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.