Christmas in San Cristóbal de las Casas (24-26 dic)

I arrive in San Cristóbal on the morning of the 24^th, and the drive up was beautiful!  It’s so high up in the mountains, we were literally driving through the clouds to get there!  Everyone was out in the markets and streets getting ready for Christmas.  I checked into my hostel where everyone was super nice, before walking about the city.  I went to like 5 museums, because they were all super small.  I went to an anthropological museum, and history museum, a popular art museum, a textile museum, and the amber museum.  I left my teachers credential in DF which not only gets me 25% discount on buses, and it also gets me discounts and free entrances to museums!  So that was super annoying that I didn’t have it.  I also walked around the artisan market that was a block from my hostel, and fell in love with all the beautiful hand-made clothing.  I also tried going to a cultural centre, but it was closed.  Finally I went up a bit north to see the food market which was huge!  I also bought this beautiful hand-made carpet for my new apartment in DF!  It was made in an indigenous village called Tenejapa, and the ladies at the store told me it would have taken 3-4 weeks to make!

When I got back to the hostel, I met a couple Spanish guys in my dorm.  One was on exchange for the semester in DF, and the other in Pennsylvania.  They had made a dinner reservation for the night with some other girls that had been on exchange in DF and invited me to join all of them.  Before we went, I wandered down to the Zócalo with Angel, another teacher I met from DF, as we thought it would be really lively.  But all the streets were dead.  I guess everyone was in church. But also, so ridiculous, they had an ice-skating rink and snow hill in the zócalo here as well!  Like the Mexican government has their head stuck so far up their ass and give as much of a fuck about their indigenous population as the Canadian government does about theirs, that they actually think it’s a good use of tax-payer dollars to put this shit in the middle of town when there are kids sleeping on the streets here!  And then on top of all the money they’re wasting, it’s so much energy to keep both of these things below 0 degrees 24/7.  It’s like they care more about impressing the tourists with this crap than they do about the starving homeless families that live here!  The whole fucking government here is corrupt, and Mexicans are so disillusioned with the lack of true-democratic elections, that so many have just become apathetic, because they know the government won’t listen to them even if they try to voice their opinions.

Anyways, the dinner with the Spaniard/French/Kiwi was delicious, and there was live music.  After that I headed back to the hostel, where we broke a piñata and had a party.  It gets pretty chilly a night in San Cristóbal because it’s so high up in the mountains, but with a couple sweaters it’s fine.  But half the people there had just come from the beach, and the temperature change was a little extreme for them, and were wrapping themselves in like multiple blankets to sit outside haha.  Next time anyone chirps me in Canada for being cold all the time, I’ll have to tell them about the ridiculous cold threshold for anyone outside of our country.  I was just happy to not be having snow and ice for Christmas, and everyone else was saying it was the coldest temperature they had ever experienced.

Christmas Day I had planned to go horseback riding to an indigenous village to the north of the city named Chamula with the exchange students, but they had made a reservation and I hadn’t, and there was no more room on the tour.  I just hopped on the bus instead and went up there.  They have mixed Christianity with their indigenous religion, and they have one of their own gods assigned to each saint, and one of the saints is seen as higher than jesus.  They don’t allow any pictures inside the church, but it was pretty eerie.  Like the whole floor was covered in pine leaves, and they had dolls for each saint/god in glass cases and people would like go inside with each one to pray for whatever, and tons of the women were sitting on the floor with candles throwing different liquids in front of each of as like an offering to the different gods.  All the women in the town wore these black furry skirts with the beautiful hand-embroidered belts and shawls.  And the men were all in their traditional dress as well.  I bought a poncho from one of the artisan vendors there which I was pretty excited about.  I had been wanting a ponco for a while, but had been waiting to find the perfect one.  And San Cristóbal was a great place to buy it for the chilly nights.  I love it so much!

