Quetzaltenango Pt 1

Ok, so here I am. Finally. In Quetzaltenango, otherwise known as Xelaju. It didn't take this long to get here, no. In fact, since my last post, it was another two weeks of waiting for the weather to subside before I came to the place I was meant to be working in. And the words "meant to be" are not by chance.

Where do I begin? Xela, the other moniker Quetzaltenango goes by, is an awesome place to live. It is in the safest corner of Guatemala. It nestles comfortably in a highland, surrounded by mountains, at 2500 m above sea level. It is cobbled. I kid you not. Really, truly, the streets are cobbled. It's amazing, though it's a killer on a pushbike. I don't even have my trusty old mountain bike with me. I'm borrowing a second hand racer that the project officer for Cultural Survival lent me. On occasion. To go further than the 15 minute distances of the huge La Democracia market. Scoff at me will ya? Have you tried walking long distances at high altitude? It's exhausting.

Back to the wonders of Xela though. It's a city that charms you slowly, beckoning to its heart with small, cozy, funky cafes. Try and ignore the grandiose buildings in Neoclassical style and the interspersed ArtDeco bits and pieces and you will fail. Terribly. Its central plaza houses something like Roman amphitheatre, except that is fully round with no atrium. The Cathedral overlooking the plaza is like something out of a Baroque fantasy. Surrounding it are homes from colonial, post colonial and German plantation days. Excuse me? German plantation days? Yep. At one point, one of the presidents of Guatemala gave away large tracts of land to German settlers who married local indigenous women and set up house here. There are now a bunch of kids who can trace their ancestors to Germany. Very very weird.

Back to the funky cafes, coz that's where the city pulses. At places like El Cuartito, Cafe Baviera and Artesano, NGO workers and backpackers studying spanish huddle over their laptops, making use of the free WiFi. At less foreigner-oriented places like Cafe RED and Tilde, you find the artsy types of Quetzaltenango. They organise festivals. They play music. They do hip hop. They graffiti. They write poems. They do murals. And they are, almost all of them, Guatemalan. If you want to hang with the heavies in Guatemala's cultural capital, this is where they are. My first month in Quetzaltenango I spent every late afternoon and evening there, getting to know the heavyweights for future reference and boy, did that come in handy!

I bet you wanna know what happened with ArtCorps and Cultural Survival and the mayan kids that want video skills. All in good time. Tune in for the next post, which will have a mixture of that and the 2nd Latin American Conference on Theatre of the Oppressed, coming live to you from Xela. In the meantime, I leave you with the videos I took of the 12 of October march in the capital.