Guatemalan Doors & Windows

There are interesting sights, sounds and smells everywhere you go in Xela.  We resist the smells of the street food, but that's not easy if you're walking somewhere and haven't eaten recently.  The trucks with loudspeakers are everywhere, announcing, warning, inviting.  There are seemingly no noise ordinances here.

We decided to collect some of the sights of Xela-photographs of the interesting doors and windows we see as we are coming and going.  This one is our favorite so far. We walk by it every week on our way to church.  It has every appearance of being abandoned, but will likely stand there for a long time to come.

Xela is a city of walls and doorways that make what lies inside indistinguishable.  Some of the gates open to reveal a courtyard and individual houses or apartments inside.  Some open to parqueos-parking lots for the shoppers of Centro where the streets are too narrow to park.  Some gates are just private entrances, such as the one to the mission home.  Unless you happen to walk by when the gate is open, you would never know what is inside the walled enclosure with broken glass or rolled barbed wire atop.

We hope to have an in-depth look at doors and windows in other parts of the city in the near future, ideally before the rainy season begins and makes our wanderings more complicated.