatemala from March 4-18, with 2 nights in Belize (March 14-16). We loved the colorful Mayan culture found in Guatemala, but traveling there was cumbersome and a bit grueling at times. We needed a lot of rest after our trip! I was happy to add two more countries to my list; I’ve now visited or lived in 43 countries.
A long grueling drive to San José
On Tuesday, March 3, we drove a grueling 4 hours to San José where we spent the night at Hotel Aeropuerto; they allow us to leave our car there (for $10/night) if we stay either the night before or the night after a trip. I hope that will be the last time we have to drive to San José. We sat by the pool and read, and later enjoyed beers and ate a Mexican dinner at the on-site Cactus Beer Garden. The next day, we flew from San José to Guatemala City.
In Antigua, we were bowled over by the celebrations, unfurling purples, and alfombras de aserrín (sawdust carpets) of Cuaresma (Lent). We met my nephew Seth who would climb Volcán de Acatenango the following two days, and just as we met him, we witnessed the death of a baby right in front of us at Al Tueste Coffee House. We popped into churches, as well as ruins of convents and monasteries destroyed ultimately by the 1773 earthquake; this catastrophic event led to the capital being moved to Guatemala City. We wandered through the colorful Mercado Local and the Mercado de Artesanías, where I bought a couple of Guatemalan tops and pants. We stopped for drinks each afternoon at Red Zebra with its mellow music and vibe. Finally, we sampled authentic Mayan cuisine at Itzam.
Around Lago de Atitlán, we went from our Airbnb base in Panajachel to the Sunday market and the colorful town cemetery in Chichicastenango, where colorful tombstones and mausoleums encourage Guatemalans to accept the inevitability of death. We zipped across the lake in lanchas (water taxis) to various towns around the lake: San Pedro la Laguna (the hippie backpacker town), San Juan la Laguna (the Tz’utujil town filled with colorful Mayan-themed murals), and San Marcos la Laguna (the “spiritual nurturing” town). We took a tuk-tuk to Santa Catarina Palopó where houses are painted in blues and greens with Mayan symbols. We ate several times at Lena’s Atlantis Restaurant decorated with colorful Mexican perforated banners called papel picado, representing the fragility of life and the element of wind.
We arrived early to Flores after a short flight from Guatemala City and spent our first day exploring the colorful island town, visiting the Cristo Negro (Black Christ) at Catedral Nuestra Señora de Los Remedios y San Pablo Itzá, taking a boat ride on Lake Petén Itzá, eating delicious lunch and dinner at Nativo, and soaking in the hotel pool. Our second day, we took a shuttle 1 1/2 hours north of town to Tikal Ruins and National Park, where we spent nearly 5 hours and close to 19,000 steps traipsing through the huge site in hot and humid tropical jungle. We learned all about the Mayan city, once the capital of what became one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya, reaching its heights during the Classic Period, c. 200-900 AD. When we were able to relax after our exhausting day, we had fun watching little boats and a small ferry putter back and forth across the lake as if in some video game.
San Ignacio and the Mayan sites of Xunantunich and Cahal Pech in Belize
We took an early shuttle from Flores across the Belize border and onward to San Ignacio, Belize. Our first day, we wandered through the town’s Saturday market; visited an iguana project, where we were able to pet and hold the iguanas; ate lunch at San Ignacio Resort Hotel; hung out by the pool at Maya Mountain Lodge; and ate a delicious dinner there at Fiona’s. On our second day, we visited the Mayan sites of Xunantunich and Cahal Pech, ate lunch at the wonderful Ko-ox-han-nah, and then relaxed in the afternoon at the hotel pool and ate another fabulous dinner at Fiona’s. We checked out at 11:00 on Monday but had to wait around by the pool for our 2:30 shuttle back across the Belize border to Flores, where we caught a flight at 8:45 p.m. back to Guatemala City.
