la Ciudad de México round 2

3-6 de febrero

This post is going to be a pretty brief post because I didn't transfer any of the pictures from this trip to my laptop before my phone was stolen a couple days later. 

The rest of the LASP program and I went to Mexico City during the end of the first week of February to go to museums, see the major sites and get to know a bit more about the history of Mexico. 

My favorite parts were the palace of Maximilian and El Palacio de Bellas Artes, the latter featured an amazing mural by Diego Rivera named El hombre controlador del universo. I spent a good 15 minutes sitting in front of this mural, just taking it in, absorbed by its complexity.

Source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/diego-rivera/man-controller-of-the-universe-1934

All of the murals in this museum were absolutely stunning, and the 40 minutes we had there were not enough. 

Most of the nights were spent in the hotel, but there was a 7-11 across the street so we had access to junk foods for random hotel room parties. It was a really good bonding experience for everyone and I came out of it feeling more connected to the group as a whole. 

Some of my friends and I spent an extra night in la Ciudad, and we went out for the night to a bar/club thing where we ended up just sitting around, eating chips and guac, talking about life and playing Never Have I Ever. 

I want to go back to CDMX really badly because the city is massive- it takes about 2 hours of highway driving to cross the city from one side to the other- and absolutely stunning.

Oaxaca City

22-24 de enero

I know this post is really late, but I finally have down time where I can feel productive so here we go.

Oaxaca City, Oaxaca is a beautiful city in the mountains of central Mexico.  

My friends and I stayed in a beautiful Airbnb where we each got our own room. They voted me into the master suite because I’d orchestrated all the travel and housing plans (MomFriend^TM). It was absolutely wonderful.

 

This is a picture of the view from our airbnb. Syd was lucky and got the room with the view, so she got to wake up to this every morning and go to sleep to the full moon every night.

Biggest downside was the mosquitos, but they were tame in Oaxaca compared to what I'd have to live through in Puebla in a week and a half.

Oaxaca is famous for its cheese, which I have pretty much formed an addiction too. My go-to snack is a quesadilla with some salsa and some Oaxaca cheese, because it’s melty and stringy like mozzarella but it tastes better.

Our first day there we got breakfast in a cute little restaurant near the city center. I had a delicious omelet de champiñones y espinaca and cafe de olla (at right), which means coffee of the pot because it’s brewed with a whole bunch of sweet spices in a giant clay pot, giving it a very unique flavor. I generally hate black coffee, but cafe de olla is sweet enough that I didn’t want to add anything.

Overall, the food in Oaxaca was amazing. For dinner our last night there Syd and I split a sample platter of different cheeses and sausages that featured quesadillas, guacamole and totopos, i.e. tortilla chips.

All through dinner we made friends with pigeons, some adorable dogs, and at the very end a father son duo brought up a marimba (its like a giant wooden xylophone) and played some adorable music. 

We also tried mezcal, which is a super strong alcohol that's made from the same plant as Tequila (i.e. agave) but it's fermented differently.

The city center was absolutely adorable. It was still very colonial, which I have some moral issues with but man is the architecture stunning. 

These pictures are of my two favorite places I found in Oaxaca. One is of a small courtyard near an open-air market with beautiful trees and crooked streets (above). The other is a tiny hidden alley/courtyard we found where all the businesses were therapists, spiritual healers and a tiny cooking school. I fell instantly in love and didn't want to leave (left).

We also made a trip out to Monte Alban, the ruins about a 30 min drive from Oaxaca City.

It's an old Zapotec city that's only partially excavated, so some of the pyramids aren't fully exposed (see the main pyramid to the left). There was so much exploring to do that we Hailey and I didn't get a chance to see the whole thing because we spent too much time exploring the first half and taking a ton of pictures. Travel Tip: don't spend 1/2 your time at a site in the first 1/4, because you end up rushing through the last half and missing some cool things. Oh well, Oaxaca is definitely on my list of places I need to see again. 

look at my cute friends

The trip was absolutely amazing. Best purchases were an absurd amount of Oaxacan chocolate, which makes the greatest hot chocolate I have ever eaten in my entire life, and a blanket. I have a problem where I buy a blanket in every country I go to because I am obsessed with them. I don't really consider it a major problem, because they keep me warm and can also double as beautiful wll hangings once I actually get my own place. This one is brightly colored and has a simple striped/geometric pattern on it. I love it a lot.

