I was lucky enough to get a Lilly Creative Renewal Grant in 2022.  Learn more about the Lilly Teacher Creativity Grants here. My family decided to visit the state of Yucatán to practice our Spanish and see Mayan Ruins and learn about indigenous American math. Join us on our journey. 

Resources (11 de octubre)

Now I am back in the US and back to classroom teaching and missing the sunny Yucatan! I'm going to use this space to house resources I've created to help share this work with others. 

Base 20 Abacus in Desmos Graphing Calculator

Béisbol   (13 de julio)

A few weeks ago my dad told me that he thought baseball was more popular that soccer here and I was like, really? But then I did some research. Mérida is pretty close to the Caribbean and especially in the non touristy parts you can pick up a big Carribean influenced accent in people's Spanish. Their soccer team is in the Expansion League, which is considered semi-professional. In contrast their Mexican Baseball League team plays in the stadium that is considered the best in the league. They play at Parque Kukulkan Alamo (Kukulkan the Mayan mythical feathered snake). It is definitely popular here and they were in town our last week so we went to a game. 

We bought pretty good seats for $8 USD each to watch the Leones (Lions) del Yucatan play the Algodoneros (cotten worker?) de Union Laguna (from the state of Coahuila) .  To keep my kids entertained we made a list of things different and same in the US and in Mexico at baseball games. This is their list: 

The Same: 

• Cotton Candy (though sometimes this is hard to find in the US now)

• People walking around to sell you beer and food. 

• Mascots (the Lion here.)

• Silly things like races in between innings.

Different: 

• The dirt seems more red, but maybe that's because all dirt here is red (clay) soil. 

• The food they sell is different. Chips are spicier. They kids are un-impressed. There are no giant pretzels. All the pizza has pepperoni. 

• When we went is was the night of the Jarana Yucateca so they had traditional dance and live music walking in. Notice the lion dressed in the traditional baile folklorico clothing of the Yucatan. 

Chicxulub Crater  (11 de julio)

This weekend we went to the beach. But on the way back we stopped in Chicxulub Puerto. This little beach town that is quickly becoming a tourist destination beachtown for those escaping Mérida in the summer is as close as possible to the center of the crater of Chicxulub. This is the impact crater of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago and is probably partially responsible for the unique geology of the Yucatan peninsula. The outer ring of the crater is a concentration of tons and tons of cenotes. 

This video helps explain what happened and helped Micah understand how this event wipped out the dinosaurs. 

Anyway if you are going to visit one of these little side of the road dinosaur attractions....it might as well be the place where the dinosaurs went extinct. 

Chicxulub was actually on the way back from our beach day at Telchac Puerto. Fancy beach club for the win. (and because I really like being able to shower the sand off and having the choice of also swimming in a pool and ordering food and drinks delivered directly to where I am sitting!) With the three different swimming options we think our final count for the trip will be 11 different pools. 3 different cenotes. 3 different playas. This trip we swam in 17 different locations and almost every day.  Micah swam in 18 places though because his art camp has a pool too.

Around Town  (9 de julio)

We've had so much fun this week settling into our life in the city this week in Mérida. The kids started camps. Micah is going to an art camp, Adira to a small Montessori school, and I'm taking small group Spanish classes from 9-1 every day. Micah has gotten really into this graphic novel series in Spanish and convinced us to buy all of them (we have a weakness for book purchases for kids.) and most of his art at art camp this week features these characters! 

Adira likes her school a lot too! She is speaking a little more Spanish and becoming more confident. And I think my Spanish is getting better two after two weeks of intensive classes 4 hours a day too! Since our school days ended around 1pm, we came home each day, had lunch and then tried to rest in the heat of the day. We planned outings again each evening. Here are some of the things we did each day. 

On Monday we had one on one time with the kids. Shoshanna took Micah to the arcade at the mall. And Adira and I went out to get our nails done and to get ice cream. 

Tuesday was Adira's half birthday. Apparently we have a tradition to go out for donuts on half birthdays and this was no exception. This donut place made the glazes to order. Here we go 4 1/2. 

On Wednesday we headed out to Parque Aleman. A city park with that hosts a little funfair for kids at night. We had elote and esquites for dinner and churros and frappes for dessert. 