Museum-going inGuatemala City, Guatemala
We had an afternoon in Guatemala City after a private driver brought us back from Panajachel to Guatemala City, where we would catch a flight early the next morning to Flores. On that afternoon, we visited the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología where we saw hundreds of items collected from Mayan sites all over Guatemala, including Tikal. That night we ate dinner at Kyoto Restaurant, where we enjoyed sake, Sapporo and sushi. After we returned from Flores/Tikal and Belize, we spent another day exploring two museums on the beautiful campus of Universidad Francisco Marroquin: Museo Popol Vuh (museum with Mayan art and relics) and Museo Ixchel del Traje Indigena (cultural museum focusing on indigenous dress). We ate another dinner at Kyoto, and left early the next morning (5:30 a.m.) to fly back to San José.
Dining Out
Once we returned home from Guatemala, we went to Moya’s Place to listen to the debut of the band Deep Cover; we are acquainted with two of the members. I enjoyed a Pad Thai with shrimp while Mike had a Fajita Bowl with chicken. We also have on our Spring BINGO card to try three new restaurants before we leave Costa Rica, so we tried Dond’Liz, a restaurant in Tronadora that we discovered has a great lending library. I enjoyed my grilled tilapia with garlic sauce while Mike ate a hamburger. I picked up a book, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You I’m Sorry by Fredrik Backman, adding additional pressure on myself to finish that PLUS all the books I brought from Virginia. I would prefer not to haul any of them back home. After going there for the first time, we ended up going there twice in the same week, the second time just before we attended El Gran Tope de Tronadora. On Friday night we went out with Darrell and Farida to Casa Italia in Nuevo Arenal, where we had a wild night filled with laughter. 🙂
No Kings Day protest in Costa Rica
On Saturday, March 28, we met a group of about 75 like-minded folks to wave our NoKings signs and get photographed by phones and a drone. It’s always uplifting to find how many people throughout the world are against our current fascist administration. I was also encouraged by the turnout in over 3,000 locations in the U.S. and in other locations throughout the world.
El Gran Tope de Tronadora
On the 28th, we went to the festivities in Tronadora to celebrate the town’s 50th anniversary since it was rebuilt on higher land after the dam that created Lake Arenal forced the town to move. It was billed as the “Gran Tope de Tronadora (The Great Tronadora Horse Parade).” It seemed a bit chaotic and disorganized, but we enjoyed the crazy atmosphere.
Homebody stuff
We saw the moon the night before we drove to San José; the 4th was the night of the Full Worm Moon but we couldn’t see it from our hotel in San José. We played Scrabble four times, with each of us winning twice. Mike got the car washed so he can start putting feelers out to sell the car in May. I finished 4 books in March bringing my total to 14/48. I especially enjoyed My Friends by Hisham Matar and The Women I Think About At Night by Mia Kankimäki. We watched one fabulous movie, the Norwegian Affeksjonsverdi (Sentimental Value). We started watching a couple of new series or new seasons of old series: Finding Ola (located in Cairo) and Virgin River (S7). We finished watching Younger, Emily in Paris (S5), The Upshaws , and the fabulous Danish series Families Like Ours (Familier som vores). We continued watching Leanne, Ponies, Between Lands (Entre tierras), Ripple, Grantchester (S4), Shrinking, The Lincoln Lawer (S4), and The New Adventures of Old Christine.
Drives, walks and local explorations
On Sunday morning, March 1, we went for a breezy walk from Tronadora down Peninsula 1. It was a gorgeous day, and we met a lot of calves, horses, and friendly Costa Ricans along the way. The only other walk we did was a loop around Tronadora, where we saw some pretty spring flowers.
Finishing up My Winter BINGO card & a new Spring BINGO card
I wrapped up my Winter BINGO card and made up a new Spring BINGO card. I was finally happy to put away my 2025 bullet journal, which held my Winter BINGO card.
Finishing up my Winter BINGO card
I checked off a number of things on my Winter BINGO card in March, achieving 5 BINGOs:
Visit Lago Atitlán and Chichicastenango in Guatemala
Made the last of my “comfort foods”: Chili Mac
Finished reading The Nickel Boys.
Winter BINGO card – wrapped up!