Bonus Photos:

Giant spider we found at Monte Alban. It was a little over an inch long and about an inch wide, including legs. You could see it from about 10 feet away, putzing its way through the dead, yellow grass. It was so beautiful, but I probably would die of fright if it had suddenly appeared on my body. No one else wanted to get anywhere near it, but I was down on my knees trying to get pictures.

Beautiful Tree with the background of an old church and an amazing system of roots that was breathtaking. Also this lighting was amazing and everything about this tree and this moment made me exceedingly happy. 

In front of the church doors there was a painter who was working on capturing the beauty of this area, and just past him, up the street, was an open air market with a whole bunch of blouses, jewelry and generally tourist-y souvenirs. It was super cool to wander around and look at everything though and the light filtering through the leaves around us was absolutely stunning.

I was pretty sunburned by the end of the day though.

Fun Fact: I'm actually getting tan?!?!?!

Keep in mind that I have always been as white as a piece of paper, so when I say "tan" what I actually mean is that my skin doesn't reflect sun and blind the people near me anymore. 

I'm still the whitest person in the LASP program.

Cacaxtla & la ciudad de México

26 de diciembre a 2 de Enero

I spent my second week in Mexico staying with an amazing family in the neighborhood where Diegro Rivera and Frida Kahlo lived. The mother, Yvonne, graduated high school with my mom and was kind enough to host me for the week. I had such an amazing time.

The two older boys, 14 and 8, were very sweet, and we went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens in theaters together (viewing #3). We discussed nerd culture, language, the city, everything. Unfortunately, it was most;y in English so my Spanish really didn't improve much that week. 

There were also two younger children, a 5 1/2 year old boy and a 2 year old girl (both spoke better Spanish than me). 

My second day there they took me to see Cacaxtla, one of the largest archaeological sites in México. It's believed to be a city built by the Olmecas-Xicallanca people (I will abbreviate to Olmecs).

It was absolutely amazing. The site is outside the ring of mountains surrounding la Ciudad de México, but the volcano in this picture (which constantly experiences minor eruptions that mostly consist of puffs of smoke/vapor/ash) is visible from both the city and Cacaxtla.

I was absolutely blown away by the pristine colors, and the visibility. You can see the pollution that's everywhere here and sinks down between buildings to settle close to the ground. It was so warm though. I don't think I've been cold since I got here. #blessed

The view here is from atop the largest uncovered pyramid at the site, the pyramid you can see is a minor temple that's still in pretty good shape. If you look carefully, just across the visible path from that pyramid is a triangular-ish shaped hill with some small trees on it. Specialists suspect that it's another pyramid, but they haven't received enough money to finish excavating the whole site yet.

The view all around the main central pyramid is littered with these small suspected-pyramids (you can see 3 more in the picture above), leading scientists to believe that Cacaxtla is one of the biggest sites they've found.

This is a panorama of the large pyramid as you approach from the path. All of the different step-like layers were built during a different "era." At the end of each era, a child was selected as a sacrifice, and then their body was entombed in the walls being built for the next era. The child was selected based off of number of birthmarks or patches of differently colored hair. If you had two or more, you were a prime candidate for ringing in the new era. 

The priests who did the sacrificing lived at the top, and were the only men who didn't have to fight in the wars with other tribes.

All of the paint here is original. Nothing has been restored. Nothing. I still can't get over that. This mural is almost 100% in tact, and depicts the Olmecs conquering the Maya, which represented the earth "conquering" the rain, i.e. absorbing it. It's a mural of the necessary sacrifice of celestial water to the earth for the sake of live. The Maya are the ones in feathers (sky--> rain --> water) and the Olmecs are in the leopard skin (leopard --> land animal --> earth). 

