Home at last, and: HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Well, hello there. If you are seeing this, thank you for stopping by after my mysterious disappearance! I meant to post that I would be traveling in December, but the post never got written, and I can count the minutes I've been near a computer in the past month on one hand! But I am back! Back from, to be specific, Morocco and Italy.

Morocco:









Italy:









More on that to come. Much more! But right now It is 1-1-11. New Year's Day. I love me a new year. I like to think of New Year's as the "Emperor of Mondays." Mondays, I know, are not everyone's favorite day of the week, but I love Mondays. For some reason, Mondays have always felt like clean slates to me, like . . . new notebooks. You know? Like a fresh etch-n-sketch screen. The feeling is: begin now.

Whatever it is, BEGIN IT NOW.

On New Year's, that feeling amplifies a millionfold. I am massively excited about 2011, for many reasons. 2010 was oh so good to me, a life-changing year, a holler-with-joy kind of year, a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming year. What will 2011 hold? Many more firsts for Clementine. Talking! Wanting to pick out her own wonderful mismatch outfits. Continuing to become her little-person-self. A new book to write! And one to shepherd to the shelves, a process filled with anxiety and glee. Jim's and my 10th wedding anniversary, this June. Ten years of marriage, the very best of marriages. From art school parking lot to a gondola in Venice, up to Portland, Oregon and creating our little Pie, not to mention our books, and more on the way.

Gratitude. Looking back, looking ahead, I am filled with it. I love New Year's. Clementine is napping now, hopefully getting over jet lag (we were all up in the middle of the night eating pancakes, which -- hey! -- was not so terrible!), and enabling me to crack open my computer for the first time in a month. I haven't gotten to email yet. Oy, how I hate the junk that daily clogs my inbox. Will tackle that next.

I am feeling an urge to totally overhaul this blog and really dig into it this year. It has become a bit ... thin ... of late, and I don't just mean this month. I have ideas of how I'd like it to be, and I think I might begin again, a whole new address, a fresh sidebar and banner, a clean start. Maybe. If Clementine naps a while longer :-)

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I am so happy to be back home!

A guest post about cheese, with a little bit of France thrown in

As promised, here we have a guest post by my marvelous best friend, Alexandra, who went to France recently, and ate a lot of cheese! I think it might be my fault, as I texted her relentlessly with commands to "eat cheese for me today," which is what I say whenever anyone goes to France. Can we all just take a moment to sit dreamily in honor of cheese? (a favorite quote: "The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." -GK Chesterton) And the last thing I'll say about cheese, before turning you over to Alexandra, is this: one of the highlights of being pregnant was a feeling of perfect entitlement to eat cheese! And now, without further ado ... Alexandra!


I read that Winston Churhcill said of France in 1940, “A country producing almost 360 different kinds of cheese cannot die!” Before my trip, such a statement would have meant 100% nothing to me. I even spent two years in Bulgaria, otherwise known as “the land of only two cheeses,” and my tongue never batted a flick. Yes, I've lived a nearly cheeseless existence for 38 years until last month when, while in my third day in Paris, walking along one of those narrow cobblestoned alleys strumming the Seine, I heard wheels of cheese sing out to ME. And just like that, wherever I went throughout France for the next thirteen days, all I had to do was open my mouth and wheels of cheese rolled themselves right in!


Munster, Roquefort, Tomme de Savoie, Explorateur, Gaperon, *sigh*.....I believe I was eventually welcomed by all eight of the cheese family dynasties, and each of their distinguished relatives seemed to take to me immediately. All I have to say is God bless every single morsel of cheese in France, and every last stinky fromagerie within its borders.

(My only cheese-related regret is that I didn’t have a spare pair of buttocks that could metabolize les fromages without any evidential trace of its consumption. Unfortunately, it looks like those will have to wait, along with my other dream of detachable limbs you can drop off at pilates on your way to work and pick them up at the end of the day.)