On the way back to town we passed by the Reserva Huitepec, so I asked the driver to let me out so I could check it out.  It was locked, so I asked one of the local women when it would be open, and she told me that if I walked along a little path for long enough, I’d get to a point where there was a hole in the fence.  So I did that, and when I got in, I had the whole place to myself!  The only problem though was that I hadn’t really planned in hiking so I didn’t have any water or food with me.  And because the front entrance was closed, I didn’t have a map.  But I had my compass, so I set off, and eventually found a couple miradors!  The views were incredible!  I think there was a higher mirador, but the paths weren’t really well-marked, and I was getting pretty tired without water, so I headed back to town.

Back at the hostel I met this Canadian guy who lives in New Zealand named Derek.  He joined me and Diego and Marc and the other exchange girls for dinner at another nice place with live music. This was the last night for the exchange students as they were all heading to Guatemala in the morning, except for Marc who forgot his passport in DF.  He had gotten it mailed to him, but because of Christmas it was delayed, and then it turned out someone had written down the wrong postal code on the package, so it was actually in Tuxtla.  So he was going to Tuxtla in the morning to hunt it down.  The next morning, Derek and I went to some Cavernas outside the city which you could climb through which were pretty cool.  We had gotten there in a collective, but when we wanted to leave, there weren’t any, and the cabbies were trying to rip us off, so we decided to hitchhike back to town.  We walked up to the road, and this lovely family from Cancun picked us up.  When I mentioned that I was going to be in Cancun in about a week, the family wrote down all the best places to go/things to see there and then gave me their business card and told me to call them if I needed anything while I was there…Mexicans are so nice!

After that we decided to take a collective to Zincantan, a little indigenous town about 20 minutes outside San Cristóbal.  So I thought San Cristóbal was high up, but to get to Zincantan, we went even higher!  We were literally driving through the clouds, mist all around us, and then from the mist emerged these people dressed in their traditional clothing carrying crops.  It was like I had been transferred back in time.  And then as we rounded a turn, an entire town appeared below us.  They live in this secluded little hidden place in the mountains and are fairly free of outside influence.  Like in Chamula, they don’t allow photos inside the church, and when we went in, it was eerie as fuck.  In a little side room, they had this little booth you could walk into which was kinda decorated like a barn, with different candles for each saint burning that you could make a donation to each one.  But then there was this tinny Christmas music playing from inside this closet-sized hut. Very bizarre.  The town was like a ghost town.  We barely saw anyone. All the women were wearing their traditional clothes (purple skirts and shawls), but the men were not.  It was cool though seeing some teenagers interact…just looking at them living this traditional way of life in their traditional clothes makes you think of them as others so much, and  then you see two teenage girls walking together and giggling, and you realize they’re exactly the same as teenage girls anywhere else.  Derek kept taking photos of things and people though without asking their permission, which was kind of uncomfortable.  Like if some random tourists came to your town and just started taking photos of your artwork and you children, you would tell the creep to fuck off.  But I’ve met so many travellers who think that they can come in and take photos of these people’s lives without getting their permission first.

We when back to San Cristóbal after that, and met up with one of my friends from the hostel, David, and we all headed to dinner together.  David and I had a bus together to Palenque that left at 1am, so we had to kill some time before heading to the bus terminal…I tried taking a nap in one of the hammocks in the courtyard, but then it started to rain.  And now from mountains to jungle I go…

Tuxtla Gutiérrez (22-23 dic)

Tuxtla is the capital of Chiapas, and where I started my travels through the state. It’s pretty small and there’s not much to do...I did all the cool stuff on my first day there and then was pretty bored my second haha. But when I got there Sunday morning I met this Spanish guy named Carlos at breakfast and we decided to go to el Cañón de Sumidero together. It’s this giant canyon in the next town over called Chiapas de Corzo. When the Spaniards were fighting the indigenous population there, and the Chiapas realized that they were going to lose, they decided to jump off the cliff en masse instead of facing defeat to the Spaniards. I really wanted to hike to the different miradors at the top of the canyon, but apparently that takes about 3 days (or an overpriced cab ride), so I settled on taking a boat down through the canyon.  The views were spectacular! The highest point of the cliff is 1km straight up! Una locura. There were also some waterfalls we saw along the way, and lots of wildlife. The entire boat ride was a little over 2 hours, and when it was over, we wandered about the town a bit before heading back to Tuxtla.

