Guatemala English language Magazine
Turismo is a concept so young that a century ago only the wealthy did it. And two centuries ago, nobody did. If you left “home” for anything, it was about mercantilism, conquest, or pilgrimage, and it was invariably dangerous. But nowadays, since so many of us do it, and since it has quickly become global, a vocabulary has quickly grown […]
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I once knew a Vietnamese couple named Hau and Wen. No, really. When their first kid was born, the wags who hate to change diapers said he could have been christened “Why.”
Read moreFunny thing about Margaret Blood. She fits no profile of North American do-gooders who come to Guatemala. She hails not from the Bible Belt. Nor is she a hippie-esque proletarian or a homeschooling missionary mom. But a mission she has, a mission of such scope that some of her friends thought it could never be realized. But she may prove them wrong.
Read moreThe word room was in our first-grade spellers. So why are we forever mistranslating this word? I have discussed in a previous column “smurfy” Spanish verbs. Well, room is a smurfy English noun, so if you think our language is never smurfy, get over it. Room, when you think about it, can be abstract or concrete. The former is usually […]
Read moreI tell my sons to pack a pocket mirror whenever they travel. Why? So that they, being half gringo and half Guatemalan, can flash themselves a hateful stare each time they toss trash out the window of a speeding chicken bus. (Did I say a speeding chicken bus? Uh, is there some other kind?) Their half-and-halfness is a legacy of […]
Read moreIf you think hotness and coldness in Spanish are zenny, imagine how they look to students of English. I once indexed the senses of hot when applied to autocars: hot to the touch, hot to sit in, hot in the temp gauge, hot to look at, hot to drive, or hot meaning stolen. With six meanings, English teachers could ask […]
Read moreOne day in about 1991, I was at some government ministerio doing paperwork; I forget what. Somebody on the 12th floor directed me to the primera planta near the elevator. There I would find the office I needed, to pick up a signature, pay a fee, or whatever; again, I forget that part. But I do recall walking down the […]
Read moreGuatemala’s exquisite botanical colony plays push and shove with weed and water — and sometimes with people Everyone knows that cacti need little water. But in Guatemala’s most spectacular garden, the cacti are more watered than other plants. This is hardly the fault of the gardeners. They are not the ones doing the watering. This botanical garden abuts another Central […]
Read moreMarathon fever comes to the shores of Atitlán What would make people want to run barefoot uphill for eight kilometers? The answer: a 1958 foot race departing Panajachel for nearby San Andrés Semetabaj. Scores of participants could not afford shoes, but they would not let this keep them out of the race. The excitement of that event was such that […]
Read moreCuándo and cuánto are not individually zenny, but they form a zen gestalt that can not only potentially confuse our minds, but also our speech organs. Folks in Readerland who know phonetics might note that their spellings are even closer than they appear: they differ by one letter, and barely that. The d and t are — don’t slap this […]
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The “Impsub” is not a subsurface vessel manned by cheeky cherubs, but a tense separating men scholars from boys. I would know, since it long confined me among the latter; I still regress on occasion. The topic must be approached inductively and deductively. If you have been out of college long enough to forget what these are, a refresher (in […]
Read moreThe new nation of Timor Leste has yet to choose its national bird. For the moment, though, a chicken appears both on a coin and on postage stamps. This might not be as bad of a choice as it initially appears. Chickens, considered objectively, are resplendent things. Colonel Sanders would never have been interested in any of our local national […]
Read moreI never have understood the appeal of the Smurfs. I once supposed their dialogue was a preschool guessing game. “OK, Joey, what does the third word in ‘The smurfs smurfed all the smurfs to the smurf’ mean?” The smurfiest Spanish verb may be pegar. A classical root is missing, and only Portuguese and Catalonian have even semi-cognates for it. So […]
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I never have understood the appeal of the Smurfs. I once supposed their dialogue was a preschool guessing game. “OK, Joey, what does the third word in ‘The smurfs smurfed all the smurfs to the smurf’ mean?” The smurfiest Spanish verb may be pegar. A classical root is missing, and only Portuguese and Catalonian have even semi-cognates for it. So […]
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The Atitlán Marathon is not Guatemala’s first true marathon—today there are four others—but it is the first that is wholly non-profit. All proceeds will support the one cause uniting every sector in the Atitlán Basin: the conservation of Lake Atitlán.
