Semana Santa in ANTIGUA

We did more running around at Immigration offices and had the restriction on my husbands' passport lifted.  We crossed over into the Guatemalan border for a few days of Semana Santa in Antigua! Antigua was beautiful - reminded me of Miami with the pretty colours - but colonial. The temperatures in Guat were much more comfortable than El Salvador.  This was a very touristy place to go - not your typical Guatemala I know - but I really wanted to see it as so many people I know in Canada love to visit Antigua.  The bus ride was 5 hrs to Guat City and then another hour to Antigua in traffic.  We just drove through Guat City - which reminded me of Mexico City. 

This is the famous Arch.  Loved the cobblestone paths everywhere - like so many colonial towns in El Salvador and our roots in England have these gorgeous cobblestones everywhere - loved them but after walking on them for nine hours in wedges we were ready for serious foot massages at nightime!

                          Many fab churches!

Everyone in our fam loves Mango with salt, lime and chili sauce! Mangos were everywhere!

Purple people everywhere and a procession coming right at us!

Gorgeous carpet made entirely of rice that the purple people are about to destroy!! Saw about three of them. 

Oh, don't I look so "holy" - my palm decor that the local villagers made in front of the gorgeous yellow church - only $1.50 each.  It made it back to San Salvador a little worse for wear!

Villagers making the Palm crafts to hold during the mass/procession.

Our hotel was right around the corner from this gorgeous church. 

View from our Hotel room - stayed at an awesome little boutique hotel that I would thoroughly recommend, "Casa Christina".

My favourite "float". We spoke with one of the ladies afterwards and she said it was quite heavy to carry.  They carry this for hours around the town route.

Close up of the devotion/exhaustion.  Love the veils - gettin' their Mary on!

Loved all the indigenous villagers! Their clothing is very thick though - that surprised me. 

We really loved all the beautiful crafts and colours - went a bit crazy - but hey - we're admitted shopoholics!  We were dissapointed about the silver jewellery - for some reason we thought it was supposed to be a great place to find silver and we didn't find much of that.  We did lots of bargaining - which is of course the Latin American way!

Fingers Crossed!

Douglas' 23 year old file has finally been shipped and ARRIVED in GUATEMALA CITY (love you Guatemala!  yay!  Go Guatemala!! Best looking Immigration officers around!) late last week for the bulk of processing.  This is a huge step in our Sponsorship application. If the timeline tables on the Canadian Citizenship & Immigration website are correct - from this point it could take as little as 8 months or as long as 22 months. I am hoping that his file will be in the 30% of files that were processed in 8 months.  For some reason Mexico processes them at a rapid speed of 4 months! 

We have been waiting for the replacement birth certificates for the girls to arrive in order to facilitate them having passports.  They were sent in months ago and for one reason or another are still not processed - the latest was that they were returned to me after sitting on someone's desk for weeks on end, asking me to fill out the forms again and have them notarized yet again (at a cost of $60.00) due to the fact that I wrote the middle names above the place, instead of below the place where they were supposed to go. 

We've decided that we cannot wait much longer for the certificates - I am flying out in a couple of weeks to be with Douglas for a bit as the separation on everyone, but most of all Douglas, who is all alone, is very daunting at this point.  As soon as the girls' certificates arrive I can get their passports processed in about a week - so they will fly down then to join him as well.