Enchanted cornfield

Two of my uncles and my grandfather are farmers in southeastern Wisconsin: in addition to dairy cattle, they have many acres of corn, alfalfa and beans. This spring, there was much excitement because they bought some new equipment, which should give them a little break from the constant repair needed to keep your tractors up and running.

So, naturally, I thought of them when I saw this farmer planting corn.

Yes, he really does have a stick like a broom handle

to poke a hole, then a bag full of seeds.

There were fields like this just being planted, others where the crop was already knee high and men were hoeing the weeds, and still others where the plants were tall and all tassled-out. I’m not sure if they can get multiple crops in a growing season, or if the growing season is year-round.

The picture doesn’t capture how even the rows are, but I can assure you, these guys can walk a straight line. Descendents of the Maya have been farming these highland plains like this for generations, although every few fields, you could see a man with a tank like a backpack, using a little hose to put fertilizer on the plants. Those are the pioneers, trying to see if there’s a way to save the best of the old ways while finding something useful in the new . . . not unlike what my cousin Dan will need to do if he wants to pass the family farm on to the next generation.

And of course, the Mayans also have kids by the road selling their product . . . 

Twenty-four hours later we were higher up in the mountains, at a village outside of San Cristobal de las Casas called Zinancatan. This community is known for textiles and flowers, but many some local families open up their homes for demonstrations of traditional tortilla making.  (Don’t let Nichole’s raving about the coffee distract you from the video!)
 

This woman soaked the corn over night, then ground it and mixed it into dough. Here, she is pressing it in a wooden press, then baking it on the griddle over the fire. She flips it with her fingers, then puts it in the basket . . . until we come along and use it for tacos . . . which are delicious : )  

Stay tuned for news about harvesting cacao; these chickens, however, will not be discussed!

--Kris

An interesting link about traditional Mexican cuisine:

http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00011&RL=00400

This is for Kyle . . .

. . . who knows how I love to climb! : ) Kris

Up into the highlands

Those of you who get my dad's enchanted e-mails are in for a treat when I tell you what I learned today about farming corn  . . . seriously, it's fascinating! But, we're about to head out for dinner, so that educational piece will have to wait.

In the meantime, a quick summary--two new guides, ten hours in the car, 47 Federales police, 7,200 feet gain in elevation (can that possibly be the right number?), and more steps than we could count.

Where are they going? Stay tuned to find out : ) --Kris

Videos from Izapa sites

So at the older of the two sites we visited, we learned about the beginning of the calendar used by the Maya. This is Alfonso Muralles, our guide, explaining:

Alfonso, by the way is fabulous . . . and if you're interested, you can contact him at mayatour.com.

And then we visited a later Izapan, but still 800 years old, site with a different kind of building style. Nichole is narrating and operating the camera:

Day 2 Izapa

Steam rising from an active volcano (far in the distance), a roadside billboard reminder that human trafficking is against the law, cacao beans drying on a patio . . . and of course, an archaeological site that boasts that it is “the place where it all began.” It’s been quite a day!

Yesterday, sitting outside Starbucks at the Mexico City airport, my head was full of Thomas Friedman’s thesis about the world being hot, flat and crowded . . . and specifically, I was thinking about the “flat” part. (I’m sure Friedman was not the first with this idea, but my mom was intrigued by his book a couple of years ago, so we talk about it a lot in my family!) Anyway, yes, it was true that I was in Mexico, but this airport wasn’t so different from the one in Denver . . . it even had teen-agers in I heart Justin [Bieber] t-shirts.  I needed a passport for this?

Today, however, I’m thinking about the connectedness of the world across time, not across borders. We spent the day learning about an ancient settlement called Izapa, which flourished from about 250 BC right on up to the time of European conquest, with a few ups and downs and lots of changes along the way. So these people were not just pre-Columbian, they were pre-Olmec and pre-Mayan. What remains today (or at least what is uncovered today) are a dozen stone “stelae”—each about five feet tall and three feet wide. They sit in a field at the end of a rutted road through a cacao plantation, which really looks more wild than cultivated.  

Thousands of years ago, this was a broad open-air plaza at the foot of a pyramidal, earthen mound. The mound is built to mimic the shape of a nearby volcano, and if you’re here on a summer evening, you can apparently see that Venus seems to rise straight out of the volcano—and thus straight out of the pyramid.  And scattered (well actually, deliberately lined up with astrological features and square lines) around the edges of the space are the stelae.

 This one's in a museum in Tapachula, which houses many of the stelae with more distinct carvings.

So we heard the story of the day of creation . . . August 14^th . . . and learned about the animals and people depicted in the ancient carvings, but for me the highlight was when a group of kids from Tapachula on an outing with their family stopped to ask if we were Americans : ) They tried out some English on us, then Nichole got to talking with them about why they were visiting this place today. Their answer boiled down to “because it’s where we come from.” Imagine, visiting these stones and knowing they were made by your people . . . or maybe knowing that all people are our people . . .  --Kris

We're here, we've been traveling since 5:45 a.m., and the Blogger website directions have all changed to Spanish--more soon! --Kris