Today we woke up early to visit the Copan Ruins. The Mayans built Copan in a near perfect site. It is in a very fertile valley with a river running through. Apparently the movie Apocolypto is pretty accurate in it's portrayal of the typical Mayan city. Our guide, Fidel, mentioned many times that they harvested 3 crops per year and had musician monkeys and dancing jaguars. The last two are suspect, but who knows?
The ruins themselves span an area of about 1 square km. They are very well preserved and are a national treasure for Honduras. The site is very well kept and they do a good job with tours. FYI, a good percentage of the locals in Copan speak english very well. It's probably a product of tourism and the fact that there are a lot of dual language schools in the area.
After visiting the ruins, we boarded yet another Hedman-Alas bus to Guatemala city. The travel time was about 5 hours. Hedman-Alas does bus transit right. We splurged this time on a 'first-class' seat and got a meal and HUGE seats for our ride. It was well worth the extra $10.
The Guatemalan dental school sent students to the bus station to pick us up. Then they treated us to a wonderful night on the town including a great sushi dinner and drinks at a local bar. Many of the restuarants and establishments in this part of Guatemala City are in English, and most of the students were very fluent. The group that we were with were obviously from wealthy families, but they didn't show any pretentiousness that you'd expect from folks in the states. Instead, they welcomed us into their circle of friends and made us feel very welcome.
Tomorrow we're spending the day at the dental school and listening to seminars (in spanish). One of the seminars is being given by one of our professors from UNC. It should be fun to see how a central american dental school is run. One thing that I found is universal: Dental school sucks everywhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment