Instructions in Maya

I don't know why I find this so impressive. I feel that I have to lay the blame for my impressed-ness squarely in the lap of my years as an American. Coming, as I do, from a culture in which the we're-too-freaking-stupid-to- learn-another-language-and-since-we're-so-great-we-don't-have-to mentality seems to prevail, I find it really cool that the signs at the ruins were all in english, spanish, and maya (probably Yucatecan maya). Ok, Ok, Ok, I have been to American Indian Reservations where the signs are in Lakota or Dakota or Navajo as well as english, so I know it DOES happen here. What can I say? My subjectivity was formed in a matrix of racism and I sort of expect to find racism wherever I go, to the extent that it surprises me when I find some decency and equality. But Ginger pointed out that there are a LOT of signs in spanish in the US, and they are stealthily mushrooming so quietly that I didn't notice the proliferation, but I like it, I like it, me encanta!
An Eddie Izzard quote seems appropriate here:
"The Dutch speak four languages AND smoke marijuana..."
It strikes me as I type, that this post could be very useful if, for some reason, all known references to Yucatecan Maya were to disappear and all the living maya speakers somehow forgot how to speak it and all visual records of the language somehow spontaneously combusted, well, heh heh, I have a virtual Rosetta Stone just waiting for the linguists to pounce.

Bye Bye Labna

We finally had to leave Labná. Ginger is crossing a field to the sacbe that leads out of the site. I am next to a non-ruins building. Along side this house, I found a lot of small statues that were just sitting there, apparently found and sort of piled there out of the way until who knows when. The little statues were CUTE! This thatch-roof house was on the trail, inside the archaeology zone. I think they sold souvenirs there or maybe they have a little sandwich shop there when there are more tourists? They had some stuff on tables for sale. Anyway, by this time, my guts were hurting, as I suspect you can tell from my pained expression :)

Labna

Here we are, goofin as usual. Ginger is making an "L" for Labna. Get it? But I can't seem to get pictures with her eyes open all the time. The self portrait in front of the mirador is a favorite of mine. She apparently snuck around taking these self-portraits while I was busy making monumental discoveries inside the buildings. And here is my wistful pose. "Ahhhh...Labná..." I wish I could just stay there. Except for the bathroom facilities, it's a pretty nice place. And, really, who am I to complain about bathrooms that actually flush!?!?!?!

Labna: architectural details...

Ok, again with the boring-sounding title. But this is really cool. Look carefully at the pattern of this first picture. The decorative facade of this building is, in fact, a very stylized face or mask. Look at it. Can you see it? It is a Chac mask. Cool, no? Anyway, the empty niches in the next pictures are very cool in and of themselves. Did I already post these pictures? I feel that I've already written this part. [Shake like a dog to get the heebie-jeebie deja vu off my back.] Anyway, there were apparently some statues or something cool in these niches in the wall. Alas, looted previous to this trip. But, you can still see the green paint on the feather-looking background. Maybe these little niches housed parrots painted green. There were parrots in the decorations at Uxmal. Anyway, I thought I'd throw in a picture of Ginger at the end :)

Peanut Butter Alert!

Ah haaaaaaa!
Guess what I just found in my little pantry?
After checking with the FDA, http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01563.html
I am forced to re-think my scapegoating of Jugos California in Mérida.
Yes, they are possibly criminally negligent in their water hygiene practices, but my diarrhea could just as easily have come from the equally dangerous US food industry. I did eat some of it before I left. Now I'm scared to eat any more, but, not unlike Homer Simpson and the sandwich, I can almost hear it calling my name, lovingly. What's a hungry warrior-princess to do?
They say I can throw it away and send in the lid with the damning 2111 stock number prefix and all my troubles will be over because they'll refund my money. But a fat lot of good that does me right now, when I totally want a PBJ.
I'll have to fall back on an Eddie Monsoon quote here, "Don't you think a soupcon of guilt makes carte blanche depravity taste that much sweeter?"
I would bet almost anything that this jar of peanut butter is the best-tasting peanut butter in the WHOLE world, and I can't eat it...

Ramps, niches, and me and G

More pictures of us in Labná. This area was very cool. Note the ramp. We saw these in a lot of places. I think they are part of the sacbes. Wherever a sacbe meets an arch, the sacbe goes up a ramp to pass under the arch and then down again. But we also saw these little rampms where there weren't arches. But maybe there were other little buildings at the tops of the ramps. And, maybe the ramps are just the underneath of steps or something that haven't been reconstructed yet. But one more thing abut this area of the city, there are niches in the wall of one of these buildings that used to have things in them. You can tell. Maybe little statues. I guess they were looted a long time ago.

Mirador at Labna

Ok, mirador is the spanish word for scenic overlook. I don't know what the ancient maya used these buildings for. I read that this one had large statues on it at one time. Maybe they all did. Maybe they all had big decorative statues and were kind of like giant billboards advertising the coolness of the family in charge of the city. This one has a room underneath it. Come to think of it, they all seem to have had rooms underneath them. The tall part doesn't look like it had any kind of function except to look impressive. Believe me, we have TONS more pictures of this and other miradors. And I'll be posting a few more of them as we get to them.

Sacbes and more

The first is a hut on the trail to the ruins. It had cans of gas and water and rags and lawn equipment in it, but it is typical of the houses in the area and cute, so we took a picture. The next couple are of me and G on a sacbe. The careful reader will remember that I have explained before what a sacbe is. But for the careless reader I'll re-explain. The Maya cities were all connected by raised roads. These roads were called sacbes. Labná has the best preserved (or maybe reconstructed) sabes that we found. There may be better ones somewhere, but these were the best we saw. The last picture is of Ginger in front of a building that looks like another house complex.

