Hey there, everyone. Somehow, it’s already my sixth week in San Cristóbal de las Casas. To echo previous bloggers’ sentiments, it’s a little startling how quickly the weeks blew past. Honestly, I haven’t taken a lot of time to reflect on much until now. There’s too much I want to write about to fit in one blog, but I hope I can still provide a glimpse into my time abroad in Mexico under the Loewenstern program, along with highlights of what I’ve learned and experienced these past few weeks. ¿Mi chapalot xa?
Ecology
The ecology in Chiapas has been exciting to watch! The hardest part has been taking pictures of critters without their scattering, flying away, hiding behind tree branches, or shifting at the most inopportune times. Even after I would give up taking pictures of them, I’m not well-versed enough to be able to identify as many of them as I would like to. Still, it’s thrilling to see a new animal show up for me to admire. I saw hummingbirds that zip past our window from time to time. I saw lizards and moths of all sorts of sizes and colors. There were also several daddy-long-legs in my bathroom, which was fun to discover while I was showering.
There’s a natural overlap between the flora and fauna of Houston and Chiapas, even as far south as we are. I got to see plenty of familiar monarch butterflies and prickly pear cacti. Even so, there were plenty of other new faces like the white-throated magpie jay (Calocitta formosa) and Bocourt’s emerald lizard (Sceloporus smaragdinus). I even got to see a white-nosed coatí (Nasua narica) at Las Cascadas de Chiflón!
White-nosed coatí. If you get a microscope, I bet you’d almost be able to see it in the picture. The other shots were even worse than this one, funnily enough.
Milkweed. A familiar sight back in Texas.
Dead moth I found on the sidewalk 🙁 Its wing was torn, and I don’t know what species it is. Still neat to see.
Sceloporus smaragdinus. Funny little guy who ran away from the camera.
Weird looking flowers. Very pretty! I wish I knew the name of it.
We were greeted by this monkey fella at Las Cascadas de Chiflón. Very vigilant looking.
We even found aliens in a cave!
Challenges
¡Provecho!
Breaking out of my comfort zone was a big personal goal of mine coming into this trip. To this end, I’ve been spending a lot of time doing just that–intentionally and unintentionally. When I first arrived in Mexico, I was only fairly confident in my ability to speak Spanish, and that was my main concern initially. I quickly realized, however, that the true challenge was figuring out how to work in a kitchen with a total of one knife and dubious tap water. I barely know how to cook in general, so this was a trial by fire that I threw myself into with varying levels of success. But now we have a microwave and actual knives, so things are on the up and up.
My first attempt at cooking in Mexico went quite poorly. Surprisingly, beans don’t taste that great when they’re crunchy and unseasoned.
호박전. I expected to miss homemade Korean food, but it got pretty bad around Week 4. This is the result of my coping and it came out well enough for me to feel better.
Lentil rice. A lot tastier than how I thought it’d turn out. Shoutout to Yeung Man Cooking on YouTube.
First time I’ve tried meal prepping. It’s honestly fun, but I need to work on not making a mess on every surface imaginable.
Other parts of life in San Cristóbal haven’t been easy. Most travel blogs I’ve read have advised preparing for digestive issues while in Mexico, but I did not expect it to hit me basically immediately. To avoid providing any overly specific details, let’s say I overestimated my digestive tract on Week 1. That’s been a fun ride, and I still can’t look at mushrooms for the time being. So word of advice for any travelers as overconfident as I was: buy some stomach medicine and BRAT foods as soon as you arrive.
Caldo tlapeño–the most likely culprit of my almost immediate traveler’s diarrhea. A huitlacoche pizza became the scapegoat, but I think it was framed.
Others agreed more with my stomach. Mole enchiladas rock.
Some more unsolicited advice: be careful with your credit card. Honestly, I think this is mostly just bad luck on my end, but I managed to use my card around three or four times before someone tried spending 1000 pesos with it. (The transaction name said it was for some fantasy sports betting site? If that’s the case, I hope the bets worked out for the dude so that it wouldn’t be a complete waste). In any case, San Cris is a very cash-friendly town. Outside of large and cumbersome transactions like groceries at a supermarket, I’ve been able to use regular pesos for most of my purchases. So it’s not as bad as I might be making it sound by complaining for a whole paragraph!
Language Concerns
Experience with Spanish
Using Spanish daily is fun. I finally managed to remember (most of) the preterite conjugations, but it’s still hard to catch up in a conversation. I found that it’s hard for me to distinguish Spanish words from each other when someone’s speaking. While I was trying to find ways to improve, someone at a bar told me that when he practices English, he tries to think in English as well. Sounds like a brilliant idea. Why not try this out myself? It turns out that the main issues that I’ve come across are that I’m a little forgetful and that my head’s kind of empty a lot of the time. It’s a bit of a work in progress.
One goal I set for this trip was to improve my ability to listen in Spanish. While I definitely hear Spanish every day, after a bit more than a month, I don’t feel a notable improvement in the words I can make out in a conversation. Combine this with a variety of outside conversations or the rattling of outside traffic in a colectivo, and it almost feels like I’m fighting for my life out there. Still, it’s been a great opportunity to practice in a trial-by-fire sort of way, and I’m looking forward to doing just as much for the rest of my trip. Who knows? Maybe I’ll wake up one morning and have shed all my knowledge of the English language. (Like a snake or something. Is that how that works?)
Experience with Tsotsil
So with all of these concerns in mind, I decided to take Tsotsil language classes! Tsotsil is an indigenous Mayan language that’s frequently spoken in San Cristóbal. You may wonder what this has to do with improving my Spanish skills, and the truth is that I don’t know either. But it’s been a lot of fun learning some basic phrases and grammar. There’s a lot of cool challenges with the pronunciation; it’s very different to any other language I’ve learned, and yet it’s also quite similar to Spanish. It definitely intrigues me in how the Spanish and indigenous Mesoamerican languages have influenced each other.
The vocabulary itself has also been challenging because of all the different regional variants within the language. For example, my teacher is teaching the variant spoken in Zinacantán, a town to the west of San Cris. On the other hand, one of the workers at Cántaro Azul speaks the variant from San Juan Chamula. Despite the towns’ being only about a 15 minute drive from each other, the vocabulary is surprisingly different! In fact, I’ve learned that there’s a lot of different ways to say “How are you” among the Tsotsil variants. The Zinacantán variant is “K’u xa-elan,” but the Chamula variant is “K’uxi avo’onton?” Dictionaries online usually do not make note of any specific, and some resources I’ve been using say that they get their vocabulary mainly from friends and vendors around San Cris. So who knows what sort of mixture of Tsotsil that I’m learning? You won’t hear me complain, though. It’s been a fascinating ride.
Anyway, I’m hoping that by the end of my time in Mexico, I’ll have at least some of the basics down. Somehow, I don’t have high hopes that I’ll get many opportunities to use it at all back in the United States, but it’s been good in the meantime.
Mangos with the Cántaro Azul team. They’re awesome people.
This trip, I’m extremely grateful for my Loewenstern partner, Shivani. Without her, I wouldn’t have any idea of what is happening in the city or what restaurants have been vouched for. She’s very in-the-know about things! I admit that it’s difficult for me to socialize, especially in a new language. However, I’m hoping that as I turn over to the second half of my time in Mexico, I’ll take more proactive measures to find even more new experiences and continue to kick down my comfort zone. See you later/Hasta luego/Jlikel to!
Quite adventurous experience! I appreciate your detailed description and pictures.