Hey all,
Hope everyone had a good weekend (I think that Tampa sports fans certainly did...) This weekend was fun for me as well! On Friday, after a 4 hour long meeting at Discovery (the school I work at) which was completely in Spanish, (gotta turn those listening ears on) I conked out for several hours, then awoke to meet up with my compadres and eat some bombass tacos. Then a few of us went to a bar called the Queen Elizabeth where we listened to the Beatles and drank Coronas. A nice little mixture of England and Mexico.
On Saturday, we caught the bus to San Antonio Texcala which is a small pueblita on the outskirts of Tehuacan. It is known for its onix and marmol. It is basically shop after shop of onix and marmol thingies and well as giant piles of these stones. Everything is CHEAP like you would not believe.
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| Brandon with a whole bunch of rocks | | | |
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After shopping for a while and looking at store after store of onix and marmol chess sets, mirrors, little figurings, etc etc, Brandon and I decided to break off from the less adventurous group and basically climb up the mountain to see the mines. We were on a trail for about 5 seconds before we found ourselves going straight up the mountain. It was crazy but pretty fun. What we saw, we didn't expect at all. There were men stationed around the mountain with like old-fashioned pulleys and whatnot collecting onix, marmul and also mining salt. We didn't expect it to be such an operation! It was reallllllllly cool. The climb was kind of scary and I thought I was going to fall at some points, but thank goodness neither of us did, and getting to the top was totally worth the scariness/difficulty of the climb.
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| Salt (yum) |
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| Salt beds (view from the top) |
The pictures barely do it justice, but at least they give you an idea of what it was like. I hope that some day, you will all get to climb a Mexican mountain, breathe the Mexican air and get laughed at my Mexican miners for basically crawling on your hands and knees to reach the summit, just like me.
Hasta luego!
