Over the weekend, we had our good friends in town from Chicago and wanted to give them a tour of our lovely neighborhood in Southwest Minneapolis. After stopping at my favorite coffee shop Patisserie 46 to get a cup of mi gasolina we headed towards the Rose and Trial Gardens near Lake Harriet.
A fellow WordPress Blogger, Ailsa over at “Where’s my backpack” did it again with this week’s travel theme of Street Markets. What a fantastic topic for who doesn’t love the vibrant colors and fragrances of a world market? Markets are amazing as they give you such a slice of culture. Whether it be the divine floral markets of Paris to the brilliant indigenous markets of Peru, a market always has a treasure to find.
One of my favorite markets of all is the souq. In the spring of 2011, I spent a week volunteering in Rabat, Morocco and had a wonderful time exploring the ins and outs of a Moroccan souq. You could truly find literally every thing for sale; pretty much whatever your heart desired. The colors, the sounds, the people, the smells and the diverse offerings of goods made the souq one of my favorite places to wander and buy gifts for my family and friends.
Follow me through the winding paths of Rabat’s central souq….
There is always a mosque shooting up towards the sky and summoning the daily call to prayer. The sound of the call echoes throughout the souq, bouncing off the curvy walls of the serpentine streets.
Doors are fascinating. They are also quite mysterious for who knows what lies behind the doors of a place. They are the gatekeeper when closed. Yet when opened, they offer you a look into a whole new world of possibilities inside.
When I think of doors, there is one place in particular in which I was utterly blown away by the doors: Guatemala. This colorful country had perhaps some of the most unusual and interesting doors I’d ever seen during my travels. For those of you who have been following my blog, you have already seen these photos. However, I decided to spruce them up a little by playing around with the colors.
Come, take a walk with me and admire some of my favorite doors I found…..
I promised I would move on to my next series and here it is: Sumptuous Spain! I am digging back through my archives a bit as I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from readers on it. So, I am going to go for it even though (a) The trip was 8 years ago (b) I had to scan every single picture as it was before I had a digital camera, and (c) I am going off my old, leather-bound travel journal as memory. (My own brain is way too foggy for a trip in 2004, especially after two kids).
Thus all in all, this series of posts will not be anywhere near as detailed as my recent ones on Guatemala, China, Nepal, Morocco, Costa Rica or Argentina, all relatively recent travels. But on the bright side of things I don’t have many pictures or stories written down thus it will mostly be a few fond memories per city. So here goes nothing, Hasta Spain!
Photo credit: Wikipedia Free Commons
I felt like I needed to spice my blog up a bit. Lately I’ve done an awful lot of posts on Minnesota and even have another one in the queue. When I started this blog it was mostly for sharing my stories and photos from traveling somewhere else. Yet I came to realize that many of my readers have never even been to Minnesota and perhaps don’t realize how incredibly beautiful it really is. Hence my recent focus on places around the land of lakes (we do have over 13,000!).
This morning I wanted to share some photos I’ve reworked from my trip to Iceland back in the summer of 2008. Iceland truly appealed to me. It has all the nature you could ever desire, loads of hikes, and not many people. I found a lot of peace and serenity in such a beautiful, magical place. It is my hope that I can return someday as there is much to see in this gorgeous land.
Here are some photos that will help illustrate what I mean. Hope you enjoy!
“A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.” – Washington Irving
For this year’s Mother’s Day, I decided to forego the flowers and use my voice as a gift for my mom. I wanted to write her a letter to tell her what she means to me. How much she has impacted my life and how much I love her.
Where do I even begin? The task is arduous and complex. There is no simple place to start. It’s been 40.5 long years since she has been my mom. How could I possibly due her justice in one simple post? It isn’t possible. But I’ll try my best.
Lately I’ve been having fun playing around with new iPhone applications like Snapseed and Instagram. For a novice photographer, these photo processing applications are a ton of fun. You just snap away and can process the picture into amazingly different styles right at your fingertips.
Since early spring, I’ve been using my iPhone a lot to take pictures, mostly of flowers. One reason is that it is so easy and portable. I always have it with me usually in my pocket. Another reason is that my iPhone actually zooms much better than my small, pocket-sized Canon Elph. I must admit that I am no professional photographer. I just love to take pictures during my travels and am actively working on getting better at it.
Besides using Snapseed for photos I’ve taken with my iPhone, I’ve also began using it to revisit older pictures I’ve taken from the past such as these ones I took back in 2003 in Patagonia. These photos were scanned since I didn’t have a digital camera at the time. I took these files and imported them into my iPhone into Snapseed and here is what I came up with. Not bad, huh?
To my friend Lucy, who showed me her world in Antigua and how to love the art of photography. I will forever be grateful for your kindness and friendship. May our paths meet again!
“Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same.”- Flavia Weedn
I always find it hard to say goodbye to a place. I found it especially true with Guatemala. Over the last week I’d been as immersed as possible with the culture. I lived with a host family, took intensive spanish courses, climbed a volcano at the crack of dawn, took my first chicken bus and learned to slow everything down and take things as they come. All in all, you couldn’t ask for a better journey than that.
