Dream Weaver

San Cristobal De Las Casas Part 1

Ok, so we've been out like 5 weeks now and we're 4 weeks behind on the blog.... Awkward! In my defense we were sitting on the beach watching the waves and enjoying a Pina Colada, so it would have been really inconvenient to step away and get this done... :) We'll try to get caught up, starting with a couple of long posts here!

Saturday Jan 12

We arrived in San Cristobal Sunday night after a nice relaxing hot as Hades no AC 5 and a half hour bus ride from Palenque. We checked in to our super cute hostel El Gite Del Sol, it's run by a French Canadian guy who was super great. We got an awesome room with a balcony which sounded like a great idea until we realized as a bonus it also included free serenading from the Mexican karaoke bar right next. You thought regular English speakers could slaughter a song, how about a drunk Mexican who doesn't speak English to begin with? Yeah, that's what it was like.

Just because we're in a foreign country don't think for one second we were going to miss any football, seriously that would be blasphemous! This was one of the only places we could find within a 20 minute walking radius that was showcasing the 49ers Packers game and we were made sure we were front and center!

Sunday January 13

San Cristobal was the very first area McKay served in on his mission, so it was before he really spoke Spanish very well, so incidentally he didn't think anyone would remember him. But we still went back to one of the wards he had served in and quite a few of the members still knew him right away! We also went to visit the Mandujano's after church, they are such a sweet family. They have a daughter Carlita who is 15 and 2 younger sons. They were so amazingly nice and it was so great getting to know them a little better and we made plans to meet up with them later in the week.

After visiting with the Mandaujano's another member had invited us over for dinner (I think we're really getting down that pathetic we're traveling and on a budget so please take pity on us look) which we gratefully accepted. I don't think I'll ever get over the shock of realizing how people live down here and how wasteful we must seem to them. We had a wonderful meal and it was awesome spending some time with their family.

Later that night we walked around the town center, San Cristobal is by far the most touristy of all the places we visited so far. What's surprising though is how few Americans we've seen, there are lots of Europeans and I would say 60% of the tourists also happen to be hippies. It's crazy to see them all walking around with their dreads, bare feet and hairy armpits, you can also usually smell them coming from a block away or here them pounding on their drums from just about anywhere in the city!

This is the Ortiz family who invited us over for dinner, you can tell by all their smiles that we were clearly a hit!

Monday Jan 14

We spent the day wandering through the city. First we visited the tourist market where they have booth after booth set up with bracelets, necklaces, earrings, scarves and anything and everything else you could ever hope to bring back from Mexico. It's funny cause all the booth owners tell you that everything is hand made back at their homes by their families, you believe that until the next 20 booths you see all have the exact same items made the exact same way, they must just all be a part of one big family!

Later we went to the legit Mexican market and that’s where the real magic happens, we’re talking all types of fruits and vegetables, clothes, school supplies, tv remotes (for some reason every other shop you pass has stacks and stacks of random remotes for sale, but no user manuals to go with them or blue shirts to help you figure out the one you need… Yes, I did just make a Best Buy reference…. :) and best of all open air meat. You want some chicken thighs? No problem they’ll cut the thighs from the rest of the body as you wait. You want a tenderloin or ribs or hamburger? Do you have 5 minutes? Cause that’s all it takes for them to pull the cow off the hook and get down to business as you watch. Oh, what? That’s not fresh enough for you? Well fine just pick out the turkey you want wandering free through the market and they’ll pluck and kill it you while you go next door to buy some knock off DVD’s! :) The Mercado was so massive and like a maze, it reminded me of Aladdins palace down in Vegas, once you get in there's no getting out! It’s so much fun to see and be a part of all the craziness and understand how and where everyone buys all their food.

