On a street near the town center in Antigua is a small, white store.  Inside, the wood is polished, the walls covered with ceramic dishes and, oddly, owls. Glass display cases gleam. Flowers, candles, crucifixes, and grandfather clocks serve as decorations for the neatly ordered wares. Customers jostle for position while aproned women, their faces framed by pressed paper headbands, carefully take orders and package boxes. Behind the counter, lines of sweets seduce me.

They are gorgeous, colorful, traditional. All of highest craftsmanship. Each is a tiny, delicious piece of art: handmade using recipes perfected over the years, arranged to be shown off to the maximum advantage. There are no overwhelming piles here, no boxes of candy stuffed to the brim and overflowing. Everything is in its place, waiting to be selected for purchase. Dulces with small, delicate flowers lie near elegantly crafted pastes of sugared pumpkin seeds shaped and colored like fruit. Deliciously candied oranges are encased in pools of honey on the shelf beneath neatly piled gentle puffs of meringue piled. In a drawer, large rosaries made of brightly colored fuschia and emerald corn husks hide. Behind the counter, all is in order.

This 130 year old candy store is similar to the Dulceria de Celaya in Mexico City: firmly reflecting the colonial history of Antigua while ignoring the modern hustle and bustle of the outside world. Cars honk, dogs bark, chicken buses pass nearby, but inside the doors is like stepping backwards in time one hundred year. You order by pointing out candy and selecting a number. A worker carefully records your order and then ever so slowly individually gathers each selection with silver tongs. There is no hurry, no rush to bring people in and push them back out again, having left only money behind. Customers drop in for orders of all sizes and prices, some purchasing only a few quetzales worth while others leave with arms full of neatly taped boxes. The entryway can be lined with (almost exclusively) Guatemalans patiently waiting for the chance to step up to the counter, peer through the glass and point at the most delicious looking dulces.  Waiting patiently because everyone knows that there is no other place to get candy of this quality.  Behind the counter, the women fastidiously continue on, oblivious to the passing of centuries.

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Sorry about the bit of self-indulgence above, I was getting a little bored with the standard blog entry so I tried something new.  Antigua is a very easy town to be a traveler in, but there are some pluses to it.  One is the Dulceria de Dona Maria Gordillo, as described above.  It’s wonderful to be able to find high quality homemade candy after so much time without.  Another plus, although some might consider it a negative, would be the easy availability of American  fast food here.  I had my first Subway in months yesterday, and it was delicious!  Although apparently  pickles and black olives are to be rationed very carefully here, as I was only alloted two pickles and four (FOUR!) black olives for my sandwich yesterday.   They looked a bit lonely on my sandwich.

I also visited the Pacaya volcano.  I was so incredibly glad I decided to go on this tour, as I’ve never seen an active volcano before and it was so different from anything I can remember.  Climbing over brittle, hollow volcanic rock to see a live lava flow - and roast marshmallows on it - is something that was definitely worth the long, uphill hike to get there.  I’m not so sure it was worth the little fall I took on the way back down, where I landed on the sharp-edged dried lava flows and cut my hands pretty badly.  I guess wounds heal eventually.  Tomorrow I’m heading out to Lake Atitlan… I have these hopes of finding a local Guatemalan dulce-crafter to teach me the arts of candy-making, but no one seems to be in the yellow pages.  As always you can see my other pictures on Flickr - I took a lot of candy pictures of the delicious sweets.  This was my favorite.