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Time for the annual fair in Santa Cruz la Laguna The feria in Santa Cruz la Laguna is one of a kind. No other Atitlán fair is more classical, more Guatemala-in-the-rough, and more “we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore, Toto.” There are two Santa “Cruces”: the upper, traditional town and the lower, lakeside district; they are a twain that meet at fair time like they […]
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Martin and Zorn augur larks and laughs for Panajachel theater season David and Barbara Ramey were wrong about one thing. When the dramatists and retired lobster trappers began snowbirding to Panajachel years ago, they doubted that the Atitlán Basin could support a theater company, much less supply the talent. That was before they discovered the pent-up comic acumen of Jennifer […]
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What would make people want to run barefoot uphill for eight kilometers? The answer: a 1958 foot race departing Panajachel for nearby San Andrés Semetabaj. Scores of participants could not afford shoes, but they would not let this keep them out of the race. The excitement of that event was such that only a year later it went national, and […]
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Some of us Anglophones disdain the phrase ‘at this point in time’ It is a redundancy that probably made its inventor look articulate but which today is so much filler. I once had a supervisor who had very little to say, but she never had to pausebecause she could always use these five syllables when a more word-frugal person could […]
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Panajachel to host patron saint festivities in October St. Francis of Assisi was, among other things, the patron of animals and the environment. So it is fitting that fair week in the city named for him, San Francisco Panajachel, will include a ceremony to bless the animals. The environment will also be a theme, with many organizations involved in the […]
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As if the ingress of bully bass to Lake Atitlán were not bad enough (see Revue August 2011, Lake Views, page 88), another alien may be even more harmful. At least since 2002, carp of the genus Cyprinus have been appearing in fishermen’s trawling nets. No one knows when they got there, nor what to do about them. “They have […]
Read more1923-2011 Long before I knew Arthur Kennedy, who passed last month at 87, I benefited from his legacy. So have you, if you are among the millions who have traveled Guatemala’s stretch of the Pan American Highway. He was in charge of much of the construction of what remains the country’s principal artery, and its first graded one. Kennedy learned […]
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53 years ago, an airplane wrought sudden, significant alterations in Lake Atitlán’s food chain Flying fish inhabit oceans, not lakes. Well, except for one sunny day in 1958. If you were looking at Lake Atitlán then, you would have seen big fish on the fly. They arrived in tubs welded into what was, judging from eyewitness accounts, a Sikorsky seaplane, […]
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Homesick U.S. natives living down here can visit Hawaii, Alaska, San Francisco, San Antonio, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago and maybe Philadelphia all in one day without ever leaving Guatemala. And you may do so without a passport or a Star Trek transporter room. I will prove it to you. To get started you need a recent map of la […]
Read moreIn May, the fancy for mothers turns to roses—which have more than meets the eye or nose. Not all plants sport flowers, but those that do use them to mate with others of their species. Appropriately, we use them to hail and express love, especially in February and May. Roses in particular are favored: red and burgundy roses in the […]
Read moreCan Panajachel gird up in time for the next flooding? From space, Panajachel resembles a fan on a long, broken rod. This fan abuts Central America’s deepest waters—Lake Atitlán. It looks as though the city, in mortal fear of the lake, wants to escape up the skinny gorge that forms the broken rod. In fact, the lake is the most […]
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The Oddkins-Bodkins odyssey of how La Antigua’s patron image left town Your drive from La Antigua to Guatemala City retraces a procession trod in 1778 by the foremost Antiguan of the day. Being a mute statue, he raised no objection to the move. But so many others did object that the authorities making out his ticket proceeded with anguished caution. […]
Read moreWayne Berger, a versatile genius who spread Guatemalan voices over a radius of thousands of miles, has died in Jerusalem. He was 66. Wayne’s office always reminded me of the inside of a tackle box. But if you looked closely, you saw more than just books on biblical languages jumbled on shelves with coils of wire and spare parts for […]
Read moreOne day last August, I drove down Avenida Hincapié in Guatemala City with my sons Ike (almost 12 by then) and JayJay (8). This odd street—you may know it—begins as soon as you pass under an aqueduct arch that seems to date from the reign of Marcus Aurelius. It is one of the few structures in town surviving from the […]
Read moreI did not pick the name “Lake Views” for this column, but it stuck nonetheless. So I should probably make the lake my topic at least once. There is no counting the number of times—it is too many—that I have read that Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) called Atitlán the world’s most beautiful lake. He would know, being one of the best-traveled […]
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