day seven: magic, typical dances, balcony

This was the day I figured out how to post pictures, and thus started getting behind on my blogging as my internet time was eaten up catching up on pictures for previous entries. The days are far too short here!
During project class I tried to write again to get caught up, but a power bump killed my entry and so I went out to El Trapiche, the place with the excellent sopa de lima. I ordered panuchos, but couldn´t quite finish them - the portions there are so large!
I was pretty tired for some reason and barely got through Spanish class awake; it keeps happening, so I think it has to do more with the time of day than the class or a lack of sleep. We covered concepts like how to say ¨What does your uncle do for a job? He is a lawyer", etc.
After class, Anne and I waited for Laura the huipil designer for almost an hour, and she didn´t show up. Disappointed, we took Will, Steve, Fraser and Mitch to the laundry. We wandered around in Centro for the afternoon and evening, and saw lots of great things:

• We stopped in at a Mayan chocolate boutique. Before, the girl at the counter had given us free samples of chocolate, and they were delicious; this time, she gave us toasted cocoa beans with honey, and also little glasses of cool, frothy chocolate drink.
• While walking with the boys, we stopped in at a gaming store, which had cosplay event posters, anime playing on a little TV, a rack of manga and hentai, and about ten Maya geeks playing Magic. Will sells Magic cards at home, so it was a neat sort of experience. To fully appreciate it, he bought a pack and passed it around so we could experience new card smell.
• Anne and I met up with Christiane and Mary, and went looking for a co-op Christiane used to visit. We had a lot of trouble finding it, and when we got there Christiane was disappointed that the prices had gone up and quality gone down, but on the way we bought coconut popsicles, and they were perfect - cold, just a little sweet, with shredded coconut in them.
• Also with Christiane and Mary, we stopped in at the city hall, which used to be a colonial administration building, in order to see the huge murals on display there. Most of the history of the area is represented in them; there are probably about twenty, and they´re all at least 10´by 8´, and many of them are much, much larger. They´re all the work of a single painter, whose name escapes me at the moment, but I will add later when I look it up.
  
  

  (a mural depicting a Maya worker bowed under the weight of a bale of sisal, a major industry of the Spanish colony)

• We went out to a bank so Anne could change money and I found a crazy clothing store, probably seconds, that was shoulder-to-shoulder packed with women buying shirts for 15 or 20 pesos a piece. I bought six. :)

In the evening we went back to the main square near us to see "typical dances" (that seems to be the preferred tranlation of "traditional dances") performed by a troupe of little boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 12 in traditional (colonial, not ancient) garb. The dancing was almost as incredible as the costumes; the girls wore the formal version of huipils,with many gold rosaries, blue mantillas, white heels and big flowers in their hair, while the boys wore all white with panama hats and red bandanas in their pockets. The dances ranged from relatively simple to a complex maypole dance, dancing with beer bottles balanced on their heads, and then dancing with trays of bottles and glasses of water balanced on their heads. Just incredible. I´ve never seen little boys behave so well.(unforunately all my pictures are blurry like this, but my videos turned out well and I´ll post them when I get back to the land of better bandwidth)
After the show, Anne and I went to a little restaurant on the corner of the square and sat out on a tiny balcony to eat a light supper. A very nice guy at the next table over took our picture for me, so I took a picture of him and his friend too. Anne had a beef dish and I had the best guacamole I´ve ever had. I also had a sangria, which came layered. Very pretty, and much, much better than the sangria at home. After a couple of pictures, we left to the sound of Crocodile Rock on the kitchen radio and returned to the Flamingo for well earned rest.