Land of the Muertos

What's a girl (or in this case, two girls) to do on a Saturday afternoon? Why, go to the cemetery, of course!

I think that was more or less our logic last weekend. We pass this beautiful orange gated arch into a cemetery on our way in to work every day and have been intending to check it out for several weeks. After a lovely morning of reading, relaxing, sunning and studying we decided Saturday was the day.

The guards looked a little amused as we pulled in in beat-up Roscoe, but collected our 3Q entrance fee and waved us in. We parked and started walking around, amazed at the quantity of elaborate and/or tacky mausoleums styled after everything from gothic churches to my favorite:

Egyptian tombs!

This thing is intense. It had everything down to copper hieroglyphic plates on the side. And, of course, a cross on the top. The Egyptians were big Jesus fans, I hear.

Behind it you can see the other thing I found most interesting about the cemetery. If I were a really good blogger, I'd look up the history of these walls of coffins and tell you why they're constructed this way, where the idea came from or some other interesting tidbit. But for now all I can tell you is that I was filled with a strange, unsettling sense of beauty when I walked up to this wall stacked eight high with people and tributes to them.

Space available.

What we didn't realize when we planned this day trip is that the cemetery is one of the more dangerous places to go in Guatemala City. We found this out afterward, but were given some hints as we were there (the two boys sharing a bicycle, one holding a club, for starters). Don't worry, Mom: as soon as a couple guys started trying to talk to us in English (and when that didn't elicit any response, Chines) we got in the car and left.

And we'll just pretend we didn't try to turn around in neighboring El Gallito (worth a listen).