This is the entrance to the mayapan hotel, it was not so bad, but wait till you see the next one

This is the public bus I took downtown. It seemed like every bus was made different, but so far they have all costed less then a dollar and gone too frequently to worry about; I could definitely get used to this 

 Its hard to see but in the distance is the entrance to Quatzal hostel

 The graffiti found on one side the hostel, one maya plays ball well the other holds a beating heart (more on that later)

 more graffiti. This place was a little more expensive (26$) but ended up being cheaper overall because it includes the most excellent home made dinner

 Jumping ahead to the next day, this is the entrance to the Cenote: one of the many underground caves in the Yucatan. They think the Yucatan might be the crater site of the asteroid that took out our beloved dinosours 

 Check out these stalactites!

 must have taken thousands maybe millions of years for this one to forms

 They put on a mock maya ritual. After it was done I went and swam in the water which was amazing and somehow supported a whole population of fishes

 The great pyramid of Itza! recently voted (I forget who) one of the 7 wonders of the world. If you clap in the right place it sounds like a bird flew by (great acoustics!)

 The biggest ballcourt in the Americas. Must have been a great game to play and watch. They used a ball made out of gum and used every part of the body except the hands and feet. They might have had a racket; we don't know.

 Its hard to see but in the middle is a skull representing the god of the underworld who invented this game; its the same theme as the devil playing chess for a mans soul. On the right is a man with seven snakes for a head and on the left is a man holding a head

 I really liked this wall; every brick had a number for the order archeologist had found them in the jungle after they found this key wall destroyed. That would have been a tough job

The lady in the umbrella was a expat who told me a bunch of good places to go, her ex-husband who was visiting was a ex-jew who teachers online computer science after a failed attempt to make it big with electronic music. Neat people

 The market of a thousand columns

 The observatory from where they mapped Venus

 This guy was a true prodigy. Either still in high school or just out he had been doing archeological work on the enigmatic tombs of his home state. I lectured me the entire time on all precolumbian mexican history in a conversation that passed between english and spanish. I really want to go to central Mexico now, turns out the Aztecs were the overrated ones.

 nothing new here, just a cool building which may have an iguana in it if you look closely

Just because I was not in any other pictures, it may be noted that I got a haircut and a straw fedora so I can fit in with the archeologists