Ruta Maya!!

    Here are some photos from the Ruta Maya, which we will be traveling this April and May, I hope that you folk are as excited as I am. The Ruta Maya is a travel route prepared by the Mexican Secretary of Communications and Transport as part of the bicentennial celebrations in 2010.
    2010, being the 200th anniversary of the Mexican Independence and the 100th of the Mexican Revolution, the government has put a ton of new tourist activities around the country For example,  some really cool signs saying "Quieres saber qué pasó aquí?" (Do you want to know what happened here?) that provide a number that, if one sends a text message to it, will reply with information about the site. A really interesting idea, seen here in a photo from El señor del hospital.
    Another example are road signs that point out interesting sites that are either historically or culturally significant. They are pretty interesting too, though one would need to be pretty bored to drve around follwing them. Well, I would if I had a car and a buddy, but I'm strange.


   Anyway, what I was saying before. There are various Rutas, like the Ruta de la Independencia that we went through in November and December, la Ruta del Tequila, la Ruta de la Revolución, etc. Basically, the idea is to follow the path of a certain event in Mexican History, a passively guided your established by the government. I think it's an awesome idea. So, here are some pictures of places that we will visit on the way.

   Here is where we'll be the second day of the trip, after the first really heavy day of travel to get to the southern part of México, specifically Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of the state of Chiapas. This state is known for it's jungles and isolation, I'm really excited to check it out. This photo is from el Cañón del Sumidero, or the Sink Canyon, where we will be the second day ---------->>>>>




    The third day, we'll wander around Tapachula, another city in Chiapas, and later go to a water park type deal.


   

    Later, we will head down to Guatemala to the District Conference, with all the exchange students from all over México, it should be awesome. We'll also get to explore in Antigua Guatemala, and stay there for three dys until we head back to Tapachula.

   From Tapachula, we'll wander around the Yucatán Peninsula for awhile, visiting Agua Azul, a beautiful natural park. From there, it's the route to Palenque, which I'm sure will be my favorite part.

  Palenque was a huge Maya city in the jungle of Chiapas that flourished in from 100 BC to about 800 AD, one of the most important ceremonial, trade, and government centers of the Mayan Empire. I love the Mayas, and I'll tell you why. One of the most important things in life is knowing the area that you're in, and these guys took it to extremes. They not only predicted floods, harvested and planted according to the seasons, created two calendars that are more accurate than the Gregorian one that we use, used an advanced writing system, and made considerable contributions to architecture, city planning, mathematics, and many other fields, they also studied and created the most developed body of astronomical knowledge of their time. The Mayas were one of the longest-lasting civizilations of Mesoamerica, and only had one big collapse in the middle of two periods of greatness. This brings me to Palenque, which was a city known mostly for it's ceremonial centers, especially the ball courts that were used to decide who would be sacrificed, in which the winners were deemed the most worthy to be sacrificed to the gods. It is said that only about 10 percent of Palenque is open and excavated, with the other 90 being hidden, swallowed up by the jungle. Sounds intriguing, right? Maybe I'll stray off the trail to help them out.

   Later, we'll head to Uxmal, another abandoned Maya city and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Mérida. It's pronounced OOSH-mal, and it's known for being the bext-preserved Maya site around, thanks to being built better than any other site. The city was a goverment center, as well as one of the more important archaeoastronomical sites, that being a place that served an astronomical purpose while functioning as a city too. To the left is the Pyramid of the Magician, which has been added on to 5 times, according to the pyramid-building tradition of building a new one to celebrate a cycle of time, a new leader, or another significant event. According to legend, a magician needed only one night to build it, hence the name. However, that's just a silly legend, obviously not.

    Some other sites that we will spend time with amazing people in:

        Chichén Itzá, another Maya city and UNESCO Site, in the state of Yucatán. This was one of the most important city in all the Maya civilization, if not hte most important in terms of general activity. To the left is "El Castillo", of The Castle, on of the larger pyramids in Mesoamerica and certainly impressive. Again, after much excavation, a couple of previously unknown rooms and tunnels, including a throne room inside the pyramid! Unfortunately, some other tourists are wussies and the site was closed to climbing and physical appreciation in 2006. I would recommend checking out this photo, it's in high resolution and you can really see the details of the structure.

