I did want to include some pictures we took today while touring Izapa, which is one of the most important Mayan ruin sites from an archaeological point of view. it is not truly impressively huge site like Tikal or Chichen Itza or Palenque or Copan, but it is one of the oldest and is considered to be a bridge between the Olmec culture and the Mayan culture. It was fun. We had the place to ourselves except for a group of school kids who looked to be about middle school age. They were laughing and giggling at us, and finally one of the girls came up to me with her camera. I thought she wanted me to take a picture of her with her friends, but as it turned out, she wanted to take our picture. As soon as we agreed, all hell broke loose. All the kids got their cameras out and we posed for group photo after group photo with all the kids in various combinations. It is only in the early stages of excavation.
Here is what part of the site looks like.
There are a lot of steles and other pieces from these ruins that are in a museum here in Tapachula. This is a skull decorated with turquoise, gold, and jade. The Maya always did fancy things with the corpses of their dead rulers.
There are people living in and among these ruins. They have homes, and raise their animals right where their Mayan ancestors lived thousands of years ago. (Yes, the earth is more than 7000 or even 9000 years old, regardless of what any congressman tries to tell you.) Here is a borrego, which is some kind of a sheep. I wanted to pet it, but Mike said it might bite me, and I did not want to create a scene. So I admired him (or her) from a distance.
Here is a pig that was on a leash eating from a nice wooden bowl. When we took this picture, he was stretching his (or he) back legs surrounded by chickens.
Anyway, we are leaving here tomorrow for San Cristobal de las Casas, a wonderful little town in the mountains that we visited on our last trip out here. We plan to see some awesome stuff - including a trip by horseback to a Mayan village where picture taking is seriously frowned upon. So I will just have to describe things as best as I can. I usually feel sort of uncomfortable taking pictures of people unless they really seem to want it. It just seems intrusive somehow. Mike has no such compunction, but we both agree that this could have resulted in our old camera being stolen in a Mayan market in Oaxaca last fall. It did disappear ten minutes after he took a picture of a woman in the market and she did not seem happy about it. Next thing we knew, the camera was gone.
I did want to show one other picture. Before we left for this trip, Mike was taking lessons fishing with an atirado, a fishing net used by the people in El Salvador and the people here. Net fishing is not as easy as it might seem. Here is Mike giving it a try.
On a later day he went again and some fish and shrimp were caught. Mike and his friends built a fire and cooked them.
It probably tasted really good. Nothing like roasting fish over an open fire - just gut them and roast them. No need to cut the heads off!
It is time for me to end this post and think about dinner - what shall it be? Chicken mole? Some sort of tamale variation? The possibilities are limitless.
"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." (Virginia Woolf)
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