That night we met up with Natasha and Simon, some friends we had met on our tour to Agua Azul, for dinner (there were two of the lucky ones to have been present on the bus during my brief bout of throwing up like I had something to prove) . They are from Perth, Australia (which naturally made me like them right away) and are so great, we had so much fun with them and ended up walking all over the place trying to find somewhere to eat. We finally decided on some authentic Italian Mexican pizza (get it authentic Italian Mexican, what does that even mean?…). They are doing a similar trip as us but traveling for a couple months more and I think we are going to be in Peru around the same time in April and will hopefully get to meet up with them again!

Gives the word Free Reign a whole new meaning….

This is how all these ladies do it, they sit by their stuff all day every day and hope they make enough to survive on!

This is one of the main cathedrals in town, this also happened to be the day McKay and I accidentally walked around wearing the same color shirt… So I just decided to go ahead and omit myself from a couple of these pictures so we didn't embarrass ourselves too much!

Main square in town, in Chiapas all the central town plazas like this had free public wifi, not quite fast enough to actually accomplish anything worthwhile, but just fast enough to give you a little tease, like "Hey, you have 2 notifications on facebook, but we're not going to tell you what they are."

Sorry if your friends aren’t as cool as our cool Australian friends…

Tuesday Jan 15

Booked a tour to go through the Canyon Del Sumidero for Tuesday. We headed out first thing in the morning and it included a stop over in a little town called Chiapa De Corso, they were getting ready for some kind of big carnival so all the kids and teenagers were dressed in these crazy outfits and were walking around in groups yelling things back and forth the whole time we were there. They also had some awesome street vendors set up all over the place and a few of the carnival games and rides going. After that we went on a boat tour through the canyon, it was so pretty to see and reminded us a little bit of the Snake River only with much higher canyon walls (500 meters at some places). We also got see a bunch of animals on the way like Crocs, some kind of Carion birds, and our friends the Howler Monkeys!

That night we met Natasha and Simon again and watched a movie on the Zapatista uprising. For those of you not familiar with the Zapatistas, it was basically an army made up of all the Indigenous people in the state of Chiapas trying to secure fair rights for their people. It went on for years and basically they just kept getting lied to over and over. One thing that really struck me as interesting was how many women seemed played a big part as soldiers and in the political arena. It was also very interesting to see because it originated in San Cristobal and it was crazy to see the dates and realize that McKay had been living there when some of the scary stuff was going on and he hadn't even realized exactly what had been happening!

This is how all the guys were dressed for their carnival, that mask isn't creepy or would have given me nightmares as a child at all...

A whole booth dedicated to foosball tables…. Can you say best idea ever? This was one of the booths set up at the fair.

Had the most amazing Strawberries and Cream, it was a box of frozen strawberries that they just added massive amounts of cream and enough sugar to make my Grandma proud! It was so delicious and nutritious I’m sure!

So Micheladas are a typical drink in this town and there were signs for them everywhere, they consist of a liter of  beer, salsa, lime, and different kinds of seasonings all mixed together with chili powder on the rim, sounds delicious right? This pic is in honor of Simon and Natasha, they had come on this same tour the day before us and ordered Micheladas on 2 separate occasions by mistake and ended up throwing both of them out. We couldn’t stop laughing when they told us the story, I don't know if Simon was more upset that he swallowed two separate mouthfuls or that he had to waste all the beer!

Going through the canyon! Do we know how to rock prison jump suit orange or do we know how to rock prison jump suit orange? Seriously though!

This is the beautiful Canyon Del Sumidero.

It’s hard to get the full idea from this picture, but the entire canyon was completely littered with garbage and trash of every kind and every 20 seconds or so you would just hear the engine tear in to something we had just run over. Our guide told us it takes them about 3 straight days of cleaning the river to get most of the garbage out and if they let it sit 3 days later it will be back to where it was! It's crazy to see how foreign the concept of littering being a bad thing is to so many people down here!

McKay was so scared that there was a Crocodile right behind us that he forgot to smile for the picture! We also saw some Howler Monkeys up in the trees on our way out of the canyon. 

All the way from San Cristobal to the canyon all you saw was rows and rows of corn fields and they have literally perfected how to grow corn anywhere and everywhere.... How awesome would it be to make a giant corn maze out of all that? :)