Beginning my Spring BINGO card
I completed a few things on my Spring BINGO card already:
Went to El Gran Tope de Tronadora wearing a cowboy t-shirt
Tried a new restaurant: Dond’Liz
Finished The Women I Think About at Night: Traveling the Paths of My Heroes by Mia Kankimäki, My Friends by Hisham Matar, and On the River Styx and Other Stories by Peter Matthiessen (the last of which I absolutely hated).
Spring BINGO card
Family Happenings
We got pictures of Allie at home and after drawing all over her face with markers. We also got to celebrate Alex’s 35th birthday vicariously as the family went out to a Mexican restaurant. We also got to see photos of Allie at her day care.
On my Costa Rica blog, you can find my weekly recaps of our lives in Costa Rica for the month of March:
I hope you’ll share how the year is panning out for you, and what plans you have for the spring.
How did your March go? Did you have any special family gatherings? Have you welcomed any new additions to your family? Did you celebrate any birthdays or anniversaries? Have you read any good books that can inform your worldview, seen any good movies, binge-watched any television series? Have you planned any adventures or had any winter or holiday getaways? Have you dreamed any dreams? Have you gone to any exotic restaurants, cooked any new dishes? Have you been surprised by anything in life? Have you created a Spring Bingo Card or dream list? Have you made any new friends? Have you learned anything new, taken any classes or just kept up with the news? Have you sung along with any new songs? Have you undertaken any new exercise routines? Have you marched or otherwise participated in political protests? Have you been battered, or alternately, uplifted by any news?
Please share your March with me by giving me the plot below, or a link to a post in your blog that tells about your month.
Thursday, March 12, 2026: I learned that days seem to last forever when you get up at 3:30 a.m. for a 6:00 flight, arrive at your destination before 7:00 a.m., and can’t check into your hotel until 3:00 p.m. I also learned that you can’t mess with Avianca when it comes to the weight of your carry-on. They stick strictly to a 10kg weight limit.
I learned that a heavy breakfast after an early morning, followed by a walk in the sun in a tropical environment, makes me sleepy and irritable.
I learned that all the paraphernalia associated with cuaresma (lent) in Antigua is also evident in Flores, at the opposite end of the country: the alfombras de aserrín (sawdust carpets) , the religious dioramas, and the purple colors everywhere. I learned that our Hotel Casona de la Isla is cute, has a swimming pool and bar, and that the apartments (where we would stay) are across the street in another building.
I learned, especially after being in the dry and cool climate in the Costa Rican and Gautemalan highlands, that I’m miserable once I am immersed in tropical regions with high temperatures and high humidity. I know this fact, yet I somehow always forget, or conveniently file it away, until the unpleasantness hits me once again.
I learned that Flores is a town in Petén Department’s northern region that sits prettily on an island on Lake Petén Itzá. It is a town of pastel-painted houses and businesses, cobbled streets, and souvenir shops, and is the gateway town to the Mayan ruins of Tikal. It is the second continuously inhabited settlement in the Americas after Cholula in Puebla, Mexico. It was the last Maya city to fall to the Spanish in 1679, at which time, whoever wasn’t slaughtered fled into the jungle. The Spanish destroyed the city and built the new city of Flores on top.
I learned, although I’ve actually always known, that I love taking photos of colorful things. And I’m easily charmed by anything colorful, especially murals, pastel-painted buildings, textiles, paintings, and local markets.
I learned that there is one hill in Flores, and that steep streets lead to the white twin-domed Catedral Nuestra Señora de Los Remedios y San Pablo Itzá, which hosts a rare Cristo Negro (Black Christ). I learned that this church was built on the site of an original Mayan temple in 1718 following the Spanish conquest of Tayasal.
I learned that the Petén Department of Guatemala accounts for a third of Guatemala’s area and has a tropical monsoon climate. It is bordered on the east by Belize and by Mexico with the Mexican states of Chiapas to the west, Tabasco to the northwest, and Campeche to the north. It is a densely forested low-lying limestone plain with small rivers and low-lying seasonal swamps. A broad savannah extends south of the central lakes which features a compact clay soil too poor to support heavy cultivation. The savannah is surrounded by hills covered in dense tropical forest.