But of course thats not all there is to France! You already know that you can find the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral, croissants, and pain du chocolat here too, but no one ever mentioned to me the wild boars everywhere muscling their tusks through the Saint Germaine quarter with all their overflowing shopping bags, midnight open air markets selling dried fruits and teas and lavendar alongside aerial gondola expeditions that will have you to Tanzania and back by sunrise, bath oils produced by local Mediterranean mermaids, and very lively crepe eating competitions for reptilain vultures of all sorts. Who knew that bats could devour so many Nutella smothered crepes so very quickly? Not to mention the hippie ostriches selling their beautiful oil paintings of French countryside life.

[ed note: I want to go to that France! Is there a special airline? A crack in a wall somewhere that takes you there?]


Since I’ve been back, I’ve been trying to replicate some of my finest cheese moments, and I leave you with my favorite, which can be made easy enough whether or not you like to cook. It comes very close to something I ate in Avignon. The only difference is that there it was served with literally a carpet of cheese about half an inch thick- and unless you have ample calories to spare or like to feel like you are eating a tundra of cheese, I prefer to spread the cheese only about three ants high instead -- and its still very tasty! The only other difference I notice is that the goat cheese in France smelled much more “goaty” than any I buy here. Its almost as if the goat cheese that you buy in the U.S. has been forced to shower!

Alexandra’s Very Easy & Tasty Sandwich Recipe
Serves 4 Adults with a Regular Appetite or Laini at dinnertime [ed. note. Hey!]

All you Need Are:

2 Baguettes
2 Red Peppers
2 Yellow Peppers
2 Sweet Onions
Goat Cheese - but preferably not the sort you squeeze out like toothpaste

Preheat oven to 350.

Cut each baguette in half, or in thirds. Then slice them in the middle using your knife- or you can do what I do which is just pry them gently apart with your fingers. I like the more ‘tousled’ bread look better myself!

Next, slice your peppers and onions in two and three inch long strips. Saute in olive oil.

Meanwhile, don’t forget about the bread! Place them in the center of your oven with or without a baking sheet for 5-7 minutes, or until toasty and a tiny bit crunchy. I like to turn the bread over for the last two minutes but sometimes I forget and its no biggie.

Now the bread, peppers, and onions should be all finished and temporarily placed aside because really they only play second fiddle roles as the headliner will always, always, and always be....the goat cheese, showered or not. Turn on the French national anthem as you take out your finest knife and proceed to spread a nice layer of cheese across each open faced slice, and only then, after each last teensy weensy part of the cheese has taken its place on stage, then you can bring out the supporting cast and arrange your sauteed veggies on top. Eat while warm with the anthem playing on loop.



Moving on, I come from a family in which I have been conditioned and am now unable to sleep past 7 am most mornings. My father revealed to me recently that on long road trips growing up, after we had all fallen asleep in our hotel beds, he would quietly set all the alarm clocks one to two hours ahead so that we could be up and out as early as possible. The upside of this years later is that one of my favorite things to do when traveling is to meet the city at the break of dawn when most of its inhabitants, and all of its tourists, are still snoozing. You see things you wouldn’t otherwise -- the way the sunlight skims and tickles the horizon and rooftops out of its slumber, the smell of baking croissants wafting out the backdoors of bakeries left open, and farmers pulling their vehicles into open market stalls as they unload cherries, melons, tomatoes, lettuce, among other edibles. I watched in Nice as two men, both with soccer ball bellies, tossed heads of lettuce to each other from the car to the stall’s tables, laughing and teasing as they did so. There is a crispness to early morning air that hasn’t yet been trampled by the breaths and banter of bankers and bakers on their way to work, mothers with crabby toddlers in tow, oblivious teens who bump into you as they text, not to mention an absence of honking cars, radios, sirens, and other miscellaneous human murmurs and yelps. The city seems to perch on your palm, and beckon to be explored alone.

