moldfarm

Greetings from the heart of zapatistaland, Ocosingo!

   It's amazingly beautiful here. We arrived here this afternoon, and took a look through the town. There is a big central market here where the people sell vegetables and random stuff. Little children yell Gringo Gringo! at us, but they are also smiling in a friendly way. Again we find ourselves in a very friendly town. We are staying in a hotel that costs about $20 a night; It's simple, but the toilet, or something neart the toilet leaks, but other than that, it seems fine.

  When we came into the town by bus, which was right on time, we saw an autonomous zapatista community called Paisasote nueva, so we decided to try and visit it. We found a cab that would take us there, and we started walking down the road. All of the children came out of their houses and were smiling at us and waving and saying hola! and buenas tardes, etc. We wandered down the road, which has murals of zapatistas and colorful building that are schools and medical places for them.  A family asked us to come and visit with them. They gave us some fresh bananas, just because they were being friendly.  Turns out the father was a subcomadante in the zapatista revolucion in 1994. He showed us his picture which was on a postcard. We talked for a long time with them. There are about 700 people that live in this community. They took over this rancho during the revolucion and created this autotonomous community.  They grow corn, squash, beans, and all of their food on their land there. They live very poorly; this family had a small shack, but running water. They fed us a sweet squash soup;  just squash sweetened with cane juice, and told us about how they live and their community and we asked lots of questions.  The father, Alberto, wanted to go to the united states and asked us many questions about the us and how to get there. We warned him about the immigration, etc.  It was a very fun talk and a very beautiful walk on the road there.  Anyway,  we were so honored to be invited into thier world and it was a fun conversation. We wished we could do more to help them. Seemed a bit innapropriate to give them money, though.. They were mostly interested in conversation.

  Aside from that, the food has been good. The serivce here is very intersting. They always expect you to be ready to order in like 30 seconds. Ususally we have been ordering rice, beans, tortillas, and sometimes guacamole, which they are often slightly confused about. They seem to give us like the smallest dab of beans you can imagine, and huge portion of guacamole, and like 20 tortillas, which are usually hand made. Then, oddly, they never give you the check until you ask, and they are often puzzled or surprised that you are asking for "la cuenta". And they often dont' have any change. We needed change for about $20 and the waiter went to like 4 different places to get change.. Anyway, just a weird thing that happened..

Anyway,  that's the excitement for today..

Tomorrow we are going to check out some more mayan ruins and then we are off to san cristobol de las casas..

 

hasta luego!

 

<Subcomadantes Cohenes>

So we are in Palenque, Chiapas today. We arrived yesterday. This is one of the centers of the Zapatista revolution several years back. Chiapas is still under the control of the zapatistas to some extent.  We took a tour up into the mountains today and saw several signs, etc that say, ÿou are in zapatista country. They are very friendly, supposedly. actually everyone here is very friendly, and again our spanish is good enough for us to communicate and understad people and order vegetarian food, etc. 

  We went to the Palenque ruins yesterday, which are old mayan ruins. They are very impressive pyramids and stuff like that. There are lots of giant lizardy things that make these scary loud hissing sounds. At least that´s what I think was making those sounds(semicolon) it was either that or monsters!

Today we went up to see some spectacular waterfalls and we swam in them, too.  It is really up in the mountains that things look a lot more like a 3rd world country. Simple houses, and little kids (mostly girls) being very very very insistant that you buy their fried bread or lemon or friend banana, or regular banana, etc. It is kind of annoying, but cute, too.. There are lots of stray dogs around, too. They are very cute and all of them are about luna sized.

Weather has been pretty hot and humid, and it rained really hard for like 10 minutes, still its not horrible.

The food has been pretty good. We are liking the handmade tortillas. Oddly enough, here they are fond of giving you stale bread with salsa, whereas in america they give chips and salsa.

I assume you all know that it´s myriam´s brithday today, and are all sending her wishes on her 3^3 birthday!

Tomorrow we are off to ocosingo, in Zapatista territory. They supposedly have a big market place. We havent found any vendors of wild mushrooms, although someone offered us psychedelic mushrooms(we think), which we kindly refused. 

 

ok, we´re off!!

==Señora y señor Miguelito Cohen==

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