I Learned to Love Beans Again

As a vegetarian, I'm no stranger to beans. Guatemala taught me a new appreciation for beans not in variety, but in pervasiveness. In my house, we ate our black beans runny, amost like dip. In the restaurants, the beans were thick enough that they would stick a decorative tortilla chip in them.

Beans and tortillas are nothing to get excited about here, but they aren't made from scratch! Walking down the street in any Guatemalan town, you can her the sound of women making tortillas, slapping them from hand to hand into a flat, round shape.

I've been back in Chicago for awhile but I failed to blog the last part of my travels so I will do so now. After Antigua and the volcano hike, we headed to Tikal (UNESCO World Heritage Site). I like heat and I think I can take a lot, but the humidity and the temperature were really intense in Tikal. I recommend the sunrise tour of Tikal--it's too hot during the day and you will see more animals in the morning hours. Nonetheless, Tikal is amazing both for the ruins and for the jungle plants and animals. In the central plaza, you can imagine the ancient Mayans because you are surrounded by their altars and palaces on four sides, the largest of which is over 200 feet tall. The earliest monuments date back to the 4th Century B.C., but most of the structure were built between 700 and 900 AD. At the height of Tikal, it was home to 60,000 poeple. By the 1000 AD, Tikal had been abandoned and wasn't re-discovered until the late 19th century. An airstrip was built in the 1970s which allowed the major excavations, giving us the Tikal of today.