One morning I was the first to arrive at a cafe in the Provencal town of Avignon. The waitor asked what I was reading and when I told him The Bread of Angels by Stephanie Saldana, he asked me what it was about. I explained that it is an autobiographical account of Saldana’s year living in Syria as a Fullbright scholar at the height of our war with Iraq. A Catholic from Texas, she was there to study the portrayal of Jesus in the Koran. It is also very much about the Syrians she comes to befriend and provides a very much-needed human face on the people of Syria as individuals at a time when our government was giving them the not-so-distinct honor as a member of the “Axis of Evil.” Because I was the only one there, he was able to sit down and tell me his own experience of being Muslim in France. “When I’m in France,” he explained to me, “I’m not really considered French though I was born here. But when I worked in England, I was. I’m French everywhere but in my own homeland. Because I’m a Muslim, because I’m an Arab.” This same sentiment was expressed to me by a college student, Naouel, whom I traveled with by train from Avignon to Nice. She wore a beautiful silk orange headwrap. I asked her what she thought about Chirac’s efforts to make wearing the headdress out in public illegal. Her eyes welled up and she shook her head. Then she said, “It will not change anything if it happens. What needs to change, to open, is the human heart.”

I met Mormon boys on two year missions in France, a Croatian couple who gave me the rundown on the last 25 years of their lives in broken English, an aspiring Mexican filmmaker, Rafael, who spent two great hours describing to me in amazing detail his month spent on El Camino De Santiago with his father, wonderful cousins I had never met before, and a once famous and now retired actor from Algeria while sipping tea in Le Mosque patissierie which is a part of the oldest mosque in Paris.



And of course thats the best part of traveling, that one meets so many people you would otherwise never cross paths with. We discover new parts of ourselves in places we have never been as we set eyes on new sights, taste new flavors, and are exposed to different ways of seeing and being in the world than our own narrow conditioning has often allowed.

More pictures at the Mosque de Paris:



If you’re planning to go to France, here is a wrap-up of things that I would highly recommend and that were the definite most favorite moments.

1) ANNECY

Annecy is a small town in the Alps that offers the best bike ride I have ever taken in my life. You can bike for miles and miles on a relatively flat path along the lake, surrounded entirely by the Alps, as you whiz by tiny villages and cathedrals. Bring a sandwich with you, and a huge bag of cherries naturally, and have a picnic after a few hours in any of the sweet tiny lakeside parks along the way. Annecy itself couldn’t be any more idyllic with its medieval center filled with flower-lined canals, cobblestoned streets, and the best apricot and coconut sorbet known to mankind. An old 12th-century prison jettisons out at one juncture right over one of the central townsquare canals. I would love to have spent a whole summer here eating ice-cream, going for local hikes, renting paddle boats and reading out in the middle of the lake, and strolling through the daily early morning open market that stretches right over one of the canal bridges.



2) CHAGALL MUSEUM

Chagall is one of my all-time favorite painters and his prints, along with Laini’s, make up the bulk of art on my walls both at home and office. Nonetheless, I wasn’t initially super excited to see the Chagall museum down in Nice because I knew it was comprised primarily of his biblical scenes which have never interested me nearly as much as his paintings of Russian or Parisian life. All that changed the moment I entered the surprisingly small but beautiful museum. The works are huge and displayed in a white gallery that is flooded with just enough natural light to illuminate each painting’s vibrant details perfectly. Each one was filled with so many details I had never picked up seeing in a book or even a poster. There is also a great little garden cafe outside that was a great spot to read and journal in.


3) ROTHSCHILD VILLA

I came back a second day just to write and draw here. The Rothschild villa took five years to build, and is a flamingo pink extravaganza with an enormous garden in the shape of a ship’s bow. In addition to that garden, there are five others, with my favorite being the Spanish Garden. I really like the Baronness’s sense of practicality too. While she already had four villas in the rather near vicinities, one can never have enough villas. Isn’t it weird to think of having so much money that you could build a villa the way children build houses out of Legos? [ed. note: what's weird about that? Doesn't everyone do that?] I read that when she lived there until her death in the 1930s she made all the gardeners dress like sailors and liked to dress as Marie Antoinette when having guests over. The villa overlooks the Mediterranean Sea in the heart of the French Riviera, and is an easy 20-minute bus ride from Nice.