I learned that we don’t care for apartments with no windows or natural light, or ones that lack air-conditioning in common areas. I learned that I get annoyed with 3:00 check-ins and hotels that really stick to that time. I also learned that I felt more relaxed on this trip because I didn’t post on Instagram, but then I didn’t use my time to write either. I remembered that in the days when I traveled alone, I always spent time in the evenings writing in my journal, but when I travel with Mike, I either read or watch TV. This was one of the few places where we had streaming services, so we watched Virgin River and Emily in Paris.
I learned that I love taking a boat ride in a lake to see cute towns from the water and to feel a cool breeze. I also love soaking in a cool pool with a beer after traipsing around sweating all day.
I learned that the lake was especially high after the rainy season and had flooded many businesses along the shore.
a business flooded on the lakeshore
I learned that when we find a restaurant we love, we will go to it numerous times during a visit. In our case, we ate lunch and dinner at the wonderful Nativo which serves refreshing native food with a contemporary twist. At lunch, we shared a Nativo Poke Bowl with shrimp and at dinner a Chistorra Chorizo pizza. After our long hot day traipsing around Tikal, we returned one last night for dinner where I had the best ceviche I’ve ever had: Nativo’s Aguachile, with shrimp marinated in spicy Tiger milk with habañero (a typical chile of this region), cucumber, seasonal tomatoes, golden sweet potato, and avocado, served with totopostes (crunchy tortilla). Mike ate a Pulled Native Pork: Brioche bread, lettuce, house-made pork barbecue, cheese and cabbage salad. Sadly, the night was a bit ruined by an obnoxious and loud group of drunken young people who were hollering at each other over the mellow music during our entire meal.
We were surprised to learn that we loved sitting in the restaurant overlooking Lake Petén Itzá and watching the small lanchas puttering past the rectangular windows as if in some video game. We were especially charmed by the ferry that engined past carrying one or two cars, with its dark profile moving across a sky unfurling with pink, purple and orange clouds at sunset.
I learned that I love nothing better than calling it a night after a tough long day, and returning to our “home away from home.”
Tikal Ruins and National Park
Friday, March 13: Today, we took a shuttle an hour and a half to Tikal Ruins and National Park, where we spent nearly five hours and close to 19,000 steps traipsing around the huge site in hot and humid tropical jungle.
I learned that Tikal National Park encompasses 575 square kilometers (357 sq. mi.) of jungle and thousands of ruined structures. Only 15-20% of the vast site has been officially excavated and restored after decades of archeological work. The vast majority of structures are still hidden under dense jungle foliage and soil. Tikal is the ruin of an ancient city, likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in the Guatemalan rain forest. It is part of Tikal National Park, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.
I learned that the Maya settled in the area now known as Tikal in about 900 BC. Over the centuries, Tikal became an important ceremonial, cultural and commercial center. Most of the city’s massive temples were built during the eighth century AD. Tikal became one of the most massive cities in the Maya world, with a population of maybe 100,000. It was the capital of a state that became one of the most powerful kingdoms of the ancient Maya, reaching its apogee during the Classic Period, c. 200-900 AD. During this period, the city dominated much of the Maya region politically, economically, and militarily, while interacting with areas throughout Mesoamerica such as the great metropolis of Teotihuacan in the distant valley of Mexico.
I learned that, like similar Maya complexes on Mexicio’s Yucatan Peninsula, Tikal fell into decline at the end of the 9th century and was virtually abandoned. The causes of the empire’s collapse remain a mystery, but wars, famine, overpopulation, and resource depletion have all been blamed. The most likely cause of Tikal’s collapse was overpopulation and agrarian failure.
I learned that the giant Kapok Tree (Ceiba pentandra) that we encountered near the park entrance is considered the sacred tree of the Maya. Other important trees at Tikal are tropical cedar and Honduras mahogany.
