Valladolid, Ciudad Magico?

 Like Izamal, Valladolid is a Pueblo Magico, but it's much busier - it feels more like a city than Izamal, though still smaller than Merida. It's about 2 hours from Cancun on one side, Merida on the other, and less than an hour from Chichen Itza so there are plenty of tour buses and tourists and expats from all different countries. 

In fact, one expat couple who retired here invites people to tour their huge collection of Mexican folk art in their house! (Casa de los Venados) They collect donations for the tours, which go to local charities. Everywhere you look in the house there is art, and the house itself is so cool. There are guest rooms that are like small apartments, with private outdoor spaces in addition to a private balcony, individual bathrooms, a sitting area, and a separate place for the bed. There's a huge pool with a see-through bridge you have to go over to get to the back seating area. It took them eight years to rebuild, partly because of the regulations of working on historic properties. 

This is a ceiling painting over their patio.The chandelier is a metal prickly pear cactus. I like this painting because it really does feel like those who have passed on are looking down over you to say hi, kind of in the spirit of the Day of the Dead. 

This clay figure is K's height.

Weaving is a major form of artwork in Mexico.

These metal band players are in the courtyard (so, before you get to the huge pool).

This is a painting of Izamal. There is 1 guest bedroom dedicated to Izamal, 1 to Valladoid, 1 to Frieda Kahlo. The owner's bedroom, which is off limits, is dedicated to Diego Rivera. They don't have originals works by those artists, but they do have a pinata of Frieda.

We've kind of gotten a rhythm in Valladolid, doing an adventure in the morning, then more formal school work and free time in the afternoon, then another adventure at night. On our first day, we went to the Xkopek Bee Museum, which is walkable from our hotel. There is a little free museum area with bee and buttery fly info and examples, but the tour was really cool. We learned about different kinds of bees, saw their nests and got a close look, and tasted different kinds of honey. The Maya stingless bee (melipona bee) is very small and only bites; it can't sting. The Maya used to cultivate them for honey. The melipona bee hive only makes 1 kilo of honey a year, though, so many people cultivate the European honey bee, which makes 25 kilos or more. (The European bee makes the kind of honey we find in our super markets.) But the European bees are territorial and larger; they attack the smaller, stingless Mayan bees, and so the smaller bees are endangered. Because the melipona bees make so much less honey, it is much more expensive; it is used as medicine, not so much for eating. We did taste it though, and European bee honey. In both of them, we could taste flowers more than the supermarket honey, but the melipona bee honey is thinner. Examples of the hives were in this cavern, a dry cenote. 

We also learned about a "robber bee" that does not make honey - it steals honey and pollen from other bees! It makes a lemony scented poison that makes the other bees confused and unable to fly and then steals their honey and pollen. Bee keepers do keep this bee, though, because it makes the other bees have to worker harder and produce more! Eduardo, our tour guide, also showed us a bee that attacks predators that might eat the other bees, like spiders and ants. K said it was like a whole city, with robber bees and police bees! 

It was cool to see the bees homes, too. Some were paper hives, like we've seen before, but some were inside of logs. They would chew the wood to make space, and they build a little tunnel, which they can seal off at night to protect themselves from predators. There were bees standing guard at the tunnels! In one area, the museum had working hives with a window so we could see what it looked like. 

The tour guide also showed us this really big, hairy bee - the Hulk of bees. (K corrected me. The bee looks like it has armor on, so if the Hulk was wearing the Hulk Buster suit.) Eduardo told us how it's important to have all different size bees because they polinate different sized flowers. M often thinks about planting flowers that will bloom at different times to feed the bees, and planting different sized flowers so that the ones that sleep in the flowers have a place to sleep, so I know that the diversity of food for bees is important, but I hadn't thought before about how the diversity of the bees is important for the survival of different plants. Plants we eat, as well as plants that have a right to exist even if they aren't of any use to humans. I'm reading America the Beautiful? right now and it has me thinking about how often we have to justify protecting the environment in terms of economics and public health of humans, as if everything has to serve us.

We've been busy here, so I'll have plenty more to write soon! As soon as I free up some storage for photos in Google :)