It is HOT here! Like 36 degrees in the day. I love it. Except for the fact that you could not pay me to wear pants in that kind of heat. Yet the men here apparently have never seen legs before and feel the need to comment on them when I walk by on the street. Like why do I have to sacrifice the comfort of not getting sexually harassed for the comfort of not getting heat stroke??

After we got back to Tuxtla, we went to the zoo. It was pretty cool; it only has animals native to Chiapas, and they all live in environments as similar as possible to their home environments in the wild. Like all the animals that could be dangerous to humans are obviously caged in, but they have huge enclosures that they can run around in, and many of them have stone walls instead of cages, and you view the animal from above. And there were some animals that were just free to roam about the entire zoo! Super cool.

That night Carlos headed to San Cristóbal de las Casas, and I probably should have gone with him, but I had already paid for 2 nights at the hostel in Tuxtla, so I stayed there. The next day I wandered about the city a bit before going to a marimba museum. It’s an instrument kind of like a glockenspiel or vibraphone, and is traditional to the region. We had seem some playing in the zócalo in Oaxaca, but had not known what they were called. Every night in the parquet Marimba in Tuxtla, they have musicians playing and people from the town dance the marimba. I went that night to watch which was pretty cool. All Mexicans know how to dance! I’m so jealous! Monday I tried going to a few other museums, but they were all closed. I wandered through the botanical gardens and went to a couple little markets and the zócalo (where they have an ice-skating rink and a fake snow hill to slide down). But yes, there’s not much to do there.

I am currently on a bus to San Cristóbal and am literally in the clouds.  And we just keep getting higher! I’ll be spending Christmas here, and although I’ve been told its cold, I think it will pale in comparison to the crazy ice storm everyone is facing back home right now.

Feliz navidad!

Puebla

El Zócalo

Well my travels have gotten off to a bit of a rocky start, but it’s all smoothing out now.  The bus company doesn’t accept foreign credit cards online, and I’m not eligible for a Mexican one yet.  So I couldn’t buy my ticket in advance.  I showed up to the bus station Friday over an hour before the bus I wanted to catch was (to Tuxtla), and after waiting over 45 minutes in line, I was told that there weren’t any available until Sunday!  I didn’t want to wait until Sunday to go, so instead I caught a bus to Puebla, hoping I could get a bus from Puebla to Tuxtla Saturday night instead of Sunday.  Except now I was going to be getting into Puebla at like 1am with no hostel reservation.  Oh, and I also forgot my teacher credential, which gets you a 25% discount on all bus trips during the holidays!

The inside of one of many churches I saw

Luckily the first hostel I showed up to in Puebla had a free bed, and I was able to get a Saturday night bus to Tuxtla, so all is good now.  But travelling during holiday times is horrible—the bus stations are all like zoos!  Like imagine how busy airports and stuff are in Canada during the holidays, and then put 5 times as many people.  There are just so many Mexicans.

Loving the hand-painted tiles everywhere!

Puebla was actually really nice though.  It’s only 2 hours from DF, so I think I’m definitely going to come back for a weekend in the new year, as I did not see nearly as much as I wanted to.  Also, in Cholula, the next town over, there are ruins which I want to check out.

The Cathedral...pretty much like every other Cathedral

First I went to the Ex-Convento de Santa Rosa, where apparently the nuns cooked the first ever mole.  There was a museum attached that I wanted to go to, but it was closed for renovations.  So then I checked out the Museo de la Revolucion which was pretty interesting.  From there I went to one of the many markets and had some delicious mole enchiladas.  Mole is just like the best thing ever.  I then went to the Museo Amparo which was incredible! I wasn’t going to go, as I had read that the museum was known for its colonial art (which doesn’t interest me at all), and its pre-hispanic artifacts (which do interest me, but I’ve already seen the best collection in Mexico at the Museo de Anthropologia in DF, and all the other collections kinda pale in comparison).  But I was walking by and decided to look in at what exhibits they had on, and it was free for the 2 weeks around Christmas!  There was an amazing exhibit that was 3 floors of the photographer Kati Horna’s work (who has the same birthday as me!).  She was born in Hungary, and then moved to Germany because of the First World War.  Then she lived in France for a bit, before travelling through Spain documenting the civil war.  She eventually settled in Mexico, and her work was so interesting.  Even some of the shots taken in the 30s looked like they could be today.  The way she captured human nature and had that transcend the time and place which it was shot was really cool.  Like there was a photo of these kids playing while the Spanish civil war was happening around them.  And aside from the clothes they were wearing, it could have been a shot from today.  And then there was this one called Museo de Cera, which was a shot of a couple wax statues, but she caught the unimpressed face of a teenage girl reflected in the glass.  Her husband was a graphic designer, and she did a lot of cool photo-collages with him as well.  I think my favourite though was a group of 3 photos called Muros de Mexico.  Almost all her work was in black and white except for these 3 shots of colourful walls on the streets of Mexico.  The colours were so vibrant!  They were very reminiscent of Rothko, except in photography form.

