i´m in mexico and this is what it´s like.

lo siento para no escribo por mucho tiempo. ahora yo estoy en san cristobal, mi ciudad favorito en todo el mundo, yo creo. solamente quiero escribir en espanol por que comienzo escuela para espanol tres dios ayer.

ok. i will stop writing in spanish but my head is swimming in it all day long so it´s starting to get really fun. i have taken two days of language classes con eduardo and he is muy simpatico y amable. i think he´s also the best teacher in the school. ted´s teacher is a fucking nightmare and the other girl we are staying with in the homestay has a decent teacher but eduardo i think has the best structure and experience.

san cristobal is so amazing. we have been here a week and will probably leave this thursday but i´m not sure anything can ever top this magical place.

i´m high in the mayan highlands, mountains all around, and the trip from Palenque here was utterly painful. It´s four hours and we stopped about halfway through to see these gorgeous waterfalls, mostly because i was so ill. we were riding in a “kombi” aka colletivo, aka van that leaves for its destination whenever it is full and is about a fifth of the price of the bus. for the first half of the journey there were no fewer than 17 people in the kombi. it was fucking incredible. we were relegated to the very back so of course i was fucking ill in about 5 minutes. the roads were all windy, narrow, crawling up and down mountains and every time the driver saw people by the road he would stop to pick them up and we would shove them into invisible spaces until we were packed so tightly that there was a little mayan girl sitting on my lap! she was incredibly beautiful, probably about three years old. the mayans around here are still very traditional and have managed to keep their culture much the same as it was when the spanish landed here 500 years ago, so they still wear traditional clothing. this little girl (Violeta) was wearing a thick, black, shaggy wool skirt, a gorgeous, 4 inch wide, tightly woven belt that was navy blue but with multicolored and some even metallic threads woven through it, and a silky shirt. her hair was long, in braids, with ribbons woven in and tied together at the ends of the braids. i would have been really fine with holding her except i was desperately holding back vomit and she smelled really strongly of fire/smoke, because they have open fires in their kitchens with no stovepipes or anything to cook their tortillas. normally i really like that smell, but seeing as i was carsick it was really an incredibly uncomfortable experience that, now, i´m glad i got to go through but if i hadn´t made it without vomiting it would have been so awful.

anyways, we got out, saw the waterfalls, and then got into another kombi and he again relegated us to the back, 5 of us sitting across in the back seat with only 3 people sitting in the 3 rows ahead of us. WTF! i´m pretty sure he thought he would be picking more people up so wanted to start out as compact as possible but it really sucked, again, and ted and i were mad at each other for a stupid reason but ended up having to get over that pretty quickly as it was mandatory cuddling/me sitting half in his lap the whole 2.5 hours.

so we finally got to san cristobal and at the bus station it looked like just another mexican dump. so i asked the guy where the center of town was (it was about 6 pm so it had just gotten dark. the sunset on the kombi ride was probably incredible and the whole scenery i´m sure but i was pretty focused once again on staring straight ahead and not blowing gringo chunks all over the pretty mayans). we started heading in that direction and all of a sudden the streets got really narrow and cobbled, each house had an incredible ornate gate that sometimes you could glimpse inside of to see amazing patios and salons, all of the roofs were tiled, and there were still christmas lights strung across from roof to roof. the first church we came upon was obviously built in the 1600s but freshly painted in frosting blue and white, with incredible detail and it just looked pure, clean, beautiful and amazing with a little courtyard below it where people were sitting together or walking, laughing, drinking wine and coffee and hot chocolate, and my mouth just kept dropping farther and farther as we walked on to see church after church, beautiful streets, finally got to the main cathedral in town and i was literally tearing up by then because it was just SO BEAUTIFUL and i have spent the last year of my life trying to get to another time and place in the world and it was like i had finally found it. there were mayan women and children heavy-laden with gorgeously woven blankets, sweaters, belts, bracelets, and little clay figurines, all trying to sell in their shy but persistent way. i didn´t hear a word of english and it was like FINALLY! i´m in MEXICO! and it was just so magical and we checked out three or four hotels, couldn´t believe how nice they all were for the price but we finally found one that was perched a little onto a hill and offered a corner room with windows all around, overlooking all of san cristobal, one of the cleanest and prettiest rooms i´ve been in with obviously handcrafted wooden furniture and hot water in the shower (hard to come by) for 300 pesos a night for the both of us which comes out to $25. wooooEEE!

