Tuesday, April 16th, Chichen Itza

Today, we took an excursion to see some of the sites within the Yucatan peninsula. First up was Chichen Itza. I alsways throught of Chichen Itza as just the Mayan pyramid. However, it was an entire city complex. We took a tour that left early in the morning (around 7 AM). It was about a two ride from Playa. The tour guide gave us a lot of information about the site, and the Mayan culture, although he was a bit hard to understand as he kept weaving back and forth between Spanish and English. Turns out the Mayans were very obsessed with time. With the Mayan calendar, they believed they could predict what would happen in someone's life based upon the day they were born. Many of the buildings were oriented based upon celestial evaents (solstice, equinox, and such). The main pyramid at Chichen Itza is unique not because of its size (it is actually small for a Mayan temple) but because it has a complete facade on all four sides. There are 91 steps to the top on each side (91x4 plus the temple at the top = 365).

There was also a large stadium/field complex just next to the temple.. This was for a game that they would play, the object of whicih was to place a ball through a hoop (similar I guess to basketball). The overall complex was incredibly impressive. It is hard to conceive the effort it must have taken to build these structures at the time.

It turns out that the Mayans were not centrally organized (like the Egyptians or Romans) but had many independent factions (like the Greeks). There were over twentry different Mayan languages, so different factions could potentially not speak to each other.Read more