View from the roof of Museo Amparo

The roof of the museum had a beautiful view over the whole city…you could see all the different church tops standing out amongst the tops of all the other buildings.  The first floor of the museum also had a cool installation piece by Edgardo Aragón.  There were about 15 large flatscreen TVs in portrait view next to each other forming a semi-circle around the viewer.  And on each screen was a musician suited up, standing on some rock of other formation in the middle of the desert.  And then they all started to play, with the background behind each one of them static, and them the only ones moving on the screen.  It was a pretty cool experience.

One of the circus acts at the Posada!

After that I went to another museum where I saw the plans and projections Ernesto Tamarinz made of a number of sculptures and monuments he created around the country.  And then I saw an exhibit by an artist named Fernandez Ramírez Osorio.  He had work in a number of different styles, but I most preferred his abstract work.  I then got a tour of the Palacio de Ayuntamiento (the legislative assembly), before heading to the Zócalo to check out the Posada celebrations.  They had piñatas for the kids the break filled with toys for kids whose families’ can’t afford to get them presents which was nice.  And then they had some pretty cool circus acts.  I couldn’t stay long as I had to catch my bus to Tuxtla, but I’d say it was definitely an enjoyable detour.

And now on to Chiapas!

December in DF

I finally got my IFE (voter ID card).  Well I didn’t actually get the card, but I got approved for the card, and on the 23^rd it will be ready for pick up.  Once I have my IFE I can get into museums for free on Sundays, and open a bank account other than an “express” account, and get my passport, and get my social security number for free healthcare and stuff.  Finally!  They make you jump through hoops to get stuff here, and there are so many services in Mexico you can’t access without you IFE.  So yay!

Los maestros de primaria 

I also got an apartment!  I don’t move in until January, but it’s BEAUTIFUL!  My friend lives there now, but he’s moving to Guadalajara at the end of the month, so I’m going to take his room.  His roommate had a party, so I went to it to meet her and she was super nice, and said that the other roommate is leaving as well and there’s going to be a French exchange student living with us.

My Secret Santa present with my Secret Santa!

So I have my IFE, an apartment, and…3 jobs?  Yea, I’m not quite sure how that happened, but now on top of working at the school and the private classes outside of school, I’m also working on an iPad app.  Miriam had been doing it back in Toronto and recommended me to the people for more work.  It’s actually pretty cool, the app has all these different children’s books, and the kids can touch anything in the illustration, and a label will come up saying what it is (table, girl, window, etc.).  So my job is to go through each page of the books and highlight and label everything.  It’s kinda boring, but I can sit outside where there’s wifi and work on it, and it’s fairly simple, so more money for travelling! Yay!

The grade 3/4 Spanish teacher taking a swing at the piñata

December at school has been full of interruptions with the kids practicing for the Christmas play and doing other Christmas activities (because you’re allowed to celebrate Christmas at school in a Catholic country).  The students from preparatoria put on a Christmas play about a church group putting on a nativity play, and they had the kids from primaria sing various songs throughout.  They were so adorable!  My kids did Silent Night, and then the Justin Bieber version of “Santa Claus is Comin to Town,” and I even choreographed a little dance to it for them, which was super cute.  The final week of classes half my grade 3s were away, so it was super calm.  We had to make a piñata with each class for the posada, and then the kids had to make presents and cards to give their parents.  And the kids that were in dance or theatre were constantly being pulled from class to rehearse for their end-of-the-year show.  So I was essentially a babysitter for the last week of classes.  On the final day we had a big pic-nic/potluck, and then the posada, which is a Mexican Christmas tradition.  First you sing some traditional posada songs, and then you get to break open the piñata! All the kids were very excited that it was my very first posada.  Also during the last week, there was a lunch for all the teachers, and we all exchanged our secret santa presents.  The grade 5/6 English teacher had me, and gave me this beautiful handmade shawl from Oaxaca!

