San Cristobal de las Casas

I have been taking it easy in San Cristobal de las Casas for the past few days. Tomorrow at 6 am we get picked up by a van that will take us to the Guatemala border where we will get another van to Panajachel, on the shores of lake Atitlan. I am not looking forward to the journey. The van trip through the mountains around Palenque was enough to make me really, really car sick. My mom prepared me a great first aid kit with lots of medicines, luckily I have not needed it except for some tylenol once or twice. One drug that I have realized is going to be essential and that I did not have is dramamine for motion sickness. Riding in vans and buses up and down hills  So I bought some here.

San Cristobal is truly a magical place. It was built by the Spanish in the early 1500s and because it has become such a tourist destination the buildings are beautifully maintained. Tourism is the main industry today, but I suppose when it was founded it was the city from which the Spaniards ruled over the local people and extracted the natural resources from the ground. Juan Carlos says that Chiapas is the richest state in Mexico in terms of natural resources, but it has the poorest people. There are a lot of mayan people selling crafts in the market or on the street. Its hard to imagine they make too much money at it when there are at least 50 other market vendors selling the exact same things to the exact same tourists.

San Cristobal has great coffee and chocolate, both of which are grown in this region. We were happy to know that Starbucks does not have an outlet here. Actually there are very few American chains. I saw one Subway and one McDonalds and one Dominos Pizza. We have been eating really well, for really cheap. I was feeling the absense of vegetables though, so one night I made a stir fry of lots of things. One of the best places we found is a shop called Lacteo Maya. They make all these dairy products, and dairy products are my favorite. The yogurt is also excellent. 

We didn't do any trips out of the city except a short ride to San Juan Chamula which is famous for being a Catholic Church where the local people practice a hybrid of christianity and traditional practices. So there are statues of saints all around, but then the floor is covered in pine needles and people are lighting candles and praying in their native language. San Cristobal is a great town to walk around, lots to see. There are two churches on hilltops on either side of the city, so we walked from one to the other and went up to see the views. Each neighbourhood has its own church, and I also learned that each neigbourhood is known for a particular product or occupation. I went to one free museum on the history of the city. It was small, but I learned a bit about the neighbourhoods and the development of it. Also things like bicycles used to be a very popular mode of transportation. This is hard to believe because of how steep the hills are, but bicycles certainly would make more sense on the narrow colonial streets. I am curious to know more about this city. The region has an interesting history with the Zapatista revolutionaries but I didn't get to learn about this.