i'm having some severe anxiety surrounding the birth of my niece... i learned yesterday that she is going to be forced out of her warm warm womb the day before my birthday.. am i the only one that thinks its wrong to not let nature take its course and keep her warm and safe until march 1st? its been well documented that i am not a good sharer, and the most important day of my year is my birthday, i feel like my birthday is about to be taken away from me. :( i kind of feel guilty, like i am a bad person for voicing this, but my feelings and emotions are very real, and they are bubbling up and overflowing...
[Day 2 - Chichen Itza tour]
we started the day getting up hella early to watch the sunrise, it was a bust. (see yesterdays post)
then uncle P & aunt J, and aunt T and i went to see the chichen itza ruins. we were picked up at 7:50am and were dropped off at 7pm. the bus ride each way was about 2.5-3 hours. we did stop at a cenote along the way and were able to swim. a cenote is a natural mineral well. it was a couple hundred feet under ground. P, T and i went in. there were some steps built up along the side of it and P&T jumped into the water from it a couple of times. it was great. i didn't jump, but i got their picture jumping. TC was dawdling back to the bus taking pictures of plants and the bus almost drove off without her and JH.
we ate lunch at a warehouse of sorts. it was a huge hall with tons of tables, it seemed like they really flush the people through there.. the food was a buffet, not too bad. there were four or five performers that danced around on the stage while we shovelled food into our pie holes because we only had 45 minutes. what a cash cow that place is..
then it was back on the bus.
we drove through a typical town our guide pointed out the architecture and explained what the people standing next to the roads selling stuff were. i wish we had stopped though so i could get some pics of that.
right off the bat we saw a dog (all the mexican dogs i saw looked like the dog from the simpsons. no leashes, gauntly skinny, pointy faces. i expected to see only chihuahuas. i didn't see a one) that was laying in and amongst hundreds of people walking through the entrance building. it was alive because i saw it breathing, but it couldn't care less that it was in everyones way. it kind of reminded me of fatty. :) and every mexican dog i saw had nipples that practically dragged on the ground. apparently veterinarians are few and far between in mexico.
the ruins themselves were quite impressive. however they have stopped letting people climb them and explore them. that was A-OK with me, because after our little mini-hike down to the cenote i was really feeling it in my legs. i couldn't have imagined climbing the steps to the top of the great temple, or even worse, down... it was crazy steep and there were no handrails, etc..
the grounds have three areas where there are acoustic phenomenons. one is at the foot of the main temple, if you clap at the base, it reverberates back at you in a higher pitch. it's neat.. the 2 other places were in the "ball field". our guide asked for a volunteer to run from where we were at one end of a space that was like 2 football fields to the total other end, then he spoke in strong voice and asked the guy at the other end if he could here him. he could. then they counted back and forth to 10. we could here him as if he were right next to us. it was so neat. then we did a test across the width of the field and the clapping and whistles echoed back at us like 7 times.
the ruins had a lot of fertility themes. mostly fertility relating to the agriculture of the area. i wanted to get a little jaguar made of opal that the peddlers were hawking.. i offered 2 dollars and the woman laughed at me. she said it was $20. almost everyone was touting their products for $1. but this woman wouldn't go down to 2 dollars so i didn't get anything. oh well.
our tour guide was pretty entertaining.. he said he could speak fluently 4 languages. he was pretty hysterical in english, i can only imagine how funny he was in spanish. 
that evening was the "rehearsal dinner". we weren't invited, but we happened to have dinner reservations for the same restaurant.. so we sat a few tables away and had a great time.. i even tried tuna steak for the first time ever. it was not what i expected. i don't know if i could eat a whole one, but a bite of it didn't kill me nor make me throw up.. maybe i'll try it again sometime.
worth noting are the misspellings all over all the menus everywhere we went. that was always good for a laugh.
we were pretty beat after dinner, so we retired early.
here are the comprehensive pics from this day.
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