November 10, 2002 - page 2

This week we enjoyed the visit of Centre’s academic dean, John Ward. We hope he had a great time while he was here. He attended a few classes with us, visited the ancient Maya site of Uxmal and socialized with us at a party at Phyllis’s house. In our humanities class, which was attended by Dean Ward, we had a special visitor who taught us some basic Mayan. When Ismael (the Mayanist) asked Dean Ward “¿Bix a pat k’aaba’?” Dean Ward responded glibly “Fatsy fingers in pat k’aaba’.” I’ll let all of you ask him what the question was.

In our other classes, we had the privilege of listening to linguist Barbara Pfeiler talk about the Mayan language and bilingual education in the Yucatan. With less than a month remaining to our time here, we’ve got all kinds of final projects and papers to finish, places to visit and people to meet.

On Sunday, I had the distinct pleasure of traveling with Jenny Lambdin on the Ruta Puuc, or the Hill Route, which took us to such Maya sites as Labna, X-lapak, Sayil, Kabah, and Uxmal. Although I’m no stranger anymore to Maya archeological sites, each new site that I visit has something different to see. Ruins at Labna, X-lapak, and Kabah were in different stages of restoration, and it was especially amazing to see all the intricately carved stones that were strewn over the ground at the sites. At Sayil, Jenny and I took a path that we still have no idea where it led and almost got left by the bus due to our errant explorations.