An overview of chiapas

Ok, back track. It´s been a while since i´ve posted any pictures. Chiapas was a really great place and I was really glad to have a house there, it made life much more enjoyable. We went to the market almost every day and bought all sorts of great fruits and vegetables to cook with. I bought nopales (a type of cactus leaf for eating) and fermented them with onions and chiles. They were really really good. I think that mexico is my soul country , and definitely my soul food style. We made a lot of friends in San Cristobal with travelers and some resident mexicans, one of which I was pretty enamored with but don´t have a picture of. The farm we originally went to work on was a pretty bum deal, so we quit and went to work for a permaculture project with some people that were really totally awesome. We worked at a few schools, and some other various places building chicken coops, terraces, and painting walls of a hostel. All in all I really enjoyed my time there and I think I´ll go back. Right now though I am in Oaxaca by myself taking classes at a language school for 3 weeks. I wasn´t that thrilled with the next farm and I wanted to learn spanish which was getting really hard to do because we were always speaking english to eachother. So I´m meeting up with Madeline and Alice in Morelos on the 15th of december for our next farm. Oaxaca is nice, but it´s much bigger than san cristobal. And I think I like the artisan vibe of chiapas more than here. My classes are really amazing and I´m learning much much more and so much more quickly than if I didn´t come here. But because school cost much more money than anything else in my trip I was a bit worried about paying for a place to stay for 3 weeks. So... I managed to meet someone on the street on tuesday and ask him if he knew of a roof or a patio i could pitch my tent and he helped me out. Hell yes. So right now I´m stying with his suegra, or mother in law up on a mountain 20 minutes or so from the center of the city. She´s really nice and the place is very modest. The toilet is an earthen thing on the ground that you throw a bucket of water in after you´re done to flush and at night there are cockroaches that crawl out of it. I have my own room with 4 walls and a roof which is nice and even a bed! There´s no running water and showers happen if you dump a bucket of water on yourself. It costs 4.5 pesos on a bus to get from her house to school in the morning, but i think it´s definitely the best option i have here in oaxaca. I get my own home stay for free when other students have to pay 600 dollars, and it´s a more authentic experience. All the homestay families here have mansionous houses, and really that´s not the mexican life. So, things are good ,life is awesome, and really anything you want and need can happen if you ask for it. Todo es posible en la vida.

mexican extention cord

Salvador, a campesino i worked with in chiapas. he speaks tzotzil and spanish.

Dos pingüinos the school build from trash and earth

bottles for windows

a flower i found the day everything lined up well in chiapas.

the first farm in chiapas, it was kind of a bummer, but beautiful

BEANS!

concrete love

this way out

Helena on the farm

Ah, a faster internet connection means that maybe i can put some photos up today. I was sitting on my stoop this morning waiting for the water truck to come by, and i guess people don´t really sit on their stoops in mexico because I got a lot of weird looks. It was really fun though because people would stop to talk to me and I got to practice my spanish, which is getting better by the day!

The best day ever

So, yesterday we all went to our first day at the language school. We had been trying to figure out where we were going to stay while we were in San Cristobal because the farm doesn´t provide a place for us to stay and the hostels would be expensive and camping would also be expensive because we would have to eat out all the time. There happened to be a flyer outside of our school for a house for rent, but it had a minimum stay of 4 months. We decided to look into it anyway, and it turns out that it´s owned by the woman who runs the language school. She´s a ridiculously nice person and incredibly cute and she brought us to see the house and she told us that we actually could stay in it for a month. So...WE´RE RENTING A HOUSE IN MEXICO!!! It´s definitely the most exciting thing that´s happened to us so far. Eating will be cheap because we can cook for ourselves and everything at the market is soooo cheap. You can get a bag of fruits or avocados or a beautiful assortment of beans for 15 pesos. It´s amazing! We´re moving into the house in a couple of hours from now. We also made some friends who are volunteering on the farm we will be at next week. Pretty much San Cristobal de las Casas is a most magical city. Hay muchas personas indigenas quien venden zapatas, frutas, muñecas, ropa, y muchas otro cosas. ¡Es una ciudad bonicima! Y ahora, es tiempo para mis fotos de San Cristobal de las Casas. Never mind, the computer won´t upload my photos right now, so I´ll do it later.

the first week: cancun, chichen itza, campeche

So these are some pictures from our first week in Mexico. We flew into Cancun and didnt stay there for long. The pictures appear in reverse order here because Im still learning how to get everything working just right. The bottom photos are from our first hostel in Cancun, which was really quite nice. It was 20 us dollars per person, or 200 pesos to stay there for the night wich is kind of expensive for a hostel, but it was a great place to crash our first night. Everything is colorful and made out of concrete or adobe, and all of the sidewalks are extremely narrow. Trying to get down a crowded sidewalk with my backpack really makes me feel like a giant. Theres no recycling in mexico, so there are A LOT of plastic bottles and other trash on the sides of the road which is a real bummer. Right now were in San Cristobal de las Casas and its beautiful. We will be here for a month, so we are going to rent a house! Its really cheap, only 1300 pesos for the month each, and it will be really comfy and save us a bunch of money. I have a bunch more pictures of San Cristobal that Ill put up sometime in the next week or so. Using the internet is kind of a hassle because you either have to pay for it, or you have to hope that no one else is using it. Oh well. More thoughts later. Oh, and the keyboards here are different and I cant figure out how to use the apostrophe.

The walkway near the library in Campeche

Some fancy dancers with beer bottles on their heads, campeche

Im not sure what this is counting down to exactly, but it is counting down to 2010

Campeche dancers

My most delicious tamale in a banana leaf

The ocean side in Campeche. Its on the gulf of Mexico.

Ocean

There are weird shaped lights on the buildings in Campeche

There is also a wall surrounding the city of Campeche

A cathedral

Bricks that make up many of the roofs

There is never a dull floor in Mexico

or door

or hallway

or sidewalk aparently. There are HUGE steps down to the street in some places,

and you really have to watch your step.

A campeche street

The wall looking in to the park

Las tres amigas

An awesome hallway in Chichen Itza

And a great wall in Chichen Itza

Some of the ruins of Chichen Itza

and again

An iguana!!!!!

Our first hostel











the three of us on our beds the first night