so the next morning i woke up and went out on the town to find an atm and a cafe because i was really getting sick of nescafe by then because it seems this country is single-handedly supporting that company and doggedly refusing to sell anyone their own, freshly grown beautiful coffee which is grown everywhere around here! dammit! anyways, it was overwhelming because i finally realized how little spanish i know, really just survival spanish, but i was also still just overwhelmed by how incredible this place is as little old mayan women carrying six live chickens by their feet to market and cafes everywhere and i found a few language schools and now that´s what i´m doing.

a few days in i found a coffee shop and asked for a cappuchino mocha and when she handed it to me and i took a sip i about dropped it because it was so delicious. delicately spiced with a little cinnamon and whatever else makes mayan chocolate so special, not insanely overwhelmingly syrupy or sweet like mochas in the states and just magical. i told her it was the best mocha in all of mexico and she smiled and explained that that was because not only were the coffee beans roasted and ground in her coffee shop, but so was the cacao and i could buy the ground chocolate by the kilo if i wanted. holy fucking shit i am in heaven.

so as i´ve mentioned about a dozen times, san cristobal is the center of the mayan highlands and ted and i have spent a bit of time up in the villages, once on a tour and once we rented a scooter (made for a painful day but at least i don´t get sick riding all those incredible mountain roads on a scooter. i´ve decided maybe i just need to have a sunroof in whatever car i ride in so i can stand up and have my head completely outside and that´s the only way to avoid la enferma del motion). with the guide we were able to go into one of the mayan churches where they kicked out the priest about thirty years ago, so the religion that´s practiced there is this crazy cross between ancient mayan beliefs and traditional spanish catholocism, butof course heaviest on the mayan beliefs. pretty much they kicked out the priest, elevated all the saints to the level of gods and now practice idolatry at its finest, offering their saints food, incense, candles, and lots and lots of soda because the believe that coca cola and other carbonated beverages help them release evil spirits as they burp (they are obsessed with “refrescas” for this reason and it was so weird seeing shrines by the side of the road with half-drunk bottles of coke inside them). the church also sort of serves as a hospital. it´s inside the church that the shamans do their diagnosing and healing work which involves special herbs and plants, candles, water, gourds, eggs, and chickens that they end up sacrificing and either eating or burying as an offering to the earth. there was religious fervor in the church in chamula such as i´d never seen before. tiny mayan women crouched on the floor that was spread with pine needles (in order to form a sacred space) chanting and muttering, men and women performing healing ceremonies, tapping eggs on peoples heads and pulse points, rubbing chickens on people, yes, sacrificing them, setting up elaborate rows and rows of different colored candles on the floor, and there are people everywhere you look engaging in these activities and everyone is dressed in incredible garb. there´s no taking pictures allowed in the church and mayans in general don´t like to have their pictures taken because they believe that it steals a piece of their soul so of course i don´t have many but i have been having a lot of stilted conversations with the little mayan girls that are always trying to sell us things (we´ve started givign them fruit or peanuts becauset hat´s the easiest was to get them to stop bothering us) and have asked a few of them if i can take a picture and they´ve agreed.

anyways, so that´s the world i´m living in right now and it does seem incredibly foreign and not of this time but to contrast, last night i went to a rap concert that was INCREDIBLE. it was “mujeras rap de chile y cuba” and i´d been looking forward to it all week and we almost didn´t go because we went out friday night and then had a really long day yesterday but i wanted to see it so bad so thank god we talked each other into at least checking it out. we only made it through one woman´s performance for various reasons but she was a goddess such as i´ve never seen. she was from chile with thick, dark dredlocks to her ass tied up with a head scarf and she was a pretty dark chilean, almost black, with that beautiful black/latina curvy body, incredible face with glittery beauty marks on her forehead and between her eyes, and she had this VOICE. not just rapping but that r&b crooning and filling the bar with not just sound but love and sex and passion and it was unlike anything i´ve ever heard. and she was of course rapping in spanish, bt i understood more of it than i thought it would, all about love and saving the world and women being powerful adn the poor rising up to take their own fates into their hands and this that and the other. and the whole hall was filled with people mostly brown, many gorgeous brown boys wtih long, sexy hair or dreds or curls or what have you, and some girls from finland and some aussies and just a delightful mix and everyone was so transfixed by her and couldn´t help but be moving, dancing, flowing with her words and the artwork in the place was really alive, paintings of mayan men and women and birds flying and the waitress who kept bringing us our wine had the loveliest smile and was so kind and it was just really magical.

so that is a quick (ha!) synopsis of my life and my world right now. sorry i don´t write more but there´s always so much to say, like this entry, that i know it´s going to take literally an hour to type up and it´s overwhelming but i´m also so glad to share this life and be able to look back and remember it forever.

con mucho gusto, te amo!
clea