So, I don´t know why blogger won´t let me intersperse my pictures with the text today, but I´m not going to fool with it anymore! So enjoy the pictures with captions and then scroll down for the rest of the story...
Anna and I on top of a temple at Uxmal - look at that rainbow!!
Hacienda Ochil
Temple of the Magician at Uxmal, looking dramatic
The church at Mani
Class trip to the church in Santa Elena
San Juan procession
Downtown Santa Elena
Pig´s head on paradeSorry about the lack of translation....I changed the name of the blog to the Yucatec phrase that means Good morning or, Good Day. I tend to say the Ma´a lob part whenever I don´t know what else to say.
After Merida we got in a couple of vans and headed south towards Santa Elena, where we’ll be spending two weeks. First we stopped for lunch at the Hacienda Ochil, a gracefully restored hacienda about an hour outside of Merida. The hacienda system in Yucatan was based on the production of henequen, a cousin of the maguey and agave plants (used to make pulque and tequila) whose fibers were used to make high quality ropes and nets before synthetic fibers were introduced after World War I. So as boom/bust cycles tend to go, Yucatan went from being extremely wealthy to broke in a matter of decades. The hacienda system incorporated Maya villages into a parcel of land and used their labor to work the henequen. A familiar settlement pattern in the state is a long dusty rode curving around thatched roof villages squatting in the shadows of imposing stone haciendas. Sort of reminds me of the southern US plantations. Anyways, now a lot of the haciendas remain in ruins or have been bought by wealthy hotel developers who transform them into luxury hotels. Expensive places to stay but fun places to eat lunch!
Our bed and breakfast in Santa Elena, the Flycatcher, is extremely nice. It is a departure from my usual travel style. I’m sharing the tiled suite with Anna and Anne-Marie – it is huge and has a beautiful bathroom with a bathtub and hot water. Breakfast every morning is a choice of omelettes with delicious fruit and coffee. It’s really quite wonderful staying here. The village of Santa Elena is quite large, about 5,000 people. It’s grown a lot in the last 40 years, when better roads and schools were built. Before that everyone farmed their land and spoke Maya almost exclusively. Now people still farm and speak Maya, but the younger generations don’t speak it as much and many have to leave town to find work. Right now there are 600 young men living in the San Francisco area and sending money back. It’s interesting how this skews the demographics here – we went to a saint’s day celebration the other day and there were almost exclusively women and children there.
Our bed and breakfast in Santa Elena, the Flycatcher, is extremely nice. It is a departure from my usual travel style. I’m sharing the tiled suite with Anna and Anne-Marie – it is huge and has a beautiful bathroom with a bathtub and hot water. Breakfast every morning is a choice of omelettes with delicious fruit and coffee. It’s really quite wonderful staying here. The village of Santa Elena is quite large, about 5,000 people. It’s grown a lot in the last 40 years, when better roads and schools were built. Before that everyone farmed their land and spoke Maya almost exclusively. Now people still farm and speak Maya, but the younger generations don’t speak it as much and many have to leave town to find work. Right now there are 600 young men living in the San Francisco area and sending money back. It’s interesting how this skews the demographics here – we went to a saint’s day celebration the other day and there were almost exclusively women and children there.
Parading a pig’s head through the streets as part of a procession has deep roots in the Yucatan, but no one can tell me exactly why that is. However, in this era of swine flu we all found it extremely ironic to be following a pig’s head as it was paraded with music and dancing through the streets of Mexico!
Class this week has been good but still feels long and difficult. Our hours are slightly better – 9-noon, siesta, and then 4:30-7:30. In the afternoon we’re with local native speakers and we’ve been able to get out more and have conversations around town, which is more fun than sitting in class. After a month we’ve becoming slightly conversational depending on the amount of sleep and water we’ve had! This morning someone asked Anna and I what we wanted to eat and you could just hear the gears turning in our heads! But we go it eventually. As a class we’re pretty funny to listen to though, because we’re pretty excited about the few small phrases we can put together and we love trying them out. So the other day when we walked around town with our teachers we were like bunch of chatty two year olds who repeat everything three times……this is what we sound like:
Tin bin chan xiinbal. (I’m going for a little walk) Then all 10 of us repeat:
Tin bin chan xiinbal, Tin bin chan xiinbal, Tin bin chan xiinbal, etc.
Miis! (Cat!)
Wacax! (Cow!)
Tin walik wacax! (I see a cow!)
Tin walik tsoyan sak wacax! (I see a skinny white cow!)
Keeken! (Pig!)
Nojoch chak najil k’uj! (Big red church!)
Of course, these phrases are repeated multiple times by every person. We sound ridiculous!
On Friday we had a day off to tour around the local archaeological sites. The tour was given by Tomas Gallareta, who is basically in charge of archaeology in the Yucatan (I don’t know his official title, but he knows everything about everything and gives tours to foreign heads of state). We went to Labna, had lunch at Mani (where Diego de Landa burned all the Maya books and “idols” back in the sixteenth century) before heading to Uxmal. We saw Uxmal just as a huge a dramatic storm rolled in. It never rained on us, but the views were amazing. After touring the site we had dinner at the fancy hotel, swam in the pool, and then went back for the light and sound show that happens at night. I’d never been to one before so I was very curious – basically they light up all the buildings on the site to the music and a couple of stories that they tell you. One was about the rain god Chaak, and one was an Illiad rip-off about a princess of someone at Uxmal who was in love with a prince at Chichen Itza and caused a war. The stories were not interesting but seeing all the buildings lit up was certainly spectacular.
This coming week we have three days of class and then a long weekend. We’re debating over what to do; there is so much it’s hard to decide – beaches, cenotes, archaeological sites, bull fights, etc. I’m sure whatever we do it will rule. By the way, I should also mention that our group is totally awesome. I’ve been on enough projects to know that random groups of people are hit or miss when it comes to getting along. With this group things have clicked nicely; we all enjoy each others’ company and no one is a complete idiot douchebag! A pleasant surprise, for sure.