I learned that Tikal is home to a diverse animal kingdom: agoutis, white-nosed coatis, gray foxes, Geoffroy’s spider monkeys, howler monkeys, harpy eagles, falcons, ocellated turkeys, guans, toucans, green parrots and leafcutter ants. Jaguars, ocelots and cougars also are said to roam the park. We added some new birds to our Life List on Merlin: an Ochre-bellied Flycatcher, a Short-billed Pigeon, and a Lesser Greenlet. We also saw some howler monkeys in the trees.
I learned that Tikal had no water other than what was collected from rainwater and stored in 10 reservoirs. The average annual rainfall in the area was 76.6 inchees. However, the rain was often unpredictable, and long periods of drought could occur before crops ripened, threatening the survival of inhabitants.
I learned that Temple VI is known as the “Temple of Inscriptions” and is the furthest building from the city center. We walked for 20 minutes through the jungle to get to it. The temple has a long inscription on the rear facade of the crest which was stuccoed and painted at some time in history. It is adorned with reliefs on the north and south facades. It was built between 730 and 800 AD. We started here because we often like to start at the furthest point out and work our way back.
I learned that the Palacio de la Acanaladuras (Palace of the Grooves) was a residential complex; the bedrooms have built-in beds. It was named such because of the vertical panels that surround the inner courtyard. We entered through a thin narrow tunnel leading to the central courtyard.
I learned that many structures at Tikal are not officially identified.
I learned that the Edificio Teotihuacano (Teotihuacan Style Building) has a Teotihuacan construction style, with use of the Talud-Tablero. It has representations of the god of rain, Tlaloc. It is nicknamed “Embassy.” I learned that there is a long history of interactions, both positive and negative between Tikal and Teotihuacan.
I learned that the Gran Plaza contains Templo I and Templo II. These are the site’s most iconic structures and were largely excavated and restored in the 1950s and 1960s by the University of Pennsylvania.
Here’s a very short video of the Gran Plaza, with views of Templo I and Acropolis Norte from Templo II.
Templo I (Temple of the Great Jaguar) is a funerary pyramid dedicated to Jasaw Chan K’awil who was entombed in the structure in AD 734. The 47m (157 ft) pyramid was completed in AD ~740-750.
I learned that Jasaw Chan K’awil was an ajaw (similar to “leader,” “ruler,” “lord,” “king,” or similar titles depending on the individual) of the Maya city of Tikal from 682-734 AD. He was one of the most venerated of Tikal’s rulers because his defeat of the rival Maya city of Calakmul in 685 was seen to represent a resurgence in the strength and influence of Tikal after a 130-year-long hiatus in the city’s influence. I learned that we could see his burial items in the National Museum of Mayan Art: Archeology and Ethnology in Guatemala City.
I learned that the 38m (125 ft) tall Templo II (Temple of the Mask) was built in AD 700 and was dedicated to the wife of Jasaw Chan K’awil, although no tomb was found. We were able to climb this temple via wooden steps on the back of the pyramid to have a view of the Gran Plaza.
I learned that the 52m tall Templo V was the first great temple built by the 22nd ruler of Tikal, Animal Skull, in 600 AD. It is oriented to the north facing the Acropolis, the same area where previous rulers were buried. Offerings there included obsidian, shell and ceramics.
I learned that Plaza de los Siete Templos (Plaza of the Seven Temples), covering 25,000 square meters, was named for 7 small temples, all lined up along the east side of the plaza. It includes three ball courts and three administrative-residential buildings. The plaza was conceived to carry out the ritual of the triple ball game, a unique architectural element in all of Mesoamerica.
I learned that by this time in our wanderings I was exhausted and sweating like a thermal waterfall, so I didn’t feel like climbing the 30m high Gran Pirámide in the Plaza de Mundo Perdido (Lost World). Mike, however, did climb and got some excellent photos from the top of Tikal’s other temples rising above the jungle. Covering 60,000 sq. m., this plaza contains 38 structures, one of which was designed as an astronomical complex. A square-shaped structure with stairways on all four sides, bordered by stylized masks, the Gran Pirámide is the main structure of the complex. It was designed to observe the stars and solar cycles. It was built between 250 BC to 150 AD. It was difficult to get a photo of this pyramid because of all the foliage surrounding it.
