Monday, November 21, 2005

Hace mucho frio en San Cristobal. In other words, we are freezing our butts off. It rained all day the first day, but that didn't matter to me because I stayed in bed the whole time with my cold. But later when I wanted to go out and see the town, it wasn't so good. I've been wearing my long underwear and my expedition-weight Capilene shirt at all times. It's all very well to wash your clothes in the sink when you only need to wear one t-shirt at a time. But what does one do when one is faced with hypothermia if one doesn't put on every single article of clothing one brought? But the city is nice. It smells like woodsmoke. I like it and Michael loves it.

We had to move from the hotel we stayed at the first night. When we discovered that our room had no outlets, Michael went down to the office to see if they would let him charge up the laptop. They would... for $10 pesos an hour. No, make that $20 pesos an hour. Yeah, $20, that should do it. This is about $2 USD, which may seem like a lot or a little to you, I don't know. We felt it was ridiculous. Don't get me wrong. People can charge what they want, but if I think it's too much, I'm going to decline. The next day we moved across the street to the Hostel Miramar, which is not in the Lonely Planet, but should be. It's right across the street from Posada Jovel. For an extra $20 pesos we got our own bathroom and all the electricity we could suck up.

The downside to the room, which is the downside to all the budget rooms, probably, is that it's not heated. The temperature inside the room has hovered between 59 and 63 degrees Fahrenheit (15 - 17 Celcius) for all the time that we've been here. And it's damp. Like, "your towels won't dry overnight" damp. But we have two nice thick blankets, so we're toasty while we're sleeping.

As for the town, we have kept things really chill here. (ha ha ha... sorry.) All we've really done is walk around and try to stay warm. Michael bought about fifteen assorted Zapatista dolls from the market, ranging in size from about an inch to twelve inches high (on horseback). Seriously, he went insane. He couldn't stop buying them. Exacerbating his problem was the fact that they're not just random anonymous Zapatistas. No, each of them is a specific person. So we have quite a few Marcoses, a Marcos and Ramona duo on horseback, two Trinis, a couple of Juans and a couple whose names we unfortunately forgot, some on horseback.

We also spent a lot of time at a restaurant called Mayambe because it has WiFi. We almost stayed at their B&B, but when we went to look at it, the common room was full of hippie backpacker kids lying on the floor picking nits off each other or something. It just didn't seem the place for us. But the restaurant is nice. It's run by Sikhs and features Indian, Thai, and Middle Eastern food. It's all good, but it tastes more like hippie food than anything else. But it's a nice place, and... WiFi! Also they had a nice wood fire going in the evenings.

Today we finally went down to Migration, something that we have been putting off for weeks. Way back when we crossed the border at Tijuana, someone inspected Michael's bags, but no one mentioned that we needed a tourist card. The Tijuana section of the LP did not mention anything either. Later I read something about it in the back of the book, and since then we've been meaning to go get this card, but finally just got around to it today. It was a fairly long walk. We got there at lunchtime, which was a coincidence, and a bad one.

The woman there was just about as obnoxious as she could be. She didn't want to repeat herself even though it was clear we couldn't really understand her. She just kept looking at us and eating her orange. Finally some helpful bilingual gringa came to our aid. She translated our story to the Migration lady and explained to us what we needed to do, while the Migration lady picked orange bits out of her teeth and stared at us balefully. We need to to back tomorrow with a photocopy of every page of each of our passports, a photocopy of the front and back of a credit card each, and $200 pesos each. Could we come back later this afternoon? No. Tomorrow

Sigh. I wish we had known what we were doing in Tijuana.

By the way, I added my blog to Travel Library. If you're looking for other travel blogs, check them out. I lived on the site way back when I was planning my trip to India. You can find some good stuff there.

 

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View from the roof of Hostel Miramar.

The Cathedral of San Cristobal.

On the street.

Tiny vendor of bracelets.

A snack of elote, boiled corn-on-the-cob slathered with mayo, queso, and picante sauce.

Indigenous women selling woven items.

More streets.

San Cristobal's market.

Templo y ex-Convento de Santo Domingo

20th of November parade. (LP writers should note the exposed navel jewelry on the girl in the foreground.)

More parade.

Anyone know what I'm eating here? They are crunchy, marinated in sweet liquor and cost $5 pesos. Um... I didn't really like them.