Fun fact, the first archaeologist  was a dude who analyzed this mirror thought it was just depicting the olmecs beating the mayans in a bloody battle. It was a female archaeologist who came back and said "wait, hold up, that doesn't make sense, try this instead." Of course.

We also went to el Museo Dolores Olmedo, who was really close friends with Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo. She had a personal collection of their artwork that, when she died, she donated to the city to be kept as a museum to honor their work.

As you entered the museum you were greeted by these giant agave plants. These guys were massive, to the point where you can really tell that they're straight out of the prehistoric era. Agave is everywhere, and they're right at the tale end of what I can only assume is their pollination  (do they even pollinate? I have no idea how these massive plants reproduce) season, because some of them have these giant stalks that tower over even some of the trees.

See? What even are these things. I love them. They're fascinating.

Also, just for reference, that hedge next to it? Yeah, that came up to my hip. 

The museum was also absolutely swarming with peacocks. I mean, they were everywhere. 

Look at this beautiful sleepy peacock.

They also keep a pack of a breed of dogs unique to Mexico, se llaman Xoloitzcuintle (zoh-loh-eets-kweent-lee). try saying that 5 times fast. They're simultaneously the ugliest and the cutest dogs I've ever seen. They're hairless, except some of them have a little tuft of white/grey hair on the top of their head. 

This is one laying down next to a statue in their enclosure.

I want 20 of them. They're endangered, so I'll call it a reserve and I will help to keep this hideously adorable breed of pups in existence #lifegoals

Mazatlán

I am so blessed.
I spent the last week in Mazatlán with my amazing family. We wandered through the old city, swam in the warm ocean, and soaked up the sunlight on the shore.
Our resort also had an all inclusive open bar, so i got to drink as many mangoneadas and miami vices as I could ever want.
I'm tinged a little pink now, but its all worth it.

Exploring Old Mazatlán was amazing, my dad printed out a walking tour he found online and we all just took a day to explore, enjoy good food, and take photos of old buildings.
We found a whole room filled with trophies, just left there. It was so cool to see buildings where half looked lived in, but the other half was being reclaimed by nature. I've always loved abandoned buildings, and these were just so fascinating to see from the outside.

My Spanish is better than I thought it would be, I'm able to communicate my needs and hold pretty simple conversations with people. My grandparents, sister and I went on a tour of Stone Island, where we went on a tour of the town in a horse drawn wagon. Our guide didn't speak much English at all, so I worked as a translator for my family and also had a pretty sweet conversation with him during the course of the 30 minute tour. And, if I understood him correctly, we drove past the home of the village witch, It was super cool because there were whale vertebrae (i think, whatever they were they were huge), a giant pile of coconuts, and other such knickknacks. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture :(

We spent all of Christmas day relaxing on the beach, and as a result I'm a little sunburned which made my hives act up (because apparently I'm allergic to the sun, go figure). But it was all worth it. Mom and I got up at 6:30am in order to claim a cabana and we spent the rest of the day relaxing, swimming in the (relatively) warm ocean (it was about the temperature of an outdoor pool in summer), drinking and bonding.

I'm in the Mazatlán airport now, waiting for my flight which leaves in a little over an hour. There's only about three other people here, so the anxious part of me keeps wondering if I'm in the right place, but the nice helpful tv by the gate says my flight number so I'm pretty sure I'm okay. I've been here for about four hours, because the rest of my family just boarded their flight back to the states.

Saying goodbye was hard, especially because I thought I'd be able to sit with them, but then we had to go through separate security gates. I cried a lot, and mom and gramma teared up which was expected. My dad started crying to though, which I think is only the third or fourth time I've ever actually seen him cry (tearing up during the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer doesn't count).

I only stopped crying fully after about an hour, because I kept tearing up every time I got a snapchat or a message from them on whatsapp.

It's hard realizing that I won't see them until June, especially because I've been able to just pop home for the weekend whenever I felt like it these last few years. It's going to be hard, but I know we'll make it through. 

I still have about an hour left until my flight boards, so I'm going to watching Captain America: The First Avenger and wait for the other people on my flight to start showing up.