I learned that the Templo Talud-Tablero (Talud-Tablero Temple) was named for an architectural style consisting of a horizontal rectangula panel (tablero) above a steeply sloping wall (talud). It housed two burials belonging to elite characters and was built between 250 BC -150 AD.
I learned that Templo IV is the largest construction associated with Ruler B of Tikal. It is 64.6m high and is considered one of the most iconic pre-Columbian structures in Tikal. Mike climbed this for views of other temples jutting skyward from the jungle surrounds.
Finally, I learned that Acrópolis Norte was a burial ground or acropolis. This was a sacred place where evidence of royal burials have been found. It was occupied for 1,500 years as demonstrated by numerous constructions and the 16 temples are associated with ritual activities. Numerous stelae and altars found here record the history of Tikal. Other evidence has revealed that this was where the first settlers of Tikal were established.
When we returned to Flores, I learned that my brother in the hospital had half of his foot amputated today. I felt heartbroken for him, but at the same time I was relieved. The doctor had discussed the possibility of him losing all of his leg below the knee, so this was the best of the possible outcomes. Then the hospital did dialysis, which they’ll do every other day from now on. I was happy to find that my brother has now agreed to have dialysis, something he swore he would never do.
I learned that it was lovely to sit at the outside bar at our hotel to have a drink and enjoy the sunset and to watch the little boats scurrying past.
I learned that in tropical climates one should always carry an umbrella. After our last dinner at Nativo, a thunderous rainstorm began and we had to splash through puddles, dashing from one overhang to another, only to arrive home to our apartment utterly drenched. We spent our last night in Flores packing for an early departure to Belize the next morning, and watching Between Lands.
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One of my intentions on this trip was to write a “things I learned today” list, which I did here.
A shuttle carries her north from the hub of Pana, on mountainous roads through bedraggled towns where unfinished concrete buildings hunch by the road
wearing metal stalks of rebar, like hair standing on end. Here, she sees piles of kindling in a yellow haze, and stout Mayan women, with colorful huipil blouses, carrying loads on their heads.
In the highlands of Chichi, the K’iche' Mayans sell textiles, masks, huipil, wooden miniatures of the Holy Family, and hummingbirds hovering on handbags in the Sunday market. Incense wafts like prayers,
mesmerizing tourists or communing with ancestors who might have perished in the Maya genocide during the Guatemalan Civil War. Their remains might be found
in the hilltop cemetery of candy-colored mausoleums and tombstones – white for purity, turquoise for protection, yellow for the sun’s life force or maybe just the deceased’s favorite colors – lime green, coral, lavender –
as invitations to make peace with death’s inevitability. Death looks cheerful here, and she thinks she could lie down among the pillows of tiny graves that bear only death dates.
On the eighteen steps to Iglesia de Santo Tomás, which match the months of the Mayan calendar, the indigenous K’iche' burn incense and make offerings of blossoms or corn, holding dearly to their ancient beliefs.
When she returns from Chichi, she sips wine under a rainbow of banderitas at Atlantis, with her husband, gathering her thoughts. Nearby a fountain advises: “Love all. Serve all. Help ever. Hurt never.”
The next day, she takes a lancha southwest across the ancient volcanic caldera, now Lake Atitlán, to San Pedro la Laguna, where she walks through hectic streets painted in murals.
Tuk-tuks scurry to go elsewhere. She sits drinking Turkish tea overlooking the buzzing water taxis and silent kayakers. The Israeli owner wishes he were home,
with his family while their country (& hers) are at war with Iran. The last thing she wants is to be a party to war, but this young man seems hungry for it.
A tuk-tuk scuttles her to San Juan la Laguna, where, in a cave-like structure, Tz’utujil women serve lunch of traditional food: jicama, chicken and beef stew. These Mayans believe spirits control the natural world and people’s destinies.
The yellow stripe in their weavings promises abundance - in coffee and maize, in life. Murals in the town square manifest Mayan stories - harvests, musical processions, a tattooed man with a leopard head.
