Not surprisingly, economics papers in your second language are EVEN MORE SOUL-SUCKING than economics papers in your first language. Who would have thought. Good thing I still have all this to catch up on…..
Haha, so. Maybe by the time I’m 25 I’ll get through all the posting I have to do. Here I go…
On the first day of our trip to San Cristobal de las Casas, after climbing that ridiculous church-on-a-mountain, we clambered back down and wandered. In Mexico, this inevitably leads to what amounts to church-hopping. Can I call it church-hopping? This seems wrong….but anyway.
This is la Iglesia de Santa Lucía, which was right by our hotel. (It was not actually crooked in real life. Oops.)
The inside was very bright and cool. I love these colors, especially compared to the dark and very, very gilt interiors of most churches here.
Next, we saw el Arco del Carmen, which was built originally as the belfry to el Templo del Carmen, and was later used as a way to let cloistered nuns pass from one side of the church to the other without having to actually leave the church.
We also visited the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, which is the best example of Baroque architecture in Chiapas. It was much, much too gaudy for my tastes. Unfortunately, it was also under construction, so half was covered by scaffolding and was not very photogenic. You can see some of the beautifully embroidered shawls in the foreground of the picture, though. An artisan´s market was right next to the church.
Phew! So those are all the churches we saw as we wandered the city the first day. I´ll try to get pictures of some of the streets and the zócalo (the plaza in the center of the city) up soon, and after that, the ugliest waterfalls you have ever seen! No, really. Be excited.
Hi, if there’s anyone still out there. Time got away from me (no, really Em?) what with trips and visitors, and then last week I wrote up a post, just needed to put the pictures in….and then was completely defeated by a nice long weekend of scary health problems. (Which are now mostly figured out, and I am now officially allowed to look at screens again. Dear migraines: I hate you. Sincerely, Em.)
But here’s the deal….I have all of these pictures, and things I want to say, and I’d really like to have a record of all of it, too. So I’m going to try to go back over everything. I’m not going to try to catch up to the present as fast as I can - that may not even happen before I get home - but I’d just like to start putting this together now. My silly little virtual scrapbook. Okay? Thanks for bearing with me, if there’s anyone out there still reading this.
As a preview for all the excitement that’s been going on around here, I’ll leave you with Emily’s Tip for How to Get Rid of Your Little Brother #46: Leave him on top of a pyramid.
Love you bro!
I swear. I didn’t mean to disappear for this long…September was crazy. CRAZY!
September 15th was Independence Day here in Mexico, so my friends and I went all the way to Chiapas since we had a long weekend. The busride is loooong - we left at 10pm and arrived that morning around 9am. And we arrived early.
Thankfully, they let us check into our (one star! wooo!) hotel at 9am, so we put our backpacks down and got to wash our faces (hooray!) before venturing out into San Cristobal de las Casas, the city where we stayed. (As a sidenote, our one star, $12.50 a night hotel that I was getting kind of skeeved out about? Turned out to be great. Who would have thought?)
The first day in San Cristobal, we just wandered around, taking little suggestions from my Japanese friend’s guide. My suggestions involved looking at the guide, seeing a picture I liked, and going “What’s that, can we go?”. I need to learn to read Japanese. Or get an English guidebook.
So! We saw churches. First, we did that thing that seems to be a traditional with us….climbing a ridiculous, ridiculous hill to get to a church. Can you see the teeny looking little church perched up there? 
Please allow me to point out that we slept on a bus, then tried to climb this at 10am. HA! We took breaks. Part of the way up: 
That’s maybe a third of the climb? This is closer to the top:
As a reference point, I still had this to climb:
And guess what? That’s all you’re going to get, because after all that, you couldn’t take pictures inside the church! But the view was neat, and it was nice and cool up there in the shade. (Oh, I didn’t mention that. Chiapas is much farther south than Puebla…it was very, very hot and humid. The next day we went on tours that were pretty much in the jungle, and I’ve never even BEEN that hot before. It was definitely an experience!)
I’ll show you the 8,000 other churches we visited (fine, 3 others. Whatever.) tomorrow, hopefully. I’m going to try to do short (relatively), quick posts, since I don’t have big blocks of time to do long ones (this is part of the reason I haven’t posted in so long). And it’s midterm season, so….short and quick works for me. Oy! Midterms!
Also, it’s Friday night, and I’m off to go bowling with my friends. Hope for non-stinky bowling shoes for me ;).
Hey all!
This is not a real post - just stopping by to say I’ll update in a bit. Right now I’m playing catch-up…four days in Chiapas followed by a few days of visitors (!) means that I haven’t done much (read: anything) school-related in about a week and a half. That means I have about 300 pages of….stuff…to read, and not much time to upload pictures and write. But I’ll be writing soon!
Thanks for being patient : )
The cathedral deserves a post of its own - it was too beautiful not to take a ton of pictures!
It’s known simply as la Catedral de Cuernavaca, and was begun in 1529. Construction was completed in 1552. Unfortunately, I don’t have toomuch to say about it…besides the sign marking the dates, there was nothing about the history of it. I do, however, have lots and lots of pictures. One of the side-chapels:
The cathedral itself was gorgeous…the outside is very elaborate, with lots of archways and pillars.