As Sunday morning came and went, I felt a sadness about leaving so soon. I could hardly believe how much I’d done and seen in only a week. Perhaps more than many people ever experience at all. I honestly believe that immersing oneself as much as possible in the culture you are visiting, is the greatest reward ever when it comes to traveling. It was no vacation, that is for sure. Every day I rose exhausted beyond belief and wondering how I’d gather the energy to make it through another long albeit exhilarating day. But one thing I’ve come to learn and understand about myself over the years is that this is how I like to travel. I would do it no other way. A vacation? No thanks. Sitting on the beach? I’d be bored in two minutes. Running around a country and trying to see and learn as much as possible in only a week with never taking a moment to sit still? That is what I do. That is what I crave. And most importantly, that is what I love.
Sensational, cloudless view of Agua Volcano on Sunday morning, the day of my departure.
I know that many people find my way of traveling absolutely crazy. They don’t understand me one bit.
But as I always love to say and quote my parents for reminding me “The world is your oyster”. With those encouraging, motivating words….there was no time to sit aimlessly in my room checking emails. I had to take advantage of every moment and opportunity I got to explore, learn and see my surroundings. For how else would I get a sense of compassion for Guatemala? It certainly wouldn’t be gained from laying on my bed reading a book.
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
I woke up early Sunday morning, my last day in Antigua and in Guatemala itself, to a wonderful gift. It was sunny. I laid in bed rubbing my eyes as they slowly adjusted to a beam of light shining through the small, stained glass window above my door. Other than that beam of light, the room was pitch black.
I slowly rose my tired body out of bed, gently pulled back the heavy, dark drapes and lone behold, there it was….the sun, at last! I was overjoyed. It was only half past six in the morning. I could have slept another hour or so. I certainly was tired. My entire week in Guatemala was so intense that I was in desperate need of sleep. Yet that beam of sun was calling my name. It was like a beam of hope. A sign that I would finally get to see the peaks of the three dominant volcanoes that dominate Antigua.
Finally, the clouds had lifted and gave me a gift: An entire, unobstructed view of Volcan de Agua or “Volcano of Water” the most commanding volcano, to the south of Antigua at 3766 meters/12,356 feet which dominants the colorful city of Antigua like an omnipresent God.
“I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees”.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
After full day of non-stop sightseeing and picture taking (over 400 each!) Lucy and I were exhausted and ready for some rest and relaxation. It was time for a drink. Lucy knew just the place, the Sky Bar, which had a great selection of icy cold beers and drinks yet best of all, a rooftop deck with a view to the world.
The sun was beginning to set and cast its lovely shadows across the brightly colored terra-cotta buildings of Antigua. I could hardly stand the urge and temptation to forego the drink and keep taking pictures. Yet my camera battery was really dying down as was my energy. It was also well past five o’clock happy hour.
I must admit, I seem to have an odd fetish when traveling. Every time I go to a new place there is something unique that seems to gravitate to me. In China, it was the exotic foods. In Morocco, the goods at the souq. In Nepal, the prayer flags.
So what was it when I was in Guatemala? Hands down the funky, multi-colored Guatemalan Chicken Buses that grace the roads and streets throughout the country. Known as “las camionetas“, the Chicken Buses are decommissioned American school buses that are sent on a long journey south to poor countries in Central America, where they are repainted, refurbished and act as the main source of transportation for the Guatemala’s 13.8 million people.
While researching my trip to Guatemala, I had read about the much loved and hated Chicken bus. I even googled it and found several silly pictures of these elaborately decorated buses. I knew that they were cheap, relatively reliable and safe (that is for the most part) but I wasn’t sure where the name came from and whether or not there would be real, live chickens on board. The origin of the name still remains a bit of a mystery to me today as I never did see anything except people on board. Then again, I only got to actually ride inside one chicken bus so that is perhaps not very good odds.
Today, while I was tooling around on the internet, I found an interesting piece on Chicken Buses called “LA CAMIONETA: The Journey of One American School Bus” which offers a rather fascinating account of how the school buses arrived south of the border as well as some rather grueling facts about the dangers Chicken Bus drivers face. I was warned to never take a bus at night yet I met plenty of young travelers who did. Not sure how their trips ended up but hopefully they were safe.
Above is my first sight of the Guatemalan Chicken Bus! I had heard so much about these old American buses that were shipped south of the border and then painted in an elaborate spectrum of colors. My fabulous hosts informed me that each bus is color coded for its destination. Pretty clever!
A strong aura filters around the ruins and church of San Francisco. Inside the sanctuary, the tomb of the only saint in all of Guatemala rests. It is believed that the powerful and humble Santo Hermano Pedro de San Jose is watching over the place in a sense.
Santo Pedro was a Spanish missionary who came to Guatemala during the 17th century and was known for his commitment to fighting poverty, disease and hunger among his people. A large statue of Santo Pedro looms over the grand church walls offering a sense of protection and well-being to the people of this lovely town.