She makes her way to the dock, along streets covered with sombreros and umbrellas. A jarring water taxi, packed with tourists, sprays its wake into volcano shapes mimicking the real volcanoes on the far shore.
Back in Pana, she sips a beer on the porch with her husband in the encroaching evening, infused with indigenous voices and customs. She's filled with a deep foreboding of the demise of the "other," who no one makes an effort to understand.
The last day, a tuk-tuk takes her east to Santa Catarina Palopó where she says a prayer in the church for her brother in the hospital and for the Iranians who are being slaughtered by two hateful old men
who are dizzy with power. She wanders among the peaceful blue buildings painted with Mayan symbols. In a candle factory, rainbows of twisted and twirled candles hang from rafters in waxen silence.
From Pana again, after slurping ramen noodles, she takes a lancha to San Marcos la Laguna, a place that promises spiritual nurturing but little of Mayan culture. Anything here is possible: tattoos, yoga, meditation,
sound bathings, cacao ceremonies, full moon dances – even nirvana. At a “spiritual bakery,” “ordinary” tunes of a “stolen dance” serenade the huge dog sleeping on the floor and her, in her embarrassing pale skin.
Notes about the places on the map:
Lago de Atitlán
Lake Atitlán is a natural lake filling an enormous caldera formed from a supervolcanic eruption some 79,500 years ago. It is in the Guatemalan Highlands (over 5,000 feet in elevation) in southwestern Guatemala. With a maximum depth of 1,120 feet (340 meters), it is the deepest lake in Central America. It is fed by two nearby rivers and doesn’t drain into the ocean and is shaped by deep surrounding escarpments and three volcanoes on its southern flank. Atitlán means “between the waters” in the Nahuatl language. The culture of the towns and villages surrounding the lake is strongly influenced by the Mayan people, who make up nearly 42% of Guatemala’s population.
The deep escarpments surrounding the lake make it difficult to get to the surrounding villages by roads, much like the Cinque Terre in Italy, meaning that using lanchas, or water taxis, is the most efficient way to get to them.
Lake Atitlán has three volcanoes on its shores that are part of the Central American Volcanic Arc: 1) Volcán Atitlán, active historically with more than a dozen eruptions between 1469-1853; 2) Volcán Tolimán, a stratovolcano on the southern shore of the lake; and 3) Volcán San Pedro, which rises above Lake Atlitlán northwest of Volcán Atitlán.
Panajachel(“Pana”)
Panajachel, often nicknamed “Pana,” is the main gateway town on Lake Atitlán, and the least interesting. It is a jumping off point for visits to all the other towns on the lake and to the town of Chichicastenango, where a huge market is held every Thursday and Sunday. We rented an Airbnb here, from which we launched all of our explorations.
Chichicastenango’s Sunday Market
Chichicastenango (nicknamed Chichi) is a town an hour and a half north of Panajachel in a mountainous region of Guatemala, populated by mostly the K’iche’ (98.5%), one of the Mayan peoples. Masheños (citizens of Chichi) are famous for their adherence to pre-Christian beliefs and ceremonies. The town’s famous cofradías (religious brotherhoods) hold processions in observance of their saints around the Iglesia de Santo Tomás, which dates back to the 16th century. It was built on top of an existing Mayan temple. The 18 steps leading up to the church are original and symbolize the 18 months of the Mayan calendar.
The Popul Vuh, the K’iche’ Maya’s story of creation is said to have been discovered at the Iglesia de Santo Tomás in Chichicastenango. Though Roman Catholicism is predominant here, it is infused with Mayan ritual.
In the town’s Thursday and Sunday markets, vendors sell handicrafts, food, flowers, pottery, handbags, wooden boxes, condiments, medicinal plants, candles, and copal (traditional incense), cal (lime stones for preparing tortillas), grindstones, pigs and chickens, machetes and other tools. Woven textiles are famously sold here, particularly women’s blouses called huipil.
