Happy Forth of July from Washington, DC!

Happy Fourth from the Washington Monument in DC! I visited a friend in the city and we camped out all day enjoying the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the lawn and then hunkered down with thousands of others to watch the 20 minutes of huge fireworks blossoming around the Washington monument.

It was so fun to see the patriotism of red, white, and blue blankets, shirts, towels and chairs spread all across the lawns around the reflection pond and monument. Although …

Semana Santa is certainly a week for the religious, but it’s also a week where the Antiguan community comes together and all of the residents are on the same team. The same goal. There is a single minded purpose to many of the activities and a devotion within the community that makes this week unlike anything I’ve ever previously experienced – it’s one of the richest holiday experiences I have had abroad.
Let’s take just one last look at the people and highlights from Semana Santa …

Semana Santa, or Holy Week, is perhaps one of the best times to be traveling in a Catholic country. Just as the Buddhist, Hindus and other religions have their colorful celebrations of devotion, sacrifice, and religious fervor, that’s Semana Santa week for the vast majority of Catholic Guatemalans – and the fantastic part of Semana Santa is that you don’t have to be religious at all to enjoy it, you just need an appreciation for other cultures and liking festivals would be a plus.
I’ve already talked about the decadently …

Construction on a Semana Santa carpet, or alfombra, starts in the wee hours of the morning when the cool Antigua air is still chilly on the skin and spotlights light up portions of the street where the alfombras will lie for mere minutes sometimes before the parades slowly shuffle along the cobbled streets, destroying the more than 12 hours worth of careful work and construction.
This video takes a look at the full life cycle of a Semana Santa carpet – from life until sad death:

Conception of a Semana Santa …

So there I am, a year ago today, sweaty, sand is in every single possible crevice of my body, the cake I bought completely melting all over the makeshift table, and yet the moment is precisely right as twenty-four backpackers serenade me with the Happy Birthday song in six different languages.
We were all on a three day camping/driving/sandy adventure of Fraser Island, Australia (more on that tomorrow) and as my luck would have it I was hitting the quarter of a century mark. Birthdays on the road are …

Images of Christmas traditionally evoke thoughts of a toasty log cabin with a flickering fire and cup of hot chocolate all while the snow quietly falls outside. Perhaps there’s even a twinkling Christmas tree nestled in the corner. Well, that’s not the case in Florida -it was 82 F here last week (about 60 F now)– but, you know, at least it is winter here!
Last year I found myself in the Southern Hemisphere for Christmas – Australia to be more exact. The sun was baking down outside and it …

The Nepali New Year dawned bright and early our third week in Pharping and Amrit invited all of us volunteers staying at the guesthouse to celebrate the New Year with his family up a nearby hill. Both of the monasteries were closed for New Year festivities; so, without the invitation from Amrit we would have been just four lost souls living in a fishbowl…wait…ack…rather four decidedly white people wandering on the periphery of the familial festivities of the New Year.
Instead, Amrit, Carna, and a team of his Nepali family …

Amrit is just about one of my favorite people who I met in Nepal. He’s 23 and just has one of the most optimistic and happy dispositions on the planet. Amrit’s uncle, Barbajaun owns Family Guesthouse  (and just about everything in Pharping) and Amrit lives at the guesthouse and acts as the “den-mom” of sorts for all of the volunteers living at the guesthouse through VSSN. Our first days in Pharping will forever be shaped in my memory by Amrit’s joyfulness. Although we had some problems with VSSN, …