4) ICE CREAM

This isn’t a spot so much as a suggestion. I kept a gelato ratings page in my journal so I could be sure to track my favorite flavors. Plus time was short and I wanted to be sure to try as many kinds as possible, and avoid revisiting any of the more mediocre flavors accidentally. Focus and planning is very important with so many flavors to cover. The top three star ratings went to cocco, stracciatella, bacio, pistaccio integrale, amarena, and nocciola piemonte!

Maya Angelou said somewhere that “Every child should have traveling shoes.” I’d add to that “every adult too.” I came back from this trip reinspired to work on my second draft of my novel after feeling rather stagnant the last few months. I come back feeling grateful for my family of dear friends and of course, a new appreciation for cheese. I also came back with a reassembled list of priorities and goals. Great travel does that, and while its fun to have new adventures far from home, my favorite part I think may always be the new miles it allows us to travel inwardly, infusing the soul with courage and desire to have more adventures right here on our own home turf and in our very own sweet hearts. [ed. note: yeah yeah yeah. And the cheese!]

Chiapas Trip Part 3 - Palenque and the jungle/ Chiapas Travel

All is not yet told with our trip to Mexico. So far we have wandered around San Cristobal eating walnut popsicles and banana soup, attended strange religious rites in a Mayan village church, waded in a waterfall (when we really should have swum), spooked some crocodiles off some river banks, and consumed our weight in mangoes (daily). Next stop: the Lacandon rainforest and the ancient Mayan city of Palenque.

The Lacandon is the western hemisphere's most significant rainforest north of the Amazon, and is home to a huge percentage of Mexico's biodiversity. Jaguars, ocelots, howler monkeys, toucans, crocodiles, and many other exciting beasties, not to mention Zapatistas. Of course, we saw almost none of those things in our brief excursion to the jungle -- just howler monkeys, but that was what I most wanted to see, so it's okay.

Let me begin telling this story by saying that our first four days in Chiapas, the weather was perfect. Blue skies and all. And whenever we would meet a traveler who'd come from Palenque, they'd say, without exception, "It is SO HOT. Rivers of sweat. Streaming, dripping sweat." And other graphic descriptions of amounts of sweat. I was a little trepidatious about this, not being a sweat-lover, but I was game for the jungle -- eager for the jungle -- and I figured sweat was just part of the scene. So.

When we woke early early to catch our bus, and it was raining quite heavily, I was not afraid. We had a five-hour drive ahead of us. I guess I just assumed there was a little patch of rain hovering over San Cristobal, but that our bus would drive away from it, and then it would be sunny. The first problem was that our van was full, and it being full, there was no room in it for our backpacks. The backpacks had to go on top. In the rain. "There is a cover," said the driver, proceeding to climb up on top and start arranging said cover. It seems to me now quite ominous in retrospect, that he did not want any of us to help him, or even to watch him. Could that be because the cover didn't. . . cover? Well.

We drove, and drove. The roads in Chiapas are not only snakey-curvy, but they are fraught with speedbumps. More speedbumps that you have ever seen in your life. You're zooming along, then you squeal to a stop for another series of speedbumps. You jounce around a lot. It's fine. You get used to it. There are a lot of little villagey encampments right alongside the road, a lot of strolling livestock, hence the bumps. We drove. The rain did not abate.

We reached our first stop of the day, the long-anticipated Agua Azul waterfall, where I had hoped to fulfill the "swim in a waterfall" dream (well, I have swum in waterfalls, in Hawaii and here in Oregon, but I really really wanted to swim here. Look how blue this is, how beautiful. . .



Um, I got those photos off Google. Here's what it looked like when we were there:

Not azul. Not on April 14, 2008! Oy. What you can't tell from this photo is what I had to go through to get this photo. See, the rain had flooded the waterfall. The river had leapt its banks and turned all the pathways into rivers, all the stairways into waterfalls. To even get to the viewpoints we had to walk upstream against the tide of these newborn little rivers, and they were brown and powerful and you couldn't see where you were stepping and. . . people started falling into holes.

The local kids could have stopped it, they could have called out, "No, not that way!" but they didn't. They sat back and howled with laughter. It was pretty funny. Until, er, I fell in the water! Oy, up to my waist. And I was wearing jeans. Soaked, heavy jeans! Bleh. And that was to be the extent of the "swimming" at Agua Azul! DRAT!

