Week 2

We started our language classes this week at UNIVERSAL, I am taking a class called Contemporary Latin American Women: Texts and Voices. There are four other students in my class and we have two teachers - Flor and Mahua. We have class monday through thursday from 8 AM to 10:50 AM for four weeks. The amount of time we spend in the class in four weeks is equal to what we would do in a whole 16 week semester.

We left Thursday to go to Hacienda Santa Cruz and Xochicalco, another ancient ruins site.

We spent Thursday night at the Hacienda after going to Xochicalco.

Xochicalco is amazing. It is very high up and you can see the land and mountains all around at the top of it. These ruins were created by three different groups of Mesoamerican peoples who came together to create one calendar. On the side of one of the biggest pyramids there is actually a carving showing how the three different calendars of three different peoples came together to create one calendar. This is represented by a hand pulling in one calendar, another hand pushing another away and certain numbers represented by bars and circles pushed off to the side and below. I am including this as the first picture because it is a little confusing to explain.

We drove to the Hacienda after this. I didn't really know what kind of place this hacienda thing was going to be. We were driving along a highway when I saw a very old looking building with a wall surrounding it and towers sticking up behind the walls. I made a comment to the peple around me saying how beautiful that was and as I said this our car turned right towards a set of huge wooden doors. We were going in! The doors opened for our car and I was completely caught off guard. There was bougainvilla everywhere and colonial style buildings with fountains, mosaic benches and pristine pools. One of my professors, Antonio, his partner who happens to be the great great great grandson of Benito Juarez owns part of this hacienda which used to be a sugar cane plantation.

We ate dinner in an outside room with a view of the valley and fields beyond. Dinner in Mexico is not at all like dinner in the United States. It is really just a snack. We were served agua pina or pineapple water which is made by blending water, pineapple, and sugar. It is very refreshing. Then they served us things that look like quesadillas but are called synchronizadas. There were ones with ham and oaxaca cheese and I ate the vegetarian ones with I believe manchego cheese and some lemony tasting herb. I ate this with salsa verde. Then they brought out pan dulce and coffee and I ate a lot of pan dulce. We had a bonfire after that and had s'mores! The graham crackers here are very different and so is Hershey's chocolate. But I loved how it was different. The graham crackers weren't as sweet but had more of a nutty flavor.

I went to be early after that because I was tired but me and a few other people decided to get up to walk up a hill to a church to see the sun rise. I woke up around 6 AM and we started to walk up a steep hill across the street from the Hacienda. That was kind of disappointing because the sun didn't rise in front of us above the toy house looking hacienda but behind us halfway hidden by a hill. But it was still beautiful in its own way. Then we met Antonio for a run. He took us to a dirt path that led to a plant nursery. I think we ran about five miles in a valley surrounded by moutains. A man was herding some goats while we were running and we ran with the goats!

The breakfasts that I have been served in Mexico are very different compared with the United States. There are a lot more savory items and vew few sweet items. A very popular dish is chilaquiles which is pretty much a way to use up stale corn tortillas. The corn tortillas are refried and layered in a pot with salsa and cream and cooked till soft. We also had some sort of scrambled eggs with tomatoes as well as beans! I love beans, I eat them at least twice a day here. There was also papaya and cantaloupe as well as yogurt and granola. And I can't forget the fresh squeezed orange juice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ahhhh I get a little too excited about food sometimes.

We had a day of discussions of readings and "bonding" in small groups. We discussed some articles such as Peggy McIntosh's Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack: White Privilege and some other ones about identity and power as well as the uses of Tu and Usted in Mexican Spanish.

We had a snack of cucumber and jicama in lemon juice with chili powder on top, so good!

For lunch/comida at 1:30 we were served a lentil soup with plantains in it. Then we had a plate of beans, rice, and grilled cactus with tomatoes and onions. I really like cactus. The Spanish word for cactus is nopal. They served us dessert too that was a gelatin made of a fruit. I am having a hard time here with the desserts because they pretty much consist of gelatins and puddings that are very light. I am seriously craving something heavy and decadent like chococolate cake with ganache and vanilla ice cream! I can't really find that here. I did buy something really good from the bakery though called La Piedra, or rock. It was not airy and light like most pan dulce but dense, which was exactly what I wanted. And it was covered in sugar. I ate it with tea, it was so good!!!!!!!!!!

We had time to just relax at the hacienda and some people went in the pool. They set up hammocks for us and I sat by the pool and read and took a nap. We left at 6 PM and arrived in Cuernavaca around 7:30 where Don Victor had dinner waiting for us! He is a great cook.

Teotihuacan

I went to Teotihuacan last Sunday with the art professor from UNIVERSAL, the language school that I go to. He was our tour guide.

Teotihuacan is the first ancient ceremonial site in Mesoamerica that was used by various groups of Pre Hispanic peoples.

The major parts of Teotihuacan are the two temples, the temple of the moon and the temple of the sun. There is a very long road over 4 miles long connecting a series of smaller temple after smaller temple and the two bigger temples. It is estimated that only 25 percent of Teotihuacan has been excavated. As you walk among the ruins you see huge hills where ruins are hiding but have not been dug up yet. Maybe a job for Eric! hahaha. I climbed up both pyramids and a lot in between. There are not a lot of trees and foliage around, it is mostly dirt and you can see a lot of mountains all around in the distance.

All of the temples and buldings at Teotihuacan were orignally frescoed, or in other words, covered with plaster and adobe to create a smooth finish. Today however all that can be seen are the rocks that encompassed the original buildings without the stucco on top of it. There are a few places where rebuilding was necessary and a few other places where the orignal stucco can still be seen.

It is not known exactly what group of people built this ceremonial center. It is a site of debate but most people just say that the Teotihuacan people built it; easy enough.

Teotihuacan is a two and a half hour bus ride from Cuernavaca. After visiting the ruins we went to a building where this guy dressed in a poncho and sombrero showed us only a few of the hundred or so uses for a special type of cactus from Mexico that is called like maga or something like that. It was the original parchment paper. You could use the milk from the center of it supposedly as an aphrodisiac. The crazy poncho guy made us try the milk from it by the way. It is also what the fibers of the poncho and blankets they were selling were made of. The end of one of the leaves could be used as a needle and thread. There were a ton of uses. Then the guy gathered us around in a circle, all the while making stereotypical Mexican jokes that I really didn't think were funny at all even though some people were laughing. This is when we tried the nectar of the cactus and also he made us all try some type of tequila that had something special about it. I was pretty confused because he kept calling all of us baby and talking really fast.