San Cristobal...at first

I am here: San Cristobal, it is much cooler and rainier and therefore homelike. It's actually quite cold in the evenings, which makes me glad for my hat.

I took a bus from Tuxtla to San Cristobal, it was a bit surreal to be sitting in a greyhound type bus, with a dubbed version of Spiderman 3 playing, while watching the beautiful landscape. It is a lush and beautiful area, but the landscape also tells a story as each available space on the extremely steep hillsides that the highway cuts a path through is planted in corn. It looks to be the second planting of the season and I marveled at the short stalks, some adjacent to wide stands of trees and others on long-cleared land.

The city itself is extremely colorful and beautiful. There is a substantial backpacker and expat presence. My first full day (Friday) I took to orient myself in the city. I wandered to the Zocalo and to the plaza, there are pedestrian walkways which are teeming with locals, foreigners and indigenous women and their children selling beautiful woven items and clay trinkets. I found a coffee shop, I had not been expecting that as most of the coffee I expected to see was nescafe. It is a cruel irony that some of the world's best coffee should be grown in place that has limited access to the finished product. There is one roasting facility in Chiapas.
I ordered a cappuccino (something I've never had, but sounded appealing) and sat down to write and review my maps, I was completely derailed by two little girls who came by my table and started laying trinkets on it before I even knew what was happening.

I remembered this behavior from the last time I was in Mexico, kids wander into open air restaurants moving from table to table to sell things. It's extremely difficult for me to reconcile my position in this, I bought a trinket. She said it was an elephant, but it looks more like a ram to me. The two girls were distracted by my journal and one took up my pencil to draw an elephant for me. Her companion took up the pencil without pause to offer her rendition. It was bittersweet for me to watch these two little girls drawing. It was a school day, yet they were wandering the Zocalo with baskets of clay statuettes. They almost looked nervous at the sheer pleasure of drawing for a moment, for taking a break from their daily life. A guilty pleasure for doing what all little girls should be able to do. I felt a constriction in my chest as I watched them cover a few blank pages in my notebook.