Wednesday 4th September
Today we took the bus to Valladolid which took maybe 2 hours or so. It was about 2pm by the time we had walked to the hotel, which was a bit posh for us. It was a town with nothing particularly cheap to stay in which seems to be becoming a theme. Unfortunately there was no not water still- we've taken to leaving the showers on for a few minutes when we arrive to check for hot water but we are always left disappointed. After some time just settling and relaxing we went to look around the town. We went to the main park which had more love seats around it and a fountain with a maya lady pouring water. We visited what was called the municipal palace which i think is mainly used for council and public meetings. Inside there were some beautiful paintings depicting the maya looking into their seeing glasses and seeing ships of the europeans coming. They saw the ships as the downfall of the maya and they wernt far wrong. What followed was a lot of torture, slavery and massive upheavals of their daily lives. It also had a painting showing the revolutions some groups of Mayans organised in the following years.
After some more walking we came across what was signposted as the First textile mill, which was good for the towns economy but was burnt down in the revolution by the maya. There wasnt much to see really other than the sign but at least we learned something i suppose. It was based in what was was supposedly a beautiful courtyard but it was a bit dodgy with odd looking people hanging about like the Mexican version of chavs you get at home. We saw a few different churches, they have loads, and one in particular was beautiful which stood out. It was called the San Servacio parish, and it's sort of hard to explain what was so nice about it. It was the details in the stone, it had borders around the door ways and lovely carvings all over which wernt Christian looking they were more rustic and I suppose more mayan which is why I liked it.
We went to a former chapel that had been made into a museum but was all in Spanish so we had no idea what on earth was going on with any of it and didn't spend much time in there at all. So then we went down the thoroughfare of the friars which is a sort of alley way connecting the main town to a different neighbourhood. It was very nice down there, there were restored buildings with original lamp posts from many years ago, lots of gorgeous colours in the paintwork of all of the buildings. It had a proper local feel to it and it almost felt like we had stepped back in time a little bit with all the ladies wearing the traditional maya dresses and the men riding their bikes.
We stumbled across a nice surprise down there which was a little locally run Chocolate museum run by local Maya's. It was undergoing a project to restore some original Mayan traditions such as the art of hand made chocolate making from local cacao. We were talked through the hand made process of getting the beans, drying them out in the sun and grinding it into a powder. The fat that comes out of the beans is used as cocoa butter which seems to be mainly cosmetic but she said they also use it in cooking. We watched a couple of ladies making chocolate balls from the cocoa, and because they've ground all the fats out you can actually see them drying as they sit there. They don't melt in the heat because its just pure cocoa with nothing that could melt added in. We went on to taste a load of them, it was such a good experience. They had types that were made with flavours they would have used with their cocoa in pre Hispanic times, with things such as vanilla, chilli, spices, honey. There was a pure one which was so bitter it was almost like coffee. They then had some with flavours introduced after the spaniards arrived, and some blends they had done themselves such as tequila for example. Some were nicer than others but it was interesting to try them all, and the texture was totally different to our normal chocolate because of the purity. We also tried a cocoa bean prior to it having gone through the process for chocolate making, and it had a really nutty taste which was quite surprising. We were under no obligation at all to buy but we did anyway so we could take some home for other people to try.
We walked further and came to a convent which looked more like a fortress in the middle of a green square. It had a beautiful carved alterpeice covering most of the front wall and lovely old paintings on the stone work which were great to look at. After all that, we decided to get a pizza for tea from a dominos we had seen during our wanderings. So we went back with that and ate it with a film for the evening. It felt strange eating a dominos pizza but it was a Mexican style one so it fit the scene quite nicely!