The Chichicastenango Cemetery
The Chichicastenango Cemetery is a cemetery overlooking the town. The rainbow-colored above-ground mausoleums and tombstones celebrate the afterlife and can symbolize different family roles. White means purity. Mothers’ tombs are often painted turquoise for protection. Grandfathers’ tombs are often painted in yellow symbolizing the sun’s life force. Other graves are painted in lime green, lavender, red, or the favorite color of the deceased.
According to indigenous Maya tradition, honoring the dead encourages the living to make peace with the inevitability of death. Round offerings called comal (griddle) are made as offerings to the dead, as well as flowers, incense, candles and chickens. Families clean and repaint graves of their beloved on the Day of the Dead. If the rent for the plots can’t be paid by the family, it is said remains can be exhumed and placed into mass graves.
San Pedro la Laguna
San Pedro la Laguna is known as a backpacker and party town. It is dotted with cheap accommodations, international restaurants, street murals, and terraces perched above the lake. A big Israeli ex-pat community owns many of the businesses.
San Juan la Laguna
San Juan la Laguna is a town near San Pedro whose population is about 95% Tz’utujil. Agriculture is most important for the economy, especially coffee and maize, as well as tourism. The community is known for its adherence to traditional Atiteco culture and religious practices; they have a cyclical rather than linear concept of time. Children are thought to be reincarnations of other family members, most often grandparents.
The people speak the Tz’utujil language. Spirits are believed to control the natural world, other spirits and people’s destinies. Traditional customs come from Nawals, spirits known as “Ancient Ones” — believed to be ancient Tz’utujil people who gained divine status.
Women use a backstrap loom and the Tz’utujil weavings consistently contain a yellow stripe going through the center of cloth, symbolizing abundance.
We ate lunch at Deleite Ancestral Experiencia Gastronomica Tz’utujil, which offered traditional Tz’utujil food. The town is awash with beautiful murals that symbolize Mayan tradition. For us, this was the most gorgeous of all the towns. Pavement is painted and two streets are covered in umbrellas and hats: Calle de las Sombrillas and Calle de los Sombreros.
Santa Catarina Palopó
Santa Catarina Palopó is a town we could get to by tuk-tuk as it isn’t far from Panajachel. The town is painted in vibrant colors and Mayan symbols to encourage tourism, thanks to a local initiative Pintando el Cambio (Painting the Change). The project painted all 850 houses and buildings in the town. Local families choose the colors and traditional Mayan symbols they want on their houses. The town boasts great views of the volcanoes.
San Marcos la Laguna
San Marcos la Laguna is NOT known for Mayan culture, but instead draws New Age and hippie types. It has murals, bohemian clothing shops, cafes and hostels. Offers for spiritual nurturing include yoga, mediation, tattoos, sound bathing, cacao ceremonies, reiki, chakra alignment, massage, and full moon dances.
Here’s a little video of Lago de Atitlán and Chichicastenango.
Other notes of interest:
The population of Guatemala estimated in 2025 is 18,636,532, the most populous country in Central America. According to some sources, it is estimated that 43.75% of the people are of indigenous heritage belonging to the 22 Mayan peoples. Many others self-identify as indigenous, meaning that percentage estimate may be low.
The Guatemalan genocide (aka the Maya genocide) was the mass killing of Maya indigenous people during the 36-year-long Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power during the CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état. The perpetrators were U.S.-backed Guatemalan military governments and local militias. The motive was anti-Communism, anti-Mayan sentiment, and right wing terrorism.
The yellow haze and piles of kindling throughout Guatemala is caused by the indigenous women spending 6-8 hours per day cooking on indoor open fires. This cooking method exposes families to toxic smoke and causes illnesses including respiratory problems, eye irritations, chronic cough, cancer, heart disease, asthma, and headaches. Children risk life-threatening burns. Deforestation has a devastating impact on the environment.
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One of my intentions on this trip was to write a poem about “maps to where she’s been.” I attempted this above. 🙂
My path less traveled. Rediscovering self after surviving the abuse that almost sunk me. Goal of strengthening and thriving on my adult legs. 👣🙏🏻 #recovery #forgiveness
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