  One of the most noted stops on the trip is obviously Cancún, in the state of Quintana Roo. Cancún is obviously a huge tourist and beach place, but it too has Mayan whatnot around there. However, we all know what the objective of a visit there is: hang out on the beach and get tan. It will definitely be crazy, but don't worry Mom, I'll be the voice of reason. However, the experience should be unreal. Fortunately, the gringo spring break crowd and their self-glorifying drunkenness will be hard at work studying while we're partying.

    The next stop on the unabashedly beach bum section of the trip is Playa del Carmen, just south of Cancún. Not really too much to say about this one, other than that it's an incredibly beautiful place with some of the best beaches in the world.

    After Playa del Carmen, we'll head over to Villahermosa, the capital of the state of Tabasco, with a whole bunch of interesting whatnot, including La Venta, which I'm really excited about. La Venta was an Olmec city, the Olmecs being the "mother culture" of all the significant Mesoamerican ones, those who started the cult of Quetzalcoatl and jaguar worship. They are well-known for the colossal heads of more than 2 meters with seemingly African features, which has lead to specualtion as to their origin. The Olmec ran the show from about 1500 BC to 100 AD, laying the foundation for the civilizations that would follow.




So, that's the pre-summary of the trip, be ready for the photos whenI get back! We'll be leaving the 26th of April and getting back the 12th of May, just in time for my birthday. I'm incredibly excited, for the places but more so to spend time with some of my favorite people in the world, and that's a serious statement.

More YouTube Culture

    Here is one of my personal favorite Mexican YouTube favorites, even though it's a little embarrassing and awkward. It's called "Las Aventuras del Trapo", or "The Adventures of the Washcloth". For some reason, an interview team from Televisa, a big Mexican TV network, decides to interview a poor guy in a mental hospital.

A rough translation: We're here, and they're committing a lot of injustices, and the take away the washcloth, and they don't put it! Why do they take it away if it's something that must be there? He always meddles and meddles and meddles! Remember, they took a lot of my blood, and now they want to give them problems again!...They turned me over, and did a lot of things with me! They should give me some protection, a solution, because that time, the bread wins, and here it is!

Q: You don't go to the doctor, you don't like the doctor?

A: Eat the bread, eat the bread, eat the bread, eat it, eat it, eat it x20

Q: I have gum

A; No, no no, you have to grab the bread!

Q: OK, I will in a second

A: AHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHH UHHHHHH AHAHHAHHHH AHAHAHHAHH

A: We're here, in that which is México, México, México, and we give an applause to those who come and-you need to eat the bread. Eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it.

Q: Alrighty, I'll eat it

A: Ahhhh! It's tasty, right? Right on, so you know that it's the bread, that which is good! Even you eat bread! Crazy, right?

Q: Yeah, it's good bread

A: Yeah, sure. Put the washcloth on! That one over there! The one that was over there! Obviously, there it is man, look, there it is!

Q: Yeah, I'll look for it in a second, hold on

A: Look for it! Come on, look for it! The washcloth! The washcloth, the washcloth the washcloth

Enjoy folks

Carnaval de San Pedro Cholula

   I've become a big fan of Carnavales, and here is another installment in the Adventures of Questionable Safety series.

     This Carnaval was in San Pedro Cholula, a town right near my house. As you can see, there are the "huey-hueys", or guys who dress up like Turks, French, Arabs, Spanish, Hungarians, etc. and fire huge antique rifles every 2 minutes. It's completely different than the Carnavales in Rio de Janeiro or in France, more casual and party-oriented affairs, with strong undercurrents of debauchery; this Carnaval always has a slight implication of danger and craziness, along with the usual wild partying. So, with my two faithful traveling companions, Lourenço Ledo and Marcelo Carneiro of Brasil, I headed on down at about 12 to see what the deal was.

