once-in-a-lifetime things have been done to death
also, feliz navidad
Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently traveling around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
Before I got to Antigua, Guatemala, I worried I’d get bored there. Though beautiful, Antigua is sleepy and small, its 48,000 or so residents currently subject to a covid curfew that closes down all businesses by eleven. I looked forward to a sunset walk through the well-preserved colonial town — but then what would I do for five more weeks?
Dance, mostly, I found out.
A charming town with cobblestone streets and easygoing vibe, Antigua is home to locals who’ve lived there for generations — as well as a constant stream of tourists who stop in for a few days to a few years. That means many of the local businesses, including the dance studios, cater to itinerant travelers. Instructors offer free salsa classes at various locales to reel in would-be dancers. It’s a nice symbiotic relationship in which instructors encourage private lessons, at just $12-$15 an hour, and tourists sign up for lessons each day in hopes of making progress before their departure.
My evenings and nights filled up: group salsa class on Mondays, ladies’ styling on Tuesdays, bachata workshop on Wednesdays, a salsa night with a live band at Las Palmas on Thursdays. Bailamos! Then on the weekends, I packed in must-do excursions: A long day trip to Lake Atitlan to crisscross the water by boat visiting local villages! An overnight hike to Acatenango to see a live volcano erupt! A drive to the temple of San Simon, the patron saint of drug cartels and prostitutes and others who believe he might give them money, or health, or safe passage to the U.S. —
Life feels different here in Guatemala — different in a way that’s beautiful and sometimes vaguely disquieting. While the men all seem to wear western clothes, a significant number women wear traditional Guatemalan dress: embroidered blouse, colorful woven skirt, a belt cinching the two together. Families are very close, with many people never leaving the town where they were born. Social lives revolve around relatives. My salsa teacher Nancy, for example, runs her dance studio with two kids, both dancers in their early twenties. The big pre-xmas bachata workshop they taught was a full family affair, with all three of them demoing how it was done!
On the one hand, the closeness seems sweet and cozy, on another, vaguely constricting — what happens should you not get along with your parents?
Though all the families I met looked happy —
Sometimes, travel can feel like the same series of activities repeated over and over again in slightly different contexts. You see Mayan ruins in one country, then another, then another. You sail on one picturesque lake, then another, then another. The sense of deja vu gets exacerbated via Instagram. You see strangers and friends alike striking the same poses in the same places you will be going or have already been to. At each destination there are once-in-a-lifetime, must-do activities, yet at the same time you know that these once-in-a-lifetime things have been done to death, repeated over and over by every single person who’s visited the place hoping for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
And what of the people who live there, who cater to the tourists? What must it feel like to put on the same once-in-a-lifetime event over and over again, day after day?
All the activity was fun, but it was getting to be a lot. Funny how things you find charming at first soon come to slowly grate at you. Cobblestone streets — especially the sharp, uneven kind that require you watch every step — get less adorable and more irritating after a few weeks if it takes you a half hour to walk home after a long night of dancing —
I decided I needed a little break from it all. That’s how yesterday, on xmas eve, I found myself in Monterrico — a small beach town a couple hours away known for its warm weather, laid-back atmosphere, and black volcanic sands. The sunsets are dramatic and unreal —
I’m fond of spending xmas alone, a practice that I’d like to think has gotten popularized during covid, when many people suddenly couldn’t — and realized they didn’t have to — socialize during the holidays. This morning I woke up and took a long walk on the beach. The so-called black sands are actually more of a brownish-gray, and soft and plush. The waves lapped at my feet —
But on the way back to the hotel, I made an unexpected new friend when I stopped in at a local turtle conservation center. There, about fifty new turtles had hatched overnight — and for a small donation, I could adopt one to release into the sea to go live its best life —
My tiny tortuga came to me in a small wooden bowl. Just a few inches long, it fidgeted tentatively. Its feet looked delicate, feeble. How would it survive in the wild on its own?
But the employees of the center seemed to think tortuga would do fine. I walked on the beach until I was, as instructed, three meters from the water, and released her. For a while, she kind of just hung out by my feet, but eventually started flopping toward the water.
Then with a frothy wave she was gone —
Feliz navidad —
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
Strangers can ruin your reputation via the internet. The bizarre story of Nadire Atas, who slandered many people online — and the frustrating story of “complaint sites” that refuse to take responsibility for or help the victimized.
Abortions can save lives. Michelle Goodwin shares her story of being raped by her father as a young girl. “No child should be pressured or expected to carry a pregnancy and give birth or to feel remorse, guilt, doubt, or unease about an abortion under any circumstances, let alone rape or incest.”
Choosing single life can get expensive. “Single people should, in theory, be the purest embodiment of American values of self-sufficiency and individualism. That they’re not speaks to the fact that we don’t venerate the individual — we venerate the individual family.”
