English...Romanian...Spanish...can anyone understand me?!

Well folks I made it back from my trip. It was quite fun, and we saw a lot. Exhausted ourselves a couple of days, but also sat around for a couple of days, so it all worked out.

I discovered a weird phenomenon. Whenver someone talks to me in a foreign language, I seem to automatically respond in Romanian. I can't even tell you the number of times I said da instead of si, and got halfway through multimesc before realizing the correct word is gracias. And when I needed to say something slighly more involved, I pretty much had the sentence figured out in Romanian before even approaching the Spanish. There are a couple of words that I'm still not sure if are Romanian or Spanish. So everything I said had to go through not only the English filter, but the Romanian filter too before I got to the Spanish (not that I know either language, really, just enough to make a fool of myself). On the upside, many Mexicans found it rather amusing to be answered with a da by an American.

So anyway, here are a few pictures.

This is in Chichen Itza (not posivitve about the spelling). There is another temple inside this one, so they say, no one's allowed inside it, or on it, anymore. This one was built around the smaller one they think.

This is a playing field. There was this game that the Mayans played, seemed to have been a big deal because they've uncovered 8 playing fields in the whole area. There are carvings the in wall depicting the captain of one team beheading the captain of another team. So our guide thinks it was probably the captian of the losing team who killed the captain of the winning team, because it was an honor to die or something like that (yes, apparently the Mayans were Klingons).






Here's a close up of the little hoop on one side that the ball is supposed to go through in order to make a point. We referred to this place as the Quidditch field because, well, it looks kind of like a Quidditch field.

The observatory, for watching Venus and doing other such astronimical related research. The Mayans seem to have been pretty brilliant.

Me (proof that I was there:)

So after Chichen Izta we took a 8 hour night bus to Palenque. First though, we sat in a non air conditioned gross bus station in a city called Merida for 4 hours, discovered we were at the wrong bus station, took a taxi to the right one which was air conditioned and sat there, finally putting on our sweatshirts and long pants for another 4 hours. Sitting on bus all night wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't sat around waiting for said bus all day!

But look what we saw when we got there! Totally worth it. This was my favorite place, neat ruins in the jungle, and pretty water falls to boot. Yes, we felt the need to sing Indiana Jones a few times....me and Julie, we're nerds, it's true. We apologized to Brenda several times for our nerdiness...
This waterfall was pretty amazing. In this picture, we are looking at it standing on a swinging bridge. Pretty cool. This was right after walking down something like a million stairs and seeing the ruins below. Awesome.

In Palenque, you're still allowed to climb up and around most of the ruins (which generally requires walking up a zillion fairly steep stairs- we were pretty sore!) So this is me inside one of the ruins. The day before this pictures, our guide told us that these stairs led down to a representation of hell. You can go through a few things down there and then come out on the other side. Well we thought it was pretty cool, and so decided to go back the next day to take more pictures. Well we wandered on top of that ruin for 20 minutes, a good 10 of that spent looking for this stairwell. Finally we followed a tour group hoping they'd lead us to it, and discovered that we had been walking around it the whole time!

After Palenque we took a 12 hour night bus back across the country to Tulum. There are 5 states in the Yucatan Peninsula and we wound up being in them all, although we crossed through 2 in the middle of night and didn't really see them. By this point we had been on our trip for 6 days and had yet to see any beach. So, we got a hotel by the beach in Tulum, accidentally got sunburned pretty good (yes, I put on sunscreen...got burned anyway). There are some ruins right on the beach here, which were pretty, but I still liked Palenque better.