Happy to me

I went all 27 yesterday, as many of you have congratulated me for (thanks!) and last night we had a little fiestita here at home to celebrate. Walker and Liz were in town for one last night, and our friends Maestro Peter and Student Doctor Dan came over to party with us. It was clear to me that this was going to be a good birthday when, smoking a cigar in the back yard with Walker, Jessica came through the gate with an enormous red-and-white star-shaped piñata.

Piñatas here are made out of clay, and then covered in paper and streamers and what all else. But clay? This thing weighed 8 pounds easy, and when – later in the evening – I broke it with a dining room chair, it came apart in a soaring explosion of candies and other sundry treats, all over the heads of our guests. Really special, and all captured on video (and in the photo, below).

It was a great night way beyond the piñata. The food turned out really good, the boysenberry margaritas were fantastic, and the after-dinner game of successive rounds of draw-pass-describe in writing-repeat was really so much fun. Importantly, everyone brought me presents.

día de los muertos y votación

Liz & Walker just got in their taxi for a long trip back to Boston, so now we are home alone again and back to work. But it's been a really exciting week since the last blog post. On November 1st and 2nd Día de los Muertos is celebrated throughout Mexico. Families make altars in their homes – the ones we saw involved photos, candles, fruit and sweet bread, alcohol, lots of flowers, and pine needles – eat meals together, and go to the cemetary to decorate graves and talk about the deceased. On the second we travelled uphill to the autonomous and traditionally conservative Tzotzil-speaking town of San Juan Chamula. We walked around inside the church (right), which is not your aveage Catholic church (see the link).

From there we walked up to the cemetary. It was late afternoon on the 2nd, and we had clearly missed the party, but the aftermath was pretty amazing. Almost all of the hundreds of graves were covered in pine needles and flowers, and there were empty cans of beer, soda, and posh all around. It was a pretty lovely place to be.
Then it was election day. Someday when our children ask us where we were when Obama was elected president, we will have to tell them that we were in a sports bar called Tequila Zoo in San Cristóbal, Mexico watching coverage on CNN International. Gringolandia was out in force, though there were a number of Mexicans in the crowd as well. It is worth mentioning that the group of gringos who are living in Chiapas are, to put it mildly, not McCain supporters. The older residents – many retirees who decided they could live better off their savings down here – are perhaps the roudiest of the bunch, and often need to be shhshed from their heckling so that we can hear what is going on on the television. The night ended with chants of !Si se puede! and tequila shots all around. We are even more excited about coming back home in a couple of months and it feels a little less embarassing to be an American living abroad.

Palenque

We are very happy to have two new visitors this week, Liz and Walker here from Boston. They got in Thursday night, and yesterday morning we set off on a mini-roadtrip to Palenque. On the way we checked out Agua Azul, a big waterfall, and then got to our cabaña in the Panchan (Chol for "sky" or "heaven"), a new-agey jungle hippie haven with excellent Italian-Mexican food and good places to sleep just outside of the entrance to the ruins. We were just in time for a delicious dinner at Don Mucho's ("Mr. Lots"). In the morning after breakfast, again with Don Mucho, we set off for the ruins.
The ruins are pretty impressive. A very nice mix of huge nicely-restored palaces, and also smaller sites in the jungle, overgrown with trees and vines. We spent a few hours climbing up pyramids, then headed back through Chol-country to San Cristóbal, stopping for empanadas at my favorite empanada stand in the small Chol-speaking town of Francisco I. Madero, where I usually wait for combis on my way to Campanario.

Today we are back in San Cristóbal on the first night of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). It's my first time in Mexico during this holiday, which we understand is mostly celebrated with families in the home, or around gravesites in the cemetary. But tonight we are going to a public celebration involving live music, dancing, and costumes, along with traditional alters made by small local businesses.

It's cold on the mountain

Got cold here this week. We came back from Guate (on the subject of Guate, here's another shot from the lake, left), then left early the next day for Campanario, and when we really arrived back home for a while on Sunday, it was cold here. Not cold like it is in Boston – we keep up with WBUR everyday, and hearing the weather report there is pretty fun, in a way that is hard to really figure out; I'm sure a better anthropologist would have things to say about it – but it only reaches the mid-50's or so during the day, and drops into the low-40's at night. And here's the kicker: houses here have no insulation or indoor heat. We've now got 4 blankets on our bed, and they do a pretty good job for us. Right now I am wearing long johns and a thick wool sweater, a wool cap, jeans, thick socks and shoes. This is inside, working at my desk. I think in Salto de Agua (a smallish lowland city we pass through on the way to Campanario) the other day it was maybe 85. Until now, I've always much preferred our San Cristóbal climate to what was on offer in Salto, but today I'm not so sure.