    When we arrived, it was pretty tranquil, so we walked around and drank some tasty micheladas, wandered through the folks and bought some knick-knacks. We stayed at one booth for a while solving metal visual puzzles, called "rompecabezas de alambre", translated literally as "wire things that break your head", which, apart from having an incredibly accurate name, will definitely take up space in my suitcase on the way home. Marcelo is pretty good at them, but they are still quite tough to get. The idea is that you have to separate two or three parts from each other. Look up alambrijes on YouTube to get an idea. I tried explaining to him that I had gotten a high score on the SAT, that I get good grades, but it's a classic example of test- and school-based knowledge meaning nothing in situations of problem-solving and imagination.

   After that, the parade started. The huey-hueys dancing and shooting, the marching bands making a huge noise, women dancing and carrying signs, basically an group decision to make as much mess, noise, and craziness as possible. A great idea, according to me. The parade was announced by the ever-present sounds of rifles, and we got right into the action, sometimes dancing with the guys, dancing on the curb, inviting the girls to dance with us, in general making a scene, a talent which I have always developed and treasured.

As you can see in the videos, the rifles sometimes get a little too close, and 

getting too involved in the action is a real occurrence!

ENJOY, and leave comments or send questions to

handlazfan@gmail.com

Carnaval de Huejotzingo!

HELLO EVERYBODY!

    Yesterday was a wonderful day, the day of Carnaval! Fat Tuesday is the day when Carnaval celebrations all over the world happen, from Mardi Gras in New Orleans to the Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil to the Carnaval in Dunkerque France. Gotta get all that celebrating out of the system before Lent!

A good friend of mine had told me about the Carnaval in Huejotzingo, and that it was one of the coolest things he's ever seen in his life. One of his friends had participated in the madness before, and he recommended it too. The Carnaval de Huejotzingo is famous for the "huey-hueys", costumed weirdos who dance around with huge rifles. There is a formal parade, but they wander around the streets in little groups too. They told me that it was definitely worth going, even though with the (thankfully unloaded) rifles it gets a little scary. Still,. I was undeterred! According to some statistics, there are 12 thousand dancers, 15 thousand visitors, and an average of 80 people injured per year. The doctors have told me that my finger can be reattached soon.

Here's an official video, where you can see the masks and madness

(No fights like the one you see at the end happened this year, I didn't even see any violence)

So, I got a couple buddies together, and at approximately 1015 AM EST (915 here), we hopped on a bus that said HUEJOTZINGO and vamonos! We were on our way. We were 6, my friends Alison (USA), Kerrigan Boyd (USA), Tulia Savulov (Romania), Kristina (Germany) and Anni Koponen (Finland). We got off the bus and immediately started to wander around and stick our noses in strange places. A nice guy came over and told us that some of the places, although interesting, were not worth exploring, so we headed over to the more open and public part of the town.

   In the zócalo, or main square of the town, we encountered huge markets, tents made of tarpaulin with huge piles of ice covering beer, cups, enormous grills next to huge hunks of meat, tequila, quesadillas, cemitas, chilaquiles, tacos, burros, sopas, gorditas, and everything else you could ever want. I settled for a quesadilla of mushrooms with mozarrella and salsa to go with my tequila and Squirt. Good choice.

Later we headed out to watch the parade, where the aforementioned thousands were marching around, firing the rifles, dancing, and generally making a lot of noise. At one point, Anni and I wandered a bit too close to a guy who fired, quite a bad decision. I felt the impact of the gun, and couldn't hear for a few seconds, but she started swearing in Finnish and yelling that she couldn't hear, then later started to cry. Poor girl, but this is the way things go when one explores the weirdness that is rural México.

This is a video I took right next to the parade, I hope it becomes famous!

After a while it became apparent that the situation would only get worse as the day went on, owing to the alcohol and heat, so we got on the road at about 2 PM towards the familiarity of Puebla.

What a lovely and interesting day

Check out some photos!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2080996&id=1354980287&l=1165039d88

Expediciones Culturales!

