El Año Santo

I finally accomplished my goal of over a year in going to Esquipulas! It’s a town/city in Guatemala with a super rich history...let me paint some of the history before I tell my story.:) It’s believed that it was a pilgrimage site long ago, before the first conquistadors arrived in the Americas. Back in the 1500’s a Portuguese wood sculptor donated a sculpture of a black Jesus on the cross. It was put into the church and soon became a pilgrimage site for local Catholics. Time passed and it came to the mid-1700’s when a bishop in Guatemala made a pilgrimage to see the sculpture and went away miraculously healed of a chronic illness. Upon this news the Catholic church decided to build a huge Basilica in Esquipulas and put the statue inside. It quickly converted into a huge pilgrimage site and is often called the “center of Central American faith.”
So this weekend I went with four other friends and we checked out the whole city. There’s a small zoo there that randomly has lions, water buffalos, ostriches, raccoons, crocodiles, and a whole bunch of other random animals. Two highlights of the park were the fact that the ostrich cage had an opening that literally anybody could just walk into and enter the cage. Then over the island that the monkeys live on there’s a zip line that Matt took which is about 100 yards long and costs like $1.15. On Saturday night we went to the Basilica in order to see the statue of Jesus. It was a short line and we spent about a half hour in line. The line on Sundays takes up to several hours to get through. It was a pretty simple statue without knowing the history of it, but I was pretty impressed with it. On Saturday night we went to Pizza Burger Diner for some pizza, which turned out to be the best I’ve had since I was in the States! We went back to the place on Sunday morning for breakfast cause we figured that being such a good restaurant they probably have pancakes also. We got there and they didn’t have them on the menu! So we asked the waitress (which was the same one as the night before), “Hay panqueques?” To which she casually responded, “yeah, we just don’t put them on the menu.” They were amazing! It’s my new favorite restaurant in Central America. I would say that the city has renewed my faith in Guatemala as a decent country. I was under impressed with Lago Atitlán my last trip there, so now I am back “in like” with Guatemala.