Backtrack: May 23 ❤ Tree of Tule and Mitla

This morning I woke up sort of early since we were going to Oaxaca (we actually never quite made it there since there were people protesting and roads were blocked).  We went by Armando's house to get him and then met up with Marta's family at a restaurant to eat breakfast.  We had bread, hot chocolate, and eggs.  It was hard for me to decide what to eat because they don't have descriptions with the names of the items on the menu.  Marcos took me back to see where they were preparing the food so that I could choose more easily, but it didn't help much.  There were three hammocks outside the restaurant and Jesi and Chucho were playing on them after they finished eating.  Chucho had one that you could swing by pulling on a cord by the hammock.  He was swinging himself up really high.

Chucho swinging himself on the hammock outside the restaurant.

Jesi on her hammock.

Next we went to Tule to see the tree of Tule that is more than 2000 years old.  It's huge.  There were formations in the trunk and the branches of the tree that looked like a lion, a monkey, and various other things.  Chucho kept coming up behind me and poking me to scare me.  I would do the same and he would say he wasn't scared.  One time I really got him good though.  :)  We went to look at the child of the oldest tree.  Its child is more than 1000 years old.

Facts about the tree of Tule.

The tree of Tule.

The tree of Tule and the church nearby.

Armando, Marta, Marcos, Chucho, Paula, and me in front of the tree of Tule.

We left the park and took some more group pictures in front of a fountain.

Paula, me, Marcos, Jesi, Chucho, Marta, and Chencho at the fountain near the tree of Tule.

We then went to a circle of shops to look around.  I tried on some dresses there but they were all really big.  Chucho and Jesica were looking at this shirt at one of the stands that had drawings of women's boobs labeled with the fruit that they looked like underneath, like coconuts, mangos, grapefruit, etc.  Chencho asked Jesi if she wanted the shirt and she said no and walked away from it.  haha

We ate ice cream in a marketplace nearby.  Chucho wanted to try rose petal ice cream, so he got that and lime ice cream.  The rose ice cream tasted like cheap rose perfume smells.  It was not good and he ate everything except that.  I got guanabana ice cream.  There were guanabana seeds in it.  Chucho told me to save the seeds so I could plant them at the house and when I came back there would be a guanabana tree.  :)

We got back in the car and drove to Mitla, where there are ruins as well as lots of shops.  We all walked around the first set of ruins and then I went with Marcos to look at the shops.  After that, I went with Marcos to see the other part of the ruins.  There were small tunnels that we could walk into.  They were so hot and humid inside the tunnels that it felt like a sauna!!!  I saw this really big, red, fuzzy ant in one part of the ruins.  I was going to take a picture, but I wanted to figure out what it was first.  They said it was an ant and that it was good luck to see one.  I was just about to take its picture when it ran back into the cracks of the ruins.  Oh, well.

Chucho looking around the ruins at Mitla.

Jesica in the doorway between rooms in the ruins at Mitla.

I'm sitting on the stairs at part of the ruins in Mitla.

The ruins at Mitla had beautiful designs carved into the walls.

Me sitting by the entrance to one of the tunnels at the ruins in Mitla.

Near the ruins at Mitla.

We left the ruins and went to eat dinner.  I got something called Coloradito.  It was a red mole with chicken.  It was really good.  The rest of them asked if I wanted some Mezcal, but after trying it the first time, I really didn't want to have any more.  :)  There was a TV on and Chucho was telling me, "It's like the shirt we saw when we were leaving the really big tree."  It took me awhile before I understood that he was talking about the busty women on the TV program and the shirt that had compared cleavage to fruit.  haha  He's such a sweet boy, but I suppose boys are boys!!!

When we got back to the house, Paula said she thought she lost the little "pollitos" (little chickens) that had been wandering around in the garden.  She was looking around for them with a flashlight.  I was exhausted after the long, hot day, so I took a shower and went to sleep (but not before checking for worms under my pillow.)