At our next stop, the waterfall of Misol Ha, I bought a skirt so that I could change out of my jeans. It was a cute skirt, too! But I needn't have bothered -- we went on to Palenque and by the time we'd been there for ten minutes, I was entirely drenched again! It was the most extraordinary rain I have ever encountered. It was ludicrous rain. The sky was just plain showing off. You really couldn't see. The whole world was a waterfall. And here we were, at Palenque, a wonder of the ancient world, a once-in-a-lifetime (maybe) trip! What to do? Well, of course we had to go and see what we could, rain or not. So we bought cheapo ponchos and waded in.

Remember what everyone told us about Palenque? How hot? Streams of sweat? Not so much! Oh my GOD. The rain. Everywhere the standing water was well above our ankles and we slogged through, laughing hysterically inside our ponchos, looking like a little troupe of wet hunchback ghosts. Here we are:
And here's beautiful, mysterious Palenque, lost in the mist:
Well, on a normal day, so we're told, Palenque gets between 1400 and 6000 tourists tramping around. This day, there were about 5. At the time it was comical, but now I feel like we were lucky to witness such a ferocious act of nature, and to have this spot to ourselves.

Did I mention that they haven't had this sort of out-of-season storm in over 20 years? Ha! Well, we were also told that as insane as the rain was, it was just "a shower" compared to the storms of late summer. Wow.

And the best part of the day was yet to come. After we'd finished our slog and were about to get back on the bus, the rain abated almost entirely and a series of incredibly eerie roars started to echo through the trees. Monkeys! Yay, yay, yay! Monkeys! They're called "howler" monkeys, but this is an incredible misnomer. They don't howl. They ROAR. They sound like monsters, and they were all around, roaring back and forth. We could see them moving through the treetops and the sound, it was just insanely alien and freaky and COOL. It made my day.

The day ended at El Panchan, which is a kind of "backpacker village" in the jungle just a few kilometers away from Palenque:
Set amid dense trees and a crisscrossing of streams, there are a number of hostels and cabanas, and a really really good restaurant called Don Mucho's, where you sit under a thatched palapa and listen to really really good live music while drinking cervezas and maragaritas and eating delicious "Mexican-Italian food."
It's really very good that there was this pleasant end to the day, even if I had to go to dinner dressed in Jim's swim trunks and oversize sweatshirt because my own clothes were ruined. Ruined. As expected, my backpack was wet. Not just wet: saturated. Everything in it could have just been fished out of a river, that's how wet. And that's not all. The new scarf I had bought at the market in San Cristobal had bled blue all over everything. I now was the owner of many extremely wet, extremely tie-tyed clothes! And my brand-new hair dryer was dead, so I couldn't even dry my wet soppy hair! Oh. If it wasn't for the good food, the cervezas and the margarita, I would probably have cried. At least El Panchan is just the kind of place where you can go to dinner in your husband's swim trunks and no one will think anything of it!

Here's adorable little "Nyeli," who's half-Tsotsil/half-Canadian, and who just loves to dance:
To wrap up the rest of the tale in a quick and slap-dash way, we spent the next day at the gorgeous ruins of Yaxchilan and Bonampak, deeper down in the Lacandon. Look at this ENORMOUS TREE. It makes me feel like a fairy!We took a river trip along the Usumacinta, which makes the border with Guatemala, we heard a whole lot more howler monkeys, and ended the day once more with good music, good food, cervezas, and margaritas under a palapa in the jungle. Oh yeah, there was chocolate cake too!

And the next day, with sun shining, we returned to Palenque and really saw it. It was gorgeous, the weather was perfect, and it wasn't even hot or humid! We hired a guide and he told us a lot of interesting history and identified trees and bird sounds (heard toucans, didn't see them), and all in all, it was beautiful. Here's the biggest pyramid; the red circle is there for scale (there's a wee little person inside it!)



