I had a couple of rough days at the end of last week, mostly due to the paucity (10 pt. word,
yay!) of fun people at the hostel, but I met a very nice gal from New York (Long Island to be exact) on Saturday and we hung out on Sunday, which was wicked fun. I took the day off from work and we wandered around Antigua enjoying the sights and the food. The photo on the right is from the cathedral, which was ruined during an earthquake in the 17th Century. They still use the front of the cathedral for mass, but the rest is in ruins. There's lots of ruined churches all over the town, many of whic
h are still in use. The least damaged parts are restored (somewhat) and the rest of the church is left open to the sky, so to speak. I'm including another photo of a ruined church: this one is used in part as a mercado de artesanias (artisan's market).I spent most of yesterday wandering around the area around my hotel and just getting settled. After a nice breakfast this morning I set off to the national library, not sure what to expect. For future use to anyone of you thinking of doing research in a Latin American library, the work hemeroteca apparently means newspaper archive, a fact that I did not know. And here I was worried there might not be an archive. But there it was, and there were a ton of people there. Apparently people will come in just to read today's newspaper without having to buy it at a news stand. Or at least that's what I think that group of men were doing. It was today's paper, I know that. But there were also a bunch of school kids dressed in their school uniforms presumably working on a school project and other people doing who knows what. I overheard one woman say she was looking in the newspapers for an mention of her friend who had been murdered last year. I will admit it was a lot easier to get things at the National Library here in Guatemala than it was (at least the first time) at the Library of Congress in Argentina. The man at the desk thought I was from France because I gave him my Notre Dame id (didn't want to give him my passport...didn't have my passport with me) and he was thinking of the Notre Dame Cathedral. I ended up spending five hours at the library, pawing through one month worth of newspapers. That is, I took notes on crime reports in one newspaper during five randomly selected days (there's a website that will randomly selected things for you: random.org) out of the month. I have a lot of work ahead of me if that took five hours. I have three sets of four months to look at in two newspapers...so if five hours is average per month, then it will take at least 120 hours. So five hours a day at 120 hours means 24 days. Gah! 24 days in the library! That's outrageous! I'll have to figure out some way to cut that back. Oh, and if my math is bad, please tell me. I don't want to embarrass myself. Well, that's all for now, I suppose. Chau! (PS: please don't correct my spelling of "chau." I know it's spelled ciao in Italian, but as far as I know in Latin America they spell it chau.)
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