day fourteen: santo domingo market, cucumber limonada

San Cristobal is even more beautiful in the day than at night. I had a shower before breakfast, and the water was actually hot, and the water pressure actually washed the shampoo out of my hair, which was so nice. Breakfast was equally good - strong coffee, eggs however you wanted (and could pronounce in Spanish), and a choice of fruit plate or juice. I should point out, too, that the fruit here is so much better than the fruit at home - here it´s grown for flavour, not for ability to keep while being shipped across continents, and it´s picked ripe from the tree, so mangos actually taste like mangos, and I´m told that the bananas taste like real bananas (I wouldn´t know).
The big event of the day was the market at Santo Domingo. We went on a brief walking tour so we knew where the main street was, and the market, and then had the day to explore; we were there from 9 am til 6 pm, and there were hundreds of vendors with scarves, shawls, stuffed toys, Zapatista swag, shirts, embroidered goods, jewelry... I started my shopping in earnest (we had been told to wait til Chiapas for most of our shopping, because the prices are much better) and got quite a sunburn, accidentally, even though it was much cooler than in Merida.
The two restaurants Anne and I ate at were both on Kerry´s recommendation, and as she is a vegetarian, they´re both fairly hippy sort of places, but very good regardless. There are a lot of European hippies in Chiapas for some reason - probably because of the Zapatista movement - and so there are a lot of organic or vegetarian places.
For lunch we went to a vegetarian juice bar where I had enfrijolatas (tortillas with queso and beans) and a strawberry-pineapple-papaya smoothie, which was amazing; Anne had enchiladas with textured vegetable protein (a common meat substitute at home, too) and queso stuffing, and guava juice (Anne has a thing about guavas).
We had supper with a couple others at the Madre Tierre (Mother Earth) restaurant; everyone else had chili con carne, and I had curried chicken, which was nice, but the real star of the meal was the cucumber limonada, which was really good. For the millionth time I wished I could take a picture of a taste.
We also spent some time at the internet cafe - I had a video chat with Mom and wrote two blog entries, but couldn´t reach Sean or burn CDs of pictures, which was too bad.