Sumpango Kite Festival, Nov. 1

Halloween in Antigua

Fiambre

This past week I celebrated Halloween and Día de Todos Santos here in Guatemala.  Halloween I celebrated in Antigua last Saturday with a semi-large Peace Corps crowd.  Christina and I dressed up, along with our boyfriends, as rockers; it was the boys’ first Halloween ever and they even let us put make-up on them and paint their nails black.

November 1, All Saints Day, is a national holiday in Guatemala.  Sumpango, Sacatepequez, a town close to Antigua, has one of the largest kite festivals every year.  They have enormous barriletes (kites) made of tissue paper mounted on bamboo sticks.  Some of them fly, some are just decorative.  Many depicted religious images, and others promoted naturaleza and protecting the environment. There were thousands of people crowded on a dusty, wind blown barren field with enormous psychedelic colored kites rustling in the wind – at first glance you would think we were at Bonnaroo or some such music festival.  Many people come out with their own smaller kites to fly on a nearby field and against the bright blue sky it was very scenic.

The traditional food for this holiday is fiambre.  I compare it to a chef salad, but with ten times the ingredients.  This dish includes about 15 kinds of meat and at least 20 vegetables in a vinaigrette all mixed together.  The fiambre that Julio’s mom made and sold in town to neighbors included three types of chorizo, ham, chicken, lengua (pig tongue), pepperoni, salami, celery, carrots, chile pimiento (red bell pepper), cauliflower, radish, olives, hard boiled egg, two types of cheese, green beans, pacaya (stringy pale green vegetables that looks like a sea plant), remolacha (beet), peas, and corn on a bed of lettuce, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some ingredients.  I dined on fiambre the following day at a fellow teachers house here in Toto.  It was equally delicious, although the lengua is not really my fave.  She also served ayote, a type of squash that looks like a pumpkin, but greener and much thicker, cooked and sweetened with cinnamon and sugar.  We ate it by scraping the fleshy meat right off the shell and it tasted just like pumpkin pie.

Sumpango Cemetery