3. First impressions are lovely! (by Amy 6/4/07)

San Cristobal de las Casas is a very nice little city. It sits in a valley and is busy but tranquil, you look down narrow flagstoned streets past yellow, gold, orange and white colonial stucco buildings and catch glimpses of the green mountains. In early June, it is not at all overrun with tourists, and there are many attractive people. Quite a few of the local women still wear their traditional skirts and blouses, with a sense of modernity and up to date ness, and you can tell they are not doing this to please you, to provide color. They do it because they want to and they look lovely. In this city that has been identifying itself with a local independence movement for at least 13 years (if you remember subcomandante Marcos and the wars in the 1990s and small movements continue til now), people will smile at you if they feel like it. When they smile at each other they are lovely. We are having a nice, nice time.

What do these ladies look like ? well, many of the skirts are a dark blue, with a rim or border of pattern low around the hips just under the butt, very appealing. Often the blouse has a detailed embroidery in the same hues. My favorite color is a green, turquoise, dark blue combination of embroidery, over a dark blue skirt. Some towns or tribes are more towards red, on white. One style of skirt is black with the cloth having tufts pulled out of it so it looks as though they are wearing a skirt of fur. The skirts go down to floor level narrowly, looking perfect on these slender ladies. The little girls have lots of laughter. There are a lot of young girls carrying their siblings. It{s nice.

The business of the city goes on with onedirection streets and many streets that are just for walking. This afternoon everyone was walking everywhere as the afternoon tropical storm clouds came in, then boom! the loudest thunder I have ever heard. Then heaps and heaps of rain, enough to make the local cars at some intersections plow through water up to their hubcaps. A good time to retreat into a local cafe and have the darkest, richest spicy cinnamon chocolate I can remember, in a hot cream base. Awesome. So far all we have eaten are chilaquiles and quesadillas, lots and lots of the local melty cheese and corn tortillas and savory red sauce and the drier savory topping cheese on top.

We have a nice hotel room, things are pretty empty as far as tourism, we look out on a rooftop courtyard and have nice hot water and extra blankets for those cold evenings. But it{s not cold tonight. The elevation here is 6,000 feet, warm in the days and in the winter quite cold. Our room was 450 pesos for a double but easily lowered to 400 when we asked, so $40 US dollars a night. We probably should be economizing, but we are not. This is the hotel Mansion de Los Angeles and I{m pretty sure it is the one I stayed at with mom when I was last here, at age 16. When was that 100 years ago

In those days there was much more native costume, the men for example still wore white with embroidery up the trouser seam and hats with trailing ribbons. But there was a lot more visible poverty and suffering then too, and prejudice. Now is the sense of pride.

Anyway, this is a very charming place without too much tourism but enough tourism to mean nice things to look at and places to eat. And don{t hear any English, the other tourists are low key, german french and we met a nice couple from San Diego, she{s originally from a mexican family and we liked sharing a taxi with them up from the airport (an hour by a nice fast toll road). I can see the jungles have been overharvested and it{s not 1976 but then, it{s not 1976 anywhere in the world, and we are happy to be here. More later!