We do seem to have passed beyond the rainy season. It is clear and sunny this morning, our clothes are out drying on the line. The clouds still come in in the afternoons sometimes. Here are clouds over a nice street (right).

Walker and Liz will arrive tomorrow, and give us good excuses to descend from our mountain home and be warm again.

slice the tomato fresh

Don't get me wrong, we think it is really nice that many of the restaurants around here have menus with English translations to help out us travelers. But sometimes these menus could really use double-checking by a native speaker. Here are some of our favorite menu items:

• Hawaiian pizza with ham and pinecones (=pineapples)
  
• bagel with cream cheese and salmon filled with smoke (=smoked salmon)
  
• salad with slice the tomato fresh (=fresh tomatoes...or a new English resultative?)
• pizza with Spanish ham mountain (= serrano ham; cerro = mountain)
  

Here in San Cristóbal it is getting colder and dryer. Not as cold as it is getting up north, but we miss our heaters at night. Above is a picture of the view from our backyard, courtesy of Peter.

Astral travel

We returned last night from Guatemala; a few things about that –

1.) Lago Atitlán easily ranks as one of the more amazing places I've ever been. Hard to make words do it, but: big, very clear lake, ringed around by very steep, jungled mountainside and 3 volcanoes. The best part of the whole trip may have been just the lanchas, the water-buses that run regularly between the lakeside towns, and from which we could watch the lake and awesome shore/mountain roll by.

2.) Antigua is nice. But I am happy to say that it isn't as nice as our new home, San Cristóbal. I'm a little proud of our city for that.

3.) Back to the lake: did you know that you could take a month-long course, including instruction in meditation, metaphysics, and (best of all) astral travel, in one of the lakeside communities? Of course you did! You astral travelers, you.

viajando en Guate

Remember how a couple of weeks ago Jess' computer died? And then was magically revived by a nice program called DiskWarrior? Well the same thing happened to my Macbook the night before Jess, Gillian and I left for Guatemala... except my computer was so dead that Disk Warrior couldn't even find a hard drive to repair. So we are again a one-computer family for a little while. Happily almost everything is safely backed up, and the fancy new Macbooks just came out, so I have something to look forward to. In the meantime, I will be getting a nice loaner from a friend.

Maybe the saddest part is that Gillian and I had just gone to record Chol ejectives in the home of a Chol-speaker living in San Cristobal with his wife, a Tzeltal-speaker from Oxchuk. We were taking some pictures of the beautiful view of the city from their house in a neighborhood called Cascajal, high up on a hill in the outskirts of the city, and offered to take a picture of Nico and his wife and give them a copy. They were excited and she spent about 20 minutes putting on her beautiful traditional hand-woven Oxchuk outfit, and asked again whether I would really bring them the pictures and I assured her that of course I would. I had just off-loaded these pictures to my hard drive and deleted them from my camera when it died. So it was a good time to goon a mini-vacation.

Today is our last day in Guatemala. We spent two nights at Lago Atitlan (above), a beautiful lake surrounded by volcanoes near the small city of Panajachel. We swam, ate good food with views, walked up to a village on top of a hill, and shopped around the Guatemala-kitsch market (a little different from the Chiapan-kitsch markets). Yesterday afternoon we arrived in Antigua, and tomorrow morning early we head back to Mexico where Gillian and I will continue recording Chol ejectives.

Antigua is beautiful. Our Lonely Planet chapter on Antigua starts with something like: "In all the long boring conversations about where the 'real Guatemala' is, Antigua is surely never mentioned. But also should not be missed." This seems pretty accurate. Antigua is beautiful, clean, friendly, and safe, with old colonial buildings and views of volcanoes. It has a special "tourist police force" to give us directions and escort us to places near the city. Last night we ate crepes for lunch and a delicious dinner in a small French restaurant. There are Guatemalans around, but it's not clear where they actually live, as the main streets seem to be full of hotels, museums, beautiful old churches, restaurants, and shops. We're not entirely sure what we'll do today, but it will most likely involve walking around and looking at old buildings and sitting in nice cafes.