Kite Festival

Oh, good, you’re still here. That is, you came back. Ok, anyway, that is to say that I’m glad that someone is still reading this, despite my appalling lack of consistency in when I write.

Since I last wrote I’ve set up my base of operations in Jocotenango, a town just at the edge of Antigua, which is about 45 minutes from the capital. I posted about Antigua earlier, back in March I think. Some friends have a house here in Jocotengano, and I’m renting a room from them. Not only is it cheaper than a hotel, but a lot more fun. It’s definitely nice to have people to talk to or have dinner with after a long day riding buses into the city and sitting all afternoon at the library. And that’s basically been the routine the last week or two….get up relatively early, catch a bus to Antigua, grab some breakfast, hop another bus to Guatemala, find my way to the Centro Histórico, where the library is, and then between three and five hours pouring through the newspaper archives. Then a quick (and fabulously cheap) lunch, another couple of bus rides, and back to Jocotenango for a quick nap before dinner and/or a beer or two with the gang. Not a bad life, really, except for the bus rides. I almost lost it at a guy on the bus on Wednesday after he tried to grind up against me in a less than respectful way while we were all crammed together during an especially crowded section of the bus route. Buses here are not for the claustrophobic.

Last Sunday a group of us made the trip to Sumpango, a small town in the same department (Guatemala is broken up in to departments and then those are broken up in to municipalities) as Antigua. Guatemala does not have the same traditions as Mexico (that most of us in the States are familiar with) for the Day of the Dead. Instead, many Guatemalans follow the indigenous/catholic practice of decorating the graves of their loved ones and flying kites over the cemetery. According to my guidebook, the kites are meant to represent the spirits of the dead. Two towns, Sumpango and Santiago Sacatepéquez, hold kite festivals on November 1st. The kites are made out of tissue paper, wood (looked like bamboo) and scotch tape, and the larger kites can reach up to 50 ft in diameter. Townspeople fly the kites smaller than twenty feet across in the afternoon (which unfortunately we missed due to some transportation arraignments). It really was an incredible sight. The bigger kites each had a theme. This year, at least in Sumpango, the themes seemed to revolve around the environment, violence against women, and indigenous heritage. The first photo is a view of the kites from across the soccer field, the second a little boy on top of a crypt in the cemetery, getting ready to fly his kite. The kites were really impressive. At first we thought they would try to fly the larger kites, but after a few conversations with some locals (who more or less laughed at us when we mentioned flying the big kites) we realized that the really giant kites were just for show. I particularly liked a kite that took a famous Dalí painting and reworked in with an image of an indigenous woman. Oh, and in case you were wondering, in Guatemala, kites are called barriletes (the word for kite in Spanish changes depending on where you are). It really is impressive, isn't it, what you can do with some tissue paper and scotch tape?