And that's our trip to the jungle! Next time I go somewhere with jungle, I really want to experience JUNGLE. I want to take a Sierra Club trip or something, camp in a jungle, ride an elephant, see huge creepy spiders, that sort of thing. (Jim might not so much want that, though). But this was a glimpse, and good to get it now. Sadly, the Lacandon is being cut down at an absolutely alarming rate, like every other forest in the world. If you want to see trees, you should probably see them soon.

{If you didn't know this, you should: Bush is pushing hard to log Sequoia National Monument. Yah. Sequoia National Monument. Whaaa? Now is a really time to become a Sierra Club member and help combat this insanity.}

Chiapas Trip Part 2 - Around San Cristobal/ Chiapas Travel

As I mentioned in my last post, San Cristobal makes a great base from which to take day trips around the countryside. After our first day of wandering in the city, that's what we did. This involved going in vans with other travelers to see waterfalls, take boat trips, and visit Mayan villages. It's really the only way to feasibly see these areas without a car of your own (and there's still some sketchiness to driving in Chiapas; you hear of unofficial document-check sites that spring up on lonely roads, but are really bandits or Zapatistas or something. Anyway, we didn't try it.)

Our first day trip was to Sumidero Canyon, a dramatic stretch of the Rio Grijalva that goes through a narrow gorge. We took a fast lancha over the green water -- fast -- slowing down to gawk at sunning crocodiles and troupes of spider monkeys making their way through the treetops. It was gorgeously sunny and egrets were everywhere, sailing in twos just above the surface of the river, and the sky was just filled with circling black vultures. At one point, in a narrow part of the canyon, you looked up and up and the rock seemed to stretch so far up on both sides (the boat pilot said its highest point was one mile, but we didn't know whether to believe him) and the shapes of the circling birds seemed to recede into forever, until they were only specks so high overhead.
Funny thing about the crocodiles. In days after, when we'd meet others who'd done the same trip on different days, they all seemed to have seen the exact same number of crocs (2) under the exact same circumstances, giving rise to rumors that the guides have two trained crocodiles waiting at specified bends in the river. Ha!

The next day we took a much longer trip that was ostensibly about going to the Lagos de Montebello, down at the Guatemalan border. Well, we did end up making it to the lakes by evening, to find them relatively unspectacular, but along the way we had seen much more interesting sites: the waterfall of El Chiflon, the Tzeltal (Mayan) village of Amantenagro del Valle (known for its pottery), and some caves filled with very strange rock formations.

A potter named Maria:
The bird planters you see everywhere in Chiapas, made in Amantenango:
Interestingly, this day we ended up on a tour van not with foreign travelers, but with Mexican tourists. There were two brothers and a sister from Monterrey, in their 60s or 70s, and a mother and daughter from Mexico City, among others, and we had such a great time with them! We were the only non-Spanish speakers, and they helped translate for us. I should note here, we met NO other travelers from the US. For some reason, Americans don't go to Chiapas. There were Europeans and Israelis, primarily. Huh.If you're going to Chiapas, you can safely give the Lagos de Montebello a miss, unless you're planning on kayaking or something, but the pottery at Amantenango and the waterfall at El Chiflon more than made the day worth it. My only regret is that we only waded at El Chiflon, and didn't swim -- it would have been PERFECT swimming, sea-green water, perfect temperature, stretches of smooth rock in lazy bends of green water, with little chutes and eddies. . . But we only had an hour so we just waded, thinking we'd get our waterfall swimming fix at Agua Azul later on. Well, that was not going to be, alas, but we didn't know it yet!! (That story is for later.)
P.S. Those are only the "tiptoes" of the waterfall -- up above that there's the really high, dramatic part of the cascade, then it goes over a series of smaller drops, each with their own little plunge pools, one of which was just the perfect shady spot for wading.

