An Afternoon Walk in our neighborhood in San Cristobal de las casas

Thursday June 1st - celebrating two calendar months since we crossed the border into Mexico to start our travels.

The sun came out and the rain stopped, we left chicken stew simmering on the stove and set out for a neighborhood walk to explore, discover and hopefully meet some of our neighbors.

We saw amazing houses, trees and flowers - really demoting that myth about the poverty of all Mexicans.  As we have seen on our travels there are rich and poor and middle class in all countries and locations.  We are currently in a middle class, non-tourist, local Mexican neighborhood and there are a mixture of houses and a lot of construction going on in this particular gated community.

This is a typical site in Mexico, masses of bougainvillea of several colors, often mixed with roses..

 Each of the streets in this neighborhood are dead ends and come off the main street that goes through the area - a short street coming off either side of the main street (kind of fish-bone pattern).

The house that you cannot see here, is behind a fence of bamboo plants which itself is behind a wall that is so well covered with ivy that you would think that it is just a well trimmed hedge.  Notice the door into the property set into the wall.

This huge building is actually one wall of a a single house

A reminder that even though we are at an elevation of 7,000 feet, there are still more mountains above us.

Look at that ivy covered wall and what appears to be an entertaining building at the back.

Clean simple lines and almost muted colors.

This house behind a clean white wall has a beautiful done at the top of one room - very Mexican.

The house with the dome has matching entrance door to the yard and garage door.

One of the huge new houses that we saw under construction - notice the curved staircase wall in the entrance.

Beautiful staircase to the front entrance on this place.

There again are those ever present mountains.

A water pipe with a spliced repair - Gerald says that this is why you cannot trust the water in Mexico.

 This was the most amazing part of our walk.  We came across this new construction being built in the antique construction method called bahareque.  Notice the rocks and mud/daub between the bamboo fences.  These are going to be the walls of the house.  The mix is all done in the traditional way - barefoot working of the cement, dirt, sand, fiber (appeared to be pine needles) and water.

Yes the Engineer in Gerald got him into deep discussions with the site foreman about the plans and the dangers of the geodesic dome roof that would be a central part of the building.  Our Spanish may not be good but we had a great conversation with this man and everyone on site was happy to talk to us and answer our questions and just generally chat with us.

Well we didn't make any friends with neighbors, we only saw one lady whom we greeted but that is as far as that got.  However, we had a great time, learned a lot and had great conversation with the builders.  We also got to pick up lots of firewood and some huge pine cones - when it gets cold again we will have a big roaring fire and the neighbors will have a clean street where we picked up the windfalls ;)