When we arrived in San Cristobal, we had taken an overnight bus from Campeche. We checked into a hostal, ravenous, and went to the kitchen for breakfast. They said breakfast was at eight, and we walked off, bewildered, because our watches said it was eight. After a couple more incidents, we figured we must have gone through a time zone in the night, and dutifully set our watches. It wasn´t until a couple bouts of confusion coordinating with people in the U.S that we realized we had in fact not gone through a time zone, we just went through daylight savings time, as had the US!
I say this because it has come to my attention that yesterday was not Thanksgiving, as we had all believed. I hope that we´ve at least understood the results of the presidential election coreectly.

holiday update

Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S., but there´s plenty of celebration here, as it´s the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution and Anne´s birthday. Tonight I am going to attempt to make her a cake out of a stack of fried tortillas, carmelized sugar, and sweetened condensed milk. Yesterday, when I left the grocery store, there was a giant parade of children dancing and doing acrobatics for the day of the Mexican Revolution. I put down my groceries and watched for a bit.

We wil be heading to Veracruz on November 25, to work with Finca Tres Mundos for about ten days. That farm does cob building and makes yogurt, marmalade, and chocolate. Should be another huge adventure.

I am moving my photo posting here: http://picasaweb.google.com/alicejam. It´s more suited to photos and has a handy map.

Here´s what´s going on here:

San Cristobal is a city that, for one reason or another, makes Maddy, Anne and I crave sweets. All the time. We cook a lot of interesting thing at home while listening to mariachi, and tonight I created what I think of as my San Cristobal dish: coconut yogurt with crushed oreos, bananas, peanut butter, and cajeta (goat milk caremel).


Na´luum is pretty great. There theme is El problema es la solucion, and could also be Do Something. They are always using whatever is around to grow plants in or make windows out of. Our Spanish is pretty unfortunate which is more noticable at the hostal, where we work with hip kids, than at the schools, where the children seem content with conversational topics such as: Do you have siblings? and What is this thing called?

As evidenced, I am trying to get all my pictures up here. It´s a bit of an arduous process at the old internet cafe. Last week, we rushed the Cancun and Chichen Itza, the spectacle of the Mayan world. We spent a couple days in Campeche, a lovely ocean town. Now we´ve settled into our house in San Cristobal De Las Casas for the month. We can get all our produce at the mercado, and I made succesful sopa de limon last night. These days, there are marigolds and pine needles everywhere for dia de los muertos, and the children all sing us this song:

buenas noches mi amigo estoy de nuevo contigo
el banquete esta servido, de ti nunca me olvido
no te preocupes, a trazido mucha cerveza
esta noche su lapida es nuestra mesa

NUESTRO ENCUENTRO ESTA CIERTO
SIEMPRE RECUERDO DEL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS
EL FIM ESTA INCIERTO
SIEMPRE RECUERDO DEL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS

...for candy, and little hands appear from everywhere when the candy is out.