December 12, 2008

Happy Virgin of Guadalupe Day and Congratulations to Mike and Lana for winning the prize for being the first to comment (as requested) on my last post. Don't know what the prize is.....maybe it's just the honourable mention you get in this post :)

We've had another full day and honestly ..... without any exaggeration.....I don't know how far we walked today but we've been walking for the past nine hours without stopping at all! And....in the midst of all that walking, part of our day was spent at another ancient site just a half hour from our hotel. There, we managed to climb soooo many stairs once again. This site is called Monte Alban and in addition to the site...there is a great view of the city. It was a great place to wander away much of the afternoon. Very different from Palenque though. Monte Alban is much smaller and had a very different feel to the place. One thing that was in really good repair and different from anything we saw at Palenque, was the ball court. They played a sort of squash game (where they hit the ball with any part of their body they could) and used the game for everything from entertainment to a means of settling disputes of all kinds.

As well, since today is the day that all of the Guadalupe fesitivities conclude...it is the biggest of them all. We participated in the fiesta that the locals all attend tonight...it is much like a giant fair with more food booths than you can imagine and we visited our share of them. We discovered a couple of new things to try too. One was a corn tortilla that had some flowers (squash flowers I think) and some other leaves of some sort along with a very stringy cheese (kind of like mozerella) and some salsa on it folded in half like a sandwich. Very different, not bad, but maybe not my favourite thing I've had so far....but....much better than the tongue tortilla's I had in San Miguel de Allende....they still hold the prize for my least favourite new thing. The other new treat we had tonight was something called a Burrenos (at least I think that was the name of it). It was a paper thin piece of dough that was deep fried and then served atop a clay bowl (because if you tried to pick it up it would just break into a million pieces), then there was some kind of syrup drizzled over it that tasted a bit like molasses, and then there was some pink sugar sprinkled over all of that.....it was delicious and so delicious that we had two of them :)

It's only 10:30 here and we're debating going back out but are still undecided on whether we're up for another mile or two. Seriously, we've put on more than 10 miles today already!

If you can believe this.....in a city of this size (a couple of hundred thousand people I'm guessing) we bumped into one of the young men we met when we were in San Cristobal tonight. We had just purchased a cob of corn from a street vendor (everyone here eats corn on the cob on the streets) and there he was....we had a nice visit.....it was funny to see a familiar face though! And then....later in the night....we bumped into the girl we had bought the bus tickets to Monte Alben from. Small world!!

Must run for now.....the next two days will be travel days so may not have internet....if not....will write from Troncones.

Till then,
Lorrie