The first time we went, the doors were closed for mass. We stopped by again later, after visiting the botanical gardens, and were lucky enough to find the doors wide open. (I don’t know how many people it takes to open them. They’re pretty big, and ridiculously thick. You can kind of get a sense of their size if you look at the bulletin board to the right for scale.)
Inside was just as beautiful. Since we couldn’t use flash, many of my pictures didn’t come out, but I did get a few good ones.
Phew! So that was the cathedral…very neat to see. I much prefer it to the cathedral in Puebla, which is too elaborate and gilded inside for my tastes. This one’s simplicity is much more appealing!
I have still more pictures of the botanical gardens, but I’ll leave them for next time. Now, I’m off to enjoy my international friends’ cooking - last week Shiori and Tomoko made us Japanese food, and tonight Laurie and Marion are making us crepes! I’m at a loss as to what to make for them…
…hamburgers?
I’ve been feeling homesick the past few days, so instead of another Mexico post (which will come shortly), how about some knitting?
I finished some socks! This is probably the eighth pair of socks I’ve knit, but only the second I get to keep, so it’s very exciting. I started these while I was taking my final exams in Montreal, then put them away for the summer. I started working on them again up here (socks are great to knit while doing readings…I don’t have to look down at them, just go around and around and around), and 23,398,387 pages of archaeology readings later, they’re finished!
Since socks are always school or schoolwork knitting, they’re very educated by the time they end up on my feet. The first sock (knit during exams in Montreal) is an expert on the Canadian dairy industry, and the second (knit here) knows a whole lot about Mesoamerican trade during the Pre-Classic and Classic periods.
Hopefully I’m retaining this information, too.
Travelling Sock Info
Yarn: Fleece Artist Basic Merino Sock, Amethyst colorway
Needles: Size 0
Pattern: Basic Sock Recipe by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, with an Eye of Partridge Heel
Started: April 2008
Finished: Sept 3, 2008
So now that these are done, I started another pair of…blue socks, haha. I’ll have pictures soon, but right now there’s no good light (it’s pouring!). So look forward to that, and more travels around Mexico, too. We’re going to the fair in Cholula tonight, which I’m sure will be an adventure.
Happy weekend, all!
Hello everyone! Hope the past weekend went well….mine was great! I hopped on a bus to Cuernavaca with three of my friends, and while we only stayed one day, we managed to get a lot in.
Cuernavaca is the capital of Morelos, the state bordering Puebla to the west. It’s called the “city of eternal spring”, since the weather stays at about 80 degrees all year long. It was actually pretty warm the day we went, though Cholula was rather chilly this weekend, so it felt good.
We walked from the bus station to the zócalo, or the center of town. They were already decorating for Mexico’s Independence Day, which is still three weeks off!
From there, we headed to the Palacio de Cortés, which is where Cortés lived after moving from Mexico City. Construction started in 1526, and besides Cortés’ residence, it was also used as a church, a prison, the Morelos state government, and finally, now, a museum.
That I apparently take really crooked pictures of. Moving on…
The museum is full of everything in the history of Morelos, from thousand year old stone statues to 20th century furniture. I’ll show you my two favourite parts.
The first doesn’t look like much…but it is actually really interesting. This is the machinery from the first clock in the tower of Cuernavaca’s cathedral, installed in the sixteenth century.
Not impressed? It’s so old, it’s believed to be the first public clock that existed on the entire American continent.
I thought that was really, really neat. Can you imagine looking up at this clock for the first time? Pretty cool.
My other favourite part of the museum is a mural by Diego Rivera, called Historia de Morelos, Conquista y Revolución. Its nine panels show the history of Morelos, and they are absolutely beautiful. I can’t post all the panels, but here’s the very beginning of the mural…the conquest of Tenochtitlan and Cuernavaca.
We did lots more in Cuernavaca - after the Palacio de Cortes, we visited the cathedral and the botanical gardens. I’ll tell you about them soon!
…and welcome to my blog! I’ve been travelling around a lot recently, so I’m going to start with where I visited last. Sound like a plan?
The school organizes many trips for the international students, so last Saturday we went to Tlaxcala, the state above Puebla. We visited Xochiticatl and Cacaxtla, sites that are both over 2,000 years old.
Xochiticatl was a ceremonial centre, containing three separate pyramids and the base of a building that has disappeared. The largest pyramid is the Pirámide de las Flores, which is associated with fertility.
The view from the top was spectacular - though the volcanoes are hidden by clouds, you can still see so much of the landscape.
The two other pyramids are not quite as large as the Pyramid of the Flowers, but are impressive nonetheless. The next pyramid is the Serpent Pyramid, which was likely used for water rituals.
The last pyramid is the Spiral Pyramid, which also has a great view. Climbing it is rather a challenge, however. There are no steps - it´s thought that to get to the top, one would actually walk all the way around the spiral path to the top. Now, you have the option of climbing stairs…but the spiral may have been easier!
The climb was certainly worth it, however. You can see the entire Tlaxcala-Puebla valley.
We were so happy to have made it to the top, we jumped for joy! And did not fall off the pyramid, though it looks like we´re close, from the picture.
So…even though Sunday my legs hurt from climbing so much, it was a really fun day.