Izamal, Pueblo Magico

On our way from Merida to Chichen Itza, the giant ruins, we stopped by the beautiful Pueblo Magico Izamal.

Pueblo Magicos are towns designated towns by the Mexican federal government as having some unique cultural or historical aspect work preserving and are within 2 hours of other travel destinations. Izamal is a beautiful small town with a monastery/convent that the Pope once visited and with many artisans. The whole town is painted this deep shade of yellow. There are horse and buggies and the horses wear hats with little holes for their ears!

 Izamal has its own pyramids - and you can climb on them! (You can't climb on Chichen Itza because there are so many people that come to visit, they would ruin the .... ruins.) Here's some pictures of us climbing on one of them. Another one had its corner in the courtyard of a hotel restaurant!

Some parts still have stairs and some don't.

You can still see each of the levels, and sharpness of the cut stone, and the careful round corners and straight lines.

So high up that Izamal is a tiny yellow town in the distance. 

This is a corner of a pyramid inside the courtyard restaurant of a hotel! The buildings of the shops are buildings the Spanish built when they came over, and the Spanish purposefully used the stone from the temples to create their own buildings, or build directly on top of the existing buildings, both because it was easier (nicely cut stone!) and because they wanted to get rid of the Maya temples and other aspects of their culture so that they could control the Maya. 

We dropped by the church during Mass and saw part of the service. I was raised Catholic, and so seeing the sign of the cross on the head, lips, and heart done by of a whole group of people, hearing Alleluia sung in Spanish, and seeing the stations of the cross in a Spanish building was powerful. There's a little museum with a statue of the Virgin Mary and several of the different robes she has worn through the years in the back. 

We went to a small but amazing art museum where the very best experts in different types of Mexican art created pieces. Here's just a few of the pictures. These ones below are all just paper and paper mache - amazing, right? 

Clay is also a popular material. There were pamphlets explaining about how the location of a place kind of influences what materials are used - is clay available, or straw, or paper? And that impacts the type of art that developed for a region. At another museum we learned about black clay used in Oaxaca (Wa-ha-ka) because they have volcanic rock. There is so much detail in these sculptures, tons of different things going in if you look closely. 

These statues below are tall, maybe as tall as K, or maybe a head shorter. 

This bus/truck has the nativity characters inside - Joseph, Mary, Gabriel, etc.

We ended with dinner at a place that had a big open window to the square, where the birds were screaming and flying all over place - they were so loud it was hard to hear each other!

 We made time to swim in the really cool pool at our hotel (kind of a requirement - it is so hot and sunny here.)

Island and bridges and a waterfall and a fountain!

The next morning we had to figure out how to get from Izamal to Chichen Itza; there's only one bus a week, we found out (in Spanish!) and it had already left. So we took a taxi to Kuntunil (actually, two taxis... I think they have rules about who can drive where). The driver dropped us off in front of shut down amusement park equipment... that had two people napping in hammocks (oops - hope we didn't wake them; they were well hidden) ... and said the bus would pass by. (My Spanish skills did not help here, but my charades skills did😀.) There was no station, but a man that came up an helped us get bus fare added to a plastic card with a device he carried, and M was able to communicate with the bus driver to get off at our hotel, just a little past Chichen Itza. More on Chichen Itza soon!