Mexico

My first stop was in Palenque to see the ruins. Again, completely mesmerized and completely drenched throughout my entire visit. I'm guessing October is rainy season in Central America... I'm pretty amazed that after seeing so many Mesoamerican ruins, I'm still impressed at every one. They're all so completely unique. Palenque has a Ruin that the Spaniards called "Palacio de los Cruces" or something like that. This was built somewhere around 730 AD before European contact and is filled with crosses built into the walls. That Jesus guy really got around apparently. Who knew. Palenque was extremely well preserved from what I could see. There were even reliefs in the temples showing Mayan Heiroglyphs still intact (unless they were renovated to look intact which would be dissapointing)

 I didn't go much out in the actual town of Palenque save for getting food 3 times a day from across the street..it was just raining so much and I had a guitar and tacos de pastor, what could I do? I'm just blown away at what crossing a simple arbitrarily drawn geographic line can do for culinary stylings. As I've ranted about before, food here...hasn't been that great. It started getting better and more authentic in Central America but was still nothing to write home about. However,  going to a simple Taqueria in Mexico gets you an amazing meal under $5. So Mexico, you might have one of the most corrupt police forces, governments and armies on the face of the planet, you might have a drug war that's threatening to destabilize and topple the country, you might make faulty electronics and bad guitars, people might say that your habit of fitting 8 people into a VW bug from 1972 is in bad taste but I say that your taste in music and food? Pretty..pretty pretty alright.

I bought a ticket to go to San Cristobal de las Casas which is closer to my exit point of Veracruz. After waiting for the 9:30 bus for 30 minutes, I finally asked someone what time it was and was told 11:00. Apparently I forgot to turn my clock ahead when I got into Mexico. In any case, I ended up having to take two shuttles instead of one and still got into San Cristobal, no problem.

My taxi driver obviously had no idea where he was going and dropped me in front of something that looked like a hostel on a random street near to the address I had written down. It was definitely not my hostel but luckily turned out to be a different hostel with overtly sexual art on the walls run by a nice girl from Oregon. I set myself down and went out to explore. San Cristobal is a small town nestled in the Mountains similar to Antigua, Guatemala I suppose. The streets are clean and full of nice restaurants serving international cuisine (even though tacos were hard to find for some reason, it was easy to get a crepe). I went with a bus to see some of the local villages around. It really feels like Peru around there. Alot of people in the town we visited, Chamula, don't speak spanish, only Tzotzil. It's nice to see that the Europeans didn't indoctrinate everyone. In fact, the Maya here have their own form of religion. A strange form of Catholicism similar to Santeria. A church we visited had statues of the saints with mirrors on their chests and has a floor blanketed with pine needles instead of pews.  It's a somewhat chaotic scene with people speaking in tongues and little kids weaving through your legs. I walked up to the altar and caught a glimpse of two men trying their hardest to break a chicken's neck for some kind of ritual. It was bizarre.  The Maya here are superstitious and have that belief that when someone takes a picture of you, they steal your soul. We couldn't take pictures in the church and even in the plaza when a woman in my group took out a camera to take a picture of a bunch of women, several of them hastily covered their faces with their coats to avoid western soul stealing. Unfortunately for them I got some DL photos with my camera phone since it apparently was beyond suspicion...even the Maya think it's too crappy to take pictures. Regardless, To all the women in the plaza whose souls I now have in my camera: sorry. 

I'm waiting for my bus to Veracruz at 9:45pm. It's hard to believe that this'll be the last overnight bus I take in Latin America. They've become so much a part of my existence that I'll probably have to take them to arbitrary destinations in America just to cope for a few months when I get back