Our third and final day trip was the most interesting, and took us to two Mayan villages near San Cristobal. San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan are both Tzotzil villages, but they couldn't be more different. Chamula. . . this was the strangest day of our entire trip. Really strange! First, there was a mild pall of fear cast over all us tourists because of the Chamulans' reputation for not tolerating photography -- you see, they believe they have 13 souls (12 human and one animal) and that when you take their picture, you steal one of their souls. Really! These girls let me take their picture (for 30 pesos), but I noticed that none of them looked at the camera. I wonder if that is their compromise, and they believe it protects their souls.
It's a fascinating experience, going to this village where they clearly have entered the modern era to some degree (there are satellite dishes and pretty nice cars, not to mention more Coca Cola than you've ever seen in your life), but they really truly stick to their old customs! They wear their traditional costumes, intricately embroidered blouses and furry black wool skirts for the women, and wool tunics and ribboned hats for the men, and they practice a very colorful blend of Catholicism and their old, mystic religion in the village church.
And here's the thing that had us all reeling: Coca Cola is part of their religion. Really! I want to know so much more, but here's the gist: there are no priests (ostensibly "Catholic," they actually worship John the Baptist above Christ), but five levels of shamans. For ills both physical and spiritual, you go to the church to consult a shaman. Once you tell him your problem he sends you off for supplies for your ritual. These involve white taper candles, eggs, Coca Cola (X number of bottles, depending on the severity of the problem), bottles of "posh" (sugar cane liquor, also used as medicine, even for babies and young children), and, in many case, a chicken or several to sacrifice in the church. We'd intentionally waited until Sunday/market day to go to Chamula, because that is when all of this is in full swing. The village zocalo and the church were crammed full, and walking into that church was like walking into another world. (Photography is absolutely forbidden, so sorry, no photos!)

There are Catholic saints in glass cases, but there any feel of Catholicism ends. The floor is strewn with fresh pine needles (the fragrance!) and covered with lit candles. It's dangerous to walk in there! Really. Every few paces is a shaman and client at work, and they'll have softened the ends of some fifty candles and stuck them right to the floor, and they pray as the candles burn down. Next to each client was their stock of Coca Cola, posh, eggs, and chickens in bags awaiting their fates. We avoided watching any actual neck-wrenching, personally.

The kicker is that the village leaders make big $$$ as the Coca Cola suppliers, and there it begins to make a kind of terrible capitolist sense. Shamans, apparently, will be shunned for refusing to use Coke in their rituals. It's a shunning society -- and worse. There's a charming little story in the town history I bought in the square that tells how in 1914 a Municipal President tried to change certain customs. Well, he was overthrown, and before they executed him, the townspeople made him dig his own grave. Oy. So, you can imagine that socially the Chamulans are really steeped in the old ways. The average age of marriage for the girls is a ripe old 13, and marriages are all arranged by the parents, with the girl having no right to refuse a suitor. Apparently the boys "shop" for wives on market Sundays! Our guide Fernando asked what traits we supposed the boys were looking for, and a smart-aleck Israeli named Charon quipped, "Brains?"

Ha. Not so! Fernando's answer was that of course they are looking for strong workers; specifically, they look at the one exposed body part -- the calves -- to see if a girl is strong or not!

Buying more weavings in the square:
Ooh, and I bought some embroidery yarn that they use in the weavings. Not all this! Just a selection. Don't know what I'm going to do with it, but some day I'll think of something:
Really, San Juan Chamula is another world, another time! But in Zinacantan, not 7 km away, though they are also Tzotzil people, things are really different. Because they have more communal wealth due to a greenhouse program that exports flowers all over Mexico, they have more education, and hence. . . change. Couples marry for love -- actually, they "escape" together and come back when the girl is pregnant, and are married in church by a priest!!

In Zinacantan we watched weavers at work, and we -- of course -- shopped, and we also got to see the inside of a traditional house and watch the women making tortillas over a wood fire. And then we got to eat fresh tortillas!
Note how all the Zinacantan women are wearing the same color scheme of purple and blue. Their clothing is so gorgeous!

Women weaving on a backstrap loom:

In the courtyard:

There's much more interesting stuff to tell, but this post is getting a little long, so I'll leave it at that.

Tomorrow we're off to the SCBWI conference in Seattle, where we will get to have lunch with Arthur Levine and talk about Goblin Fruit (yay!!), and have a "West Coast Kids Lit Drink Night" organized by the inimitable Betsy Bird. Can't wait! More after the weekend. Cheers!