Santa Semana Museum: I Came to See the Carpets

Carpets like this!

I have not been having much luck getting to see museums I wanted to see. Museums in Guatemala City? Closed. Museums in Flores? Couldn't be found, not sure if they actually existed anywhere outside of Google Maps. Museums in my hotel? Locked tight. But one small museum in Antigua I really wanted to see was open for business: the Santa Semana Museum.

"Santa Semana" translates to "Holy Week," the week beginning on Palm Sunday and ending with Easter. Holy Week is a huge deal in Antigua. It's one of the places in the world to spend your Holy Week if you're into traveling to places when that place is the place to be.

If you think that having a whole museum dedicated to a few days in the calendar is strange, remember that New Orleans has two Mardi Gras museums (which would be the opposite end of the Lenten season).

The museum is in a repurposed, slightly ruined convent.

It's only ruined in a few places. The museum make good use of the un-ruined portions of the building.

And then came the main event: Carpets!

Antigua's Holy Week is known for the lavish, colorful, intricate, handmade "carpets" that cover the streets of the town for Holy Week processions.

The carpets are not traditional fiber carpets, but are made from dyed sawdust and flowers. This one is dyed sawdust.

What is even more interesting is that these are laid down on the cobblestone streets of Antigua, with huge amount of sawdust being used as a base to level the very uneven cobblestone streets before the artisans begin work on the surface carpet.

Those are examples of the dyes used to color the sawdust.

The museum has a few of these "carpets," but to see them in person, laid out on the streets of Antigua during Holy Week, must be a spectacular sight.

When I walked into the museum, I did not even notice that these were the sawdust carpets along the walkway. They looked like woven mats.

After returning to the hotel when the skies open up, suppertime fell right when the rains lightened up.

I decided to try the Antigua Brewing Co., the brew pub in town, just to see what a Guatemala style brew pub was like. It looked like most any other brew up.

But the beers were a bit on the light side, which is generally true of any beer brewed to be drank in tropical heat. Below is the yellowest "red" beer I've ever drank.

There was live music, which was good when the gentleman below was singing. He was incredibly good.

I ordered a cheeseburger. The very interesting thing about this cheeseburger was the fries.

They somehow managed to embed chives into the french-fried potatoes. I have never had french fries that way before. I hope it is not the last time.