Back to the cold north…

I got back from Mexico yesterday. It was AWESOME!!!! I even was understanding a lot of Spanish and able to say words and phrases here and there towards the end. I can read pretty well it turns out (I read the first 3 pages of “Twilight” (“Crepúsculo”) in a bookstore), but I can’t understand much and I can’t speak for shit! Contrary to what every one says, “everyone speaks English there” really doesn’t apply. Sure, most people know about as much English as I know Spanish, but at times the Spanglish interchanges got a little confusing. For example, I went to eat dinner at this cafe near the hotel– the menu was hand written on the door. Locals were gathered around a small tv watching lucha libre with poor reception (the tv, not the audience!). The owner started listing things to me. I just said “yes” to one. I didn’t know what it was, but I figure there is very little out there that I don’t like, and the likelihood of a small local cafe with 3 tables in it serving durian, parsnips or blue popsicles is very low. It turned out to be some nice chicken thing with frijoles negros (black beans). When the guy said some conjugation of “beber” (to drink), I said “jugo de naranja?” (orange juice). It turned out they were out of orange juice, so he held up two different juices, one purple and one a milky white. I pointed to the purple one. It was delicious! I have absolutely no idea what it was, and I even asked, but I didn’t write it down, and when I asked again, the guy thought he hadn’t understood me and said something else. Oh well. When I sat down they changed the tv to “Remember the Titans.” it’s kind of surreal watching Denzel Washington give stirring speeches dubbed in Spanish. All in all the trip was super awesome!!!

We went to Chichén Itza and Uzmal which are two Mayan ruin sites. Thus, most of my pictures are of piles of rocks. I took 400 pictures and, well, probably 3/4 of them are of ruins. Look! It’s a crumbling archway! Look! It’s half a doorway! Look! It’s 5 pictures of a tumbled down wall! Anyway, I have some of them here. My new camera is awesome, but I don’t know how to set it to take smaller pictures. Thus every one is like humongous and takes forever to upload and I am way too lazy to go into Photoshop and make them all smaller. Here are the ones of Mérida and Chichén Itza: http://scootronimus.shutterfly.com/