This post will be pretty light weight, with mostly photos.

In my infinite restlessness, I've been organizing a bunch of day trips and stuff like that to various strange and obscure places in México, called "Expediciones Culturales!" (with a mandatory exclamation point). Basically, I put the call out to travel to a place for the day, we meet up in a place, and then take the bus to a previously unknown place! The first one was to the Pyramid of Cholula, and the most recent one was to TONANTZINTLA, a small pueblo on the outskirts of Puebla.

It's known for it's church...

The church is pretty much unique in México, because it is one of the very few NOT designed by Spanish artisans. The Spanish conquistadores, for some reason that I'm not sure of, put the indios of this pueblo in charge of building this church.

So, instead of building the traditional heaven over the altar scheme, the indios were told to build what THEY thought heaven/paradise was like. It turned out like this. We were not allowed to take photos inside, so I'll have to use some others:

If you notice, it's not all about angels and stuff like that, even though it looks like it at first glance. Instead of angels and God, the indios put little children, according to their belief that the afterworld consisted of being reborn as a little kid; life's most innocent age.

This was about half of the group.

Later we headed over to San Francisco Acatepec, another pueblo pretty close to Tonantzintla. I don't have so much history about this one, but the architecture speaks for itself...

          Beautiful inside, beautiful outside.

We were lucky enough to happen upon a wedding, complete with mariachis, bolo ties, and wedding cake. Really an amazing treat.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!!!

What the deal is.

Hello everyone, I hope you're all just dandy.

I'd just like to give a little update to what I've been doing lately, and some of the changes in my life obviously. Maintaining a blog is tough to do, because you have to go out and do things and make things happen in order to have good material, that is to say, that I can't actively update this thang while exploring cool places or meeting new people, you, the readers, have to hear it through me.
Admittedly, this is a hard task and , also admittedly, I haven't been doing it very well! Oh well.

At the beginning of the month, I went to a party for my friend's birthday, Camille from France. I arrived in bus after meeting up with my friend Lucy, and from Angelópolis, a mall, we took a bus the the Pyramid of Cholula, which is ridiculous to be saying like it was a normal thing, but that's the way things are, honestly. Don't worry, guys, I still appreciate and love looking at it.

So, we arrived at the party, and I will never get over how beautiful Mexican streets are. Picture a Wilson Farms or 711 or something like that. It has a big sign, fluoresent lights, trademarks, stuff like that. In México, with the exception of OXXO stores and other ones like it, the convinience stores family-owned, relatively unconnected affairs, with awesome names like Miscelania Juquilita or Abarrotes Cristo.

 Miscelania translates pretty well, but abarrotes doesn't. If you'll look at the definition, it comes from the word "to pack", which I take to mean that they are considered the things that one packs. Abarrotes are gum, pop, chips, cigarrettes, but other more local things like tamarind candy, chicharrón (pork skin), and all my favorite brands of Mexican beer (Click here for a bunch of examples).

So, to get back to my original point, these abarrote stores are magnificently decorated, with hand-painted signs, usually dedicated to some saint, person, or idea. So fun to explore in these little places, in a lot of them, if you move too much, you'll knock some stuff over! Imagine the little old ladies who sell newspapers in NYC, the ones that you can barely see, and you get the idea. So much more personal, and a lot more efficient in terms of space!



I'm a sucker for these family businesses, quite honestly.




I recently chatted with the guy who runs one near my house, a store with pretty much anything you could imagine (except deodorant, apparently), but the size of an American living room.



Another interesting thing about these stores is that seemingly without problem, it's common to see 2 or 3 open and running on the same block.

Sorry that this isn't my picture, but it gives you the idea:

Credit to pbase.com

So, just sharing some thoughts on the things that I hope will always stay interesting and weird! Come to México, it is a beautiful and interesting country, full of the type of things that you always thought would be stereotypical, but end up being perfectly in place when you find them.

Much love to all!

New photos!

Easily accessible through these links:

Fun stuff I've been up to

More fun stuff

The rest of the Independence Route

Check them out folks!