San Cristobal, Mexico & New Years 2008

Here in Xela looking at the date today, its hard to belive its already halfway through January 2008. Its been a while since I wrote and I won´t try to describe everything I´ve done as its been a lot, but would like to highlight some things.

Just after Christmas I took a trip to San Cristobal de Las Casas, Mexico. Its a beautiful highland town, sorrounded by wooded mountains and populated with buildings of well preserved colonial style architecture. San Cristobal is in the Mexican state of Chiapas and was the site of a Zapatista takeover in 1994, though now feels much more like a tranquil tourist town than the site of a violent uprising. I spent a few days there in a nice French-owned hostel called Los Camellos. Mostly I explored, enjoyed being in a peaceful town, and ate lots of tacos.

I had two highlights there. The first was a visit to San Juan Chamula, an indigenous town about 20 minutes away from San Cristobal. I visited on Sunday, which is both market day and worship day. The market there is in the plaza directly in front of the church, thus the entire area is quite crowded. The worship in Chamula is a mix of ¨pre-conquest Maya customs, Spanish Catholic traditions, and subsequent innovations,¨ says Wikipedia. Essentially, there are no pews in the church, but instead a mass of people pushing forward or sorrounding candles on the floor sorrounded by wooden saints on the wall. Wikipedia has a good description well worth reading. It was intense being inside the church, literally trapped among thousands of people, breathing the incense.

The other highlight was a visit to a museum called Na Bolom which documentes the history of the indidenous Maya peoples of the La Selva jungle in Chiapas. Its a great museum with incredible photography and lovely grounds sorrounding it. Definitely worth the visit.

Though San Cristobal has a lot to offer, I found myself feeling somewhat disconnected from the place and from the hostel I stayed at. I decided to to take a bus back to Xela to spend new years eve at the hostel where I´ve been living, feeling like it was better to be with the friends that I have here than in a city by myself where I was starting to feel a tad bit lonely. So I took the 10 hour ride, along which I was very aware of the 1st world to 3rd world transition I made crossing the border back into Guatemala. The roads are in worse shape, the busses older and less comfortable, the houses poorer. I was reminded of the Manu Chao song Welcome to Tijuana, which has always reminded me of crossing the border from San Diego down into Tijuana, though this border corssing is a whole different type of transition. You can watch the video at youtube here : click. Manu Chao is espescially interesting as being the new Bob Marley of traveling, as I hear him in literally every hostel and every traveler oriented bar I go to (along with an uncanny amount of Guns and Roses).

New Years in Xela was nice, saw a live cuban band in a French restaurant and hung out at the hostel. No public celebration here, but tons of fireworks, including those we set off ourself in the street. It was cool looking around up at the hills above Xela and seeing the fireworks that people were setting off at their houses. I was glad to have spent the holiday back here in the town that feels more and more like home.

I think I´ll stop this post here and leave the next post to descrbe my travels around Guatemala with Sara Leib, my oldest friend and a great Jazz singer. Since that trip I´ve also seen some interesting developments in my volunteer work with Partners in Solidarity. Its quite interesting the what can happen when one chooses to travel without plans, more or less trying out what comes your way. I feel sometimes like I´m so at home here, and other times miss the states immensely and can´t quite figure out what I´m doing here. It really has been quite the learning experience though, learning a new language and figuring out how to get along in a new culture.

So for now, all done rambling and posting. I hope to be in touch with those that get these posts and hear about things back in your respective homes.

Cheers and with Love

Josh

Bonus post: Pepian Recipe

Greetings from Lake Atitlan, where I currently am staying in a lovely and small village called San Marcos. I´ll fill in some travel blanks soon, but for the meantime wanted to post the recipe for Pepian, a food I´ve mentioned a few times on the blog, and pictured in the photo album below.

(Recipe as recorded by my friend James)

You need:

• a cup or so of sesame seeds

• a cup or so of pepitorias; these look like greenish pumpkin seeds,but my Guatemalan friends assure me that they are not pumpkin seeds. However, according to a brief Google search, they are in fact pumpkin seeds. So I have no idea what they really are but pumpkin seeds wouldprobably work fine.

• 4 or 5 plum tomatoes

• a cup and a half of miltomates aka tomatillos

• a pound of green beans, de-stemmed

• a couple of big carrots, peeled

• 2 pounds of rice

• a couple of small pieces of cinnamon (something like three or four pieces, each roughly 1 cm by 3 cm)

• two kinds of dried chile: chile pasa, a black chile that looks like a raisin (thus the name) and chile guaque. You need a small piece of each type of chile, something like a 3 cm slice of each.

• cumin

• black pepper

• a loaf of bread

• some kind of broth; we did it with chicken broth on one night and beef broth on another night, but it would also work with vegetarian broth.

Cooking Instructions

1. Toast the sesame seeds until they’re golden
2. Toast the pepitorias until they’re golden
3. Toast the entire loaf of bread.
4. In a dry saucepan, heat the tomatillos until they’re somewhat soft and blackened, but not so much that they lose their shape.
5. In a dry saucepan, heat two of the plum tomatoes, the cinnamon, and the chiles. You should cut the chiles and the cinnamon up into smaller pieces so they cook better. This step takes a long time and you will think you’re burning the chiles, as they’ll give off a toxic smoke. Don’t worry; they’ll be done when they’re completely blackened and look like they’re charcoal. The cinnamon should be somewhat blackened and the tomatoes somewhat blackened (but, again, it shouldn’t lose its shape).
6. Mix all of the above except the bread, plus the black pepper and cumin. Blend a cup at a time in a blender, adding water or broth as needed to help it blend. After blending each batch, strain it into a pot using a sieve. Use extra water or broth to extract more of the sauce from the stuff in the sieve. You’ll need to scrape the sieve with a spoon to make sure all the sauce gets through. When it’s all strained, you should have a sort of sandy mush in the sieve and asmooth, nutty sauce in the pot. Discard the sandy mush part.
7. Mash the toasted loaf of bread with enough broth to make it into mush, but not a liquidy mush. Blend the bread mush, put it in the pot, and stir it well. This is the pepian sauce. Let it simmer for a while, stirring occasionally.
8. (This can be done in parallel.) Chop the green beans, carrots, and the remaining tomatoes. Put them in a large pot with some oil and heat over a high flame. When they’re cooked, throw in the rice (yes, that’s dry rice) and stir constantly. After several minutes the rice should become golden brown. Add an appropriate quantity of water and a good amount of salt, cover the pot and allow it to simmer until the rice has absorbed all the water.
9. I served it with an additional salsa of chiles, garlic, onion, lime, cilantro, and salt; I think it adds a welcome kick.