More Ruins! Labna

Labná is one of the three small cities on the Puuc Trail near Uxmal. Here I am at the entrance, not feeling so good. And here I am in a scenic scene. And here is Ginger in a scenic field. The weather was perfect and the ruins were beautiful (of course). Too bad I didn't pay attention to the explanatory signs. I don't know what the building behind us was. I think an apartment complex for the elite. Wow, I just noticed! It almost looks like Ginger is standing in a crop circle.

Oxcutzcab, again

Ok, I guess you figured out that I just love saying Oxcutzcab? I say it whenever I type it. It's pronounced, sort of, like Oh-shkoots-kahb. So here are some pictures from the downtown of Ginger by the main plaza and me with the main church behind me, and a cool road sign (Ginger and I LOVE all the maya place-names). And, one of the strangest things, we saw this castle on the way out of Oxcutzcab. The road didn't take us as close to it as we wanted to see, and we thought about exploring to get closer. But, again, the bacteria swarming our guts made such excursions into populated areas without good ground-coverage flora a bit risky. The castle was cool-looking, though.

Oxcutzcab market

Ahhhh, another market. We didn't get pictures from inside this one because Ginger's intestinal parasites were doing their stuff (and mine weren't much better behaved). It was kinda scary. We were still in search of the elusive cheap hipiles. We had been assured by all the available literature that Oxcutzcab was definitely the hub of hipil-making in the universe. Note the mural over the market entrance. The ends are decorated with typical hipil stitchery patterns. We did find a few inside, but, again, all out of my cheap-skate price range. Beautiful, but I just couldn't bring myself to spend so much on something I would probably never get many chances to wear.

Welcome to Oxcutzcab

This mural at the entrance of Oxcutzcab was really cool. It says, "Welcome to the orchard of the state." If you look carefully, you can see in the right-hand corner of the first picture, a guy pedaling a big tricycle taxi. We made use of this transportation service, but felt a little guilty about it since our big white US asses took up the whole bench and we could hear our drivers grunt from time to time. The vehicles really aren't made for our juno-esque figures. But it's fun and it helps the local people. One of the tricycle taxi drivers told us that he makes an average of $50 (pesos) per day (that's $5 US, folks). Higher than the minimum wage in Mexico, by a long-shot, but crappy all the same.

The road to Oxcutzcab

Ginger, being a rabid fan of agroforestry, HAD to stop and take these pictures along the road from Ticul to Oxcutzcab. I like them a lot too. Agroforestry, for those of you who are as yet un-hipped to agricultural lingo, is the practice of combining agricultural production with forest products. For example, planting coffee in the shade of fruit trees to harvest both, prevent erosion, and boost soil productivity while providing habitat for migratory birds and other cool things. Sorry if that description is not accurate enough, Ginger. In the case here, the farmers are growing corn with bananas in the first photo and I don't know what in the second (looks like bananas to me). The third is an irrigation conduit and the last one is a house that looks pretty typical for the area. Note the open doorways: great for breezes, sucky for mosquitos. I think it's a beautiful house. If it were warm here year round I'd build one like it.

Ticul, pottery capital?

Ok, we were also led to believe that Ticul was the pottery capital of the world. That ALL of the pretty red-clay pottery was made here. So we looked, and found very little. Now, to Ticul's credit, this was probably squarely the fault of me and Ginger. We should have asked around, because apparently this is a cottage industry and families sit around making ceramic stuff in their gardens. We did stop at one place on the road going out of Ticul. We cleverly identified it as a ceramic production workshop. What tipped us off was all the ceramics in the yard, around the house, and the guys loading the truck with pieces apparently to be hauled to a larger city for sale. We didn't see anything we really liked a lot, but I did get this GREAT picture of Ginger inspecting a pot.

Possibly the best market picture of all time

I mean, really, what could I add? Words fail. Perhaps a haiku?
Painted beer logo.
Bananas and bras for sale.
Market in Ticul.

Goofin at the Ticul market

Here I am browsing the hipiles. They were all too expensive (like $25 or $30 -US). Ok, maybe that's not expensive, but I can be pretty cheap sometimes (shut up Buddy). And, here I am being all geeky and pretending to operate the tortilla machine. The teenage girls that were working there thought it was the funniest thing in the world that I was gonna pretend to work the machine in a picture. Actually, people all over the market thought it was funny that we were taking pictures of the vegetables and people. Everybody wanted their picture taken.

More market scenes

More market pictures. Because you deserve it :)
Note the hipiles that the women are wearing. Despite it's reputation for being the hipil capital of the world, Ticul did not live up to it's hipil-makin' hype. Or, possibly, Ginger and I just didn't go to the right places- one can never be sure. Another spelling of the garment might, just possibly might, be huipil. But we saw it written down in a few places and always spelled hipil. Now, the huipil is what I've always called it, because that's the name for the women's shirt-thing that the highland maya wear. It is a shirt and it's highly decorated with embroidery and it's worn tucked in at the waist and with a wide belt and skirt. So the dress that the Yucatecan Maya women wear is not exactly the same because it's a one-piece long dress, worn over a slip-like skirt with lots of decorative lace at the hem. Some of the fancier ones had embroidery on the lacy slip part that matched the embroidery on the dress itself. That would have been the one of my dreams, but the ones we were able to find were all too expensive. Alas.