El Zócalo all lit up for Christmas!

Outside of school, has been pretty quiet…I went out to celebrate one of the teacher’s birthdays one night, and then one day I went and saw the final fútbol match of the season at a bar.  The team my Mexican friends were cheering for lost to Léon.  Aside from that just getting super stoked for Christmas vacations!

Real Mexican (25 nov- 1 dec)

I had the best week!  I had my first private English class with a woman who is the head of HR at a company.  I've been hired to do some extra classes on the side by this Canadian guy who owns a language school, so it was cool to have my first one.  He's going to try to get me more classes in the new year when more kids sign up, but he's giving me anything that comes up now which is nice.  The lady was super nice, and it was a conversation class, so it was pretty chills.  I swung by the hostel afterwards for the BBQ night and got to see all my friends there which was really nice.  Friday was a PD day so I only had to go in for 4 hours which was great.  I also learned never to wear shorts in Mexico City.  They weren't even that short!  But I had to deal with so many creepy catcalls...never again.  After our meetings the teachers learned a dance that we have to perform at the Christmas pageant...I'm not really sure why the teachers have to dance in it, but it was fun (if a bit ridiculous).  Afterwards I went out with all the teachers to a mall nearby for some ice cream, and it was really cool to get to know them better outside of class.  They're all so sweet!

That night I went to check out an apartment, and initially I thought it was the prefect location, because it was walking distance to 4 different metro lines!  So after seeing the apartment I asked if it was safe to walk the 4 blocks from the metro home alone at night and they were like "definitely not. You need to take a cab," and then I was like uuuuh ok, well I'm just gonna take the trolebus now (the stop was half a block away), and the guys were like "yea...we'll walk you there."  So I definitely don't want to live in a place where I can't even walk half a block alone at night safely...pretty sketch.

My friend Steve that I met when I was staying at the hostel had left DF and then come back, so I went out to Condesa to meet up with him and a Swedish guy later, and it was really fun!  Saturday I became a true Mexican...I went to a pulqueria.  My friend Jonathon said I HAD to go experience one since I had never been, so we rolled up to this old building with saloon type swing doors and walked into this place filled with old Mexican men.  There was one table of young guys, but I was the only female in the entire place.  So we each ordered our pulque, and then when they brought it to our table we each got a 1 litre jar!  And this stuff is really heavy--it's like a meal!  So that was a surprise.  And then one of the old guys was like "Come here you have to have a taco with us!  It's tradition!"  And then they all had to cheers me and they all applauded for me when I left.  It was pretty funny/ridiculous.  We then headed to the south of the city to a bar to try some Mexican specialty called Pedo de Gorila (Gorilla's fart).  And then we went all the way up north to go to apparently the tacqueria with the best guacamole in the city.  So now I'm like a Mexico City pro.

Sunday I checked out an apartment that I love.  My friend is moving to Guadalajara at the end of December, and he said I could take his room if I want it.  The apartment is so beautiful, and there's a market across the street and a panaderia and tortilleria next to it!  and the kitchen and bathroom were decorated with hand painted tiles, and there's roof top access!  I want to live there right now haha.  After that I met up with Steve again in Coyoacan and walked around.  It's so cute there!  It doesn't even feel like you're in Mexico City...it's like it's own little town in the south of this massive city.  Lenin came and found me there and then we went to this open air cinema thing which was super cool!  It was a German art house film with Spanish subtitles, but I still managed to understand most of it, so that was encouraging!

There's seriously so many things to do in this city, you would never run out of things to do even if you spent your whole life here.  It's insane! and awesome!