oxkintok

            We’ve been doing a lot of random things this week. Por ejemple: Ashley, Caitlin, Amanda, Shoji and I went to the theater on Friday night to see the Yucatan Symphonic Orchestra perform “Los Bosques de Viena”. The Dawleys went as well, but they had the good orchestra seats whereas we poor students sat in the $8 second-tier seats. It really didn’t make a difference though, the theater was so intimate that no matter where you sat you had a decent view and excellent sound. There were two ballroom dance couples that performed during a few songs, as well as a soprano and a tenor that sang a few accompaniments to the pieces. The show lasted about an hour long and then, after a few photos with Robert and Ellen, we parted ways to wander the Centro and find a place to spend an hour or two. We found a really nice place kind of off the beaten path which will remain nameless because its “our secret” haha It was really nice, open air and intimate and you really could forget that you were in a city while you sat in there. We all grabbed cabs home and then Saturday we took our first adventure as a group.

We visited Oxkintok, a Mayan city which used to be home to three major groups of people. At first we did a bit of birdwatching, where we saw a motmot (or T’oh in Mayan), a tropical kingbird, a tanager (which is in the cuckoo family) and lots a lots of grackles. We moved from the first site to our first set of ruins where we were able to spot turkey vultures circling overhead. But I digress back to Oxkintok. This city was built for presentation so there were a lot of bigger pyramids (which we all climbed, of course) and lots of administrative buildings. Rebecca Hill, our Mayan history teacher, joined us for the day for some light introduction to the Mayan civilization and informed us that the style of Mayan architecture we were seeing was called “Puuc” which literally means “hills” in the Mayan language. Puuc is a lateral style of building with mosaic fronts and a rubble interior; it incorporates wooden door jambs and columns on the corners of buildings, with columnets lining the ground level. One of the pyramids we climbed actually had a doorway on the side of it with a small tunnel by the floor; naturally I wanted to go in. So, Katie, Amanda, Shoji and I all strapped on our headlamps and crawled inside. We bypassed the tarantula in the entrance way without even noticing its presence. When we got to the the third and final chamber we stood up to look around and low and behold, in one of the upper corners we spot a tailless whipscorpion (subclass arachnida, order amblypygi) sitting on a web just sort of looking at us. I’m not sure if you know what a tailless whipscorpion looks like, so let me allude to Harry Potter for a second. In the fourth movie, HP and the Goblet of Fire, the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Mad-Eye Moody, demonstrates the three unforgivable curses on a spider which he enlarges. That, my friends, is a tailless whipscorpion. Nasty looking creatures, let me tell you. So we all crawled out of the pyramid and let everyone else go inside, including Robert and Ellen. After that pyramid we went to another pyramid and from there we could see the remains of a labyrinth, a sort of subterranean touch tunnel which was probably used as a representation of the lord going into Sheobulba (spelling?) otherwise known as the underworld. Do not get the underworld confused with hell – they are not the same thing. Hell is punishment, whereas the underworld is simply where you go when you die; good and bad gods ruled the underworld therefore good and bad people all went there alike. After the pyramids and labyrinth we saw one of the Mayan ball courts in which I obtained my first bruise of the day. Once we saw all of that we loaded back on the buses and visited a site that had just recently been discovered – one of the Mayan’s sacred caves. There were hieroglyphs painted on the ceiling which dated to 1,007 years ago and in one of the caverns the archaeologists had found “an offering” which was a carved Mayan figurine of a head and, essentially, a pile of stones which did not match the stone of the cave. The cave then opened to a bigger chamber which was definitely underwater at some point. There were carvings in the side of the stone representing Chaac, the rain god, and there were remains of jaguar fangs and human bones further down in the cave. Let me just note that women were never allowed in the cave during the Mayan time, and thus I do believe most of us were unwanted in the cave yesterday as well. Yes, I am a person of science, but I believe life is more interesting with the possibility of a paranormal existence.

            Anyway, we left the cave and went to a cenote in someone’s backyard. It was really pretty, but you had to climb down a ladder under a well to get into it, and the stalactites were very close to the water. It was just as pretty as the last ones with much clearer water and we didn’t stay as long because we were all exhausted from sun and climbing monstrous steps all day. So after we had all had our fun we loaded the bus again and went home. On the way we stopped at a Mayan restaurant where we were served traditional food – sopa de lima, cochinita pibil and fruit. All in all, a very successful Saturday.

            So today is Sunday and since I’m done with my presentation I have the liberty to lay out in the sun all day, go shopping in el Centro and spend an hour or two at the internet café looking up all the wonderful pictures of my friends back home, updating this blog and with any luck, getting some photos on here even though the connection is horrific. This is the end of Week 3 of 13, and I hope you’re all looking forward to my return.

Siempre,

Dana