Thursday was a couple different things. Micah has really wanted a guitar from Mexico so Shoshanna took him to buy a kid sized guitar at a little workshop. We now have a future guitar player so share tips for lessons in Indy. After the guitar shop we went to a vegan burger place where the kids ordred happy meals for the first time in their lives! I like that in Mexico drink choices are aqua de jamaica (Adira's favorite) and agua de limon (Micah's favorite.) and they serve beer for the adults. Then M was super tired so he and Shoshanna went home and Adira and I went to check out baile folklorico in the square. Adira is super into dancing. She always wants to watch the whole performance. 

Apparently Fridays are Beach Days. After class on Friday we headed to Sisal. A small beach town to swim and cool off for just a while. I definitely like my beach towns smaller and less touristy. Sisal > Progreso for me. Way better! 

Saturday morning we went to the ruins of Mayapan. (about 50 minute drive from our house.) This smaller city was the most recent city (occupied until 1450 C.E.) and also has a pyramid built to look like the great pyramid of Kukulkan in Chichen Itza. But unlike the pyramids at Uxmal and Chichen Itza. You can climb these ruins. The kids loved it. It was a little terrifying at times for this scared of heights mama. 

Bici Ruta  (3 de julio)

One of the my favorite ways to tour cities is by bike...but that's hard to do outside of Paseo Montejo (with its bike lanes). Sidewalks are narrow and so are streets and cars move fast in the centro. But luckily tours by bike are still possible. On Sundays Mérida shuts down a pretty long bike route down Paseo Montejo (the main boulevard) to the big central plaza and farther south past two other churches and plazas. We did the whole thing with a few stops along the way. Adira had it easy. These tricycles are NOT easy to drive on cobblestone streets though! Especially when your passenger keeps moving around and changing up the balance of the bike! 

Road Trip Chichen Itza, Rio Lagartos, Valladolid 

(27-29 de junio)

When we were planning our trip from the states....we were on the fence about renting a car. We both learned our Spanish in Central America 10+ years ago where women do not drive, and where car rentals often say "RENTAL" really large and are a magnet for crime. But let me tell you...the Yucatan is SO safe. And women drive. We've even had female cab drivers. Our rental (through a local company I discovered through facebook and talking to people) is just a regular car with Yucatan plates. Though there are sometimes police checkpoints headed into towns we have been waved through every one. I'm not sure if it's the Yucatan or traveling with two cute kids but people are SO FRIENDLY everywhere.   Driving has made changes of plans or detours to accommodate the kids schedules so easy. And we can go at our own pace everywhere, which sometimes is "run through the ruins/museum" and sometimes is "lets pretend to be sloths." You never know. And we can on the whim stop at roadside attractions, cool looking playgrounds, etc. 

We left Mérida early Monday morning and headed east. Driving through the jungles of the Yucatán is pretty incredible. It's hard to do it justice from this video I took but there are thousands of butterflies flying across the road! It's magical! 

Our first stop was the town of Yokdzonot to swim in a cenote run by a women's cooperative. It was magical. I would go there again. They also had a good restaurant serving our favorite veggie mayan favorites....panuchos (without chicken) and a pumpkin seed dip with tortillas. I drew an arrow to help you find Micah and Adira swimming. 

When we got to our Chichen Itza hotel it was raining so we drove down the street to see if we could go to the planetarium show at the fancy Mayaland resort. Covid has really destroyed the tourism industry here and so many of these hotels are basically empty. I hope they survive. They did a special planetarium show just for our family. Micah loved it and Adira was paying enough attention to draw her version of the Mayan calendar in her diary when we got back to the car. (she doesn't write or read yet but her brother is keeping a detailed diary with pictures and words in the style of Diary of a Wimpy Kid and she does her best to keep up.)

After the Planetarium show we went into the little town of Piste near the ruins and the kids made some playground friends. They played on the playground and hide and go seek until it got dark! 

We are not a family to miss a chance to swim in a new place so we had a "night swim" as the kids call it when we got back to the hotel pool. (By our count we have swam in 12 different places since we have been here. 3 cenotes, 2 beaches, and 7 different swimming pools!) 

The following morning we got up early, ate breakfast, and packed up our car. We got to Chichen Itza early, had an awesome parking space, and saw most of the ruins before the vendors had set up. They were set up enough though for our kids to demand to buy something so we relented. Micah got a pretty cool jaguar whistle and Adira got a "magic amulet." Here they are showing off their trinkets with one of the 7 wonders of the world in the background. 

Chichen Itza is about 300 times more crowded than any other Mayan site I have been to but it is also in pretty amazing condition. And you can't help but be wowed by it. And I found some math carved into the ruins. Can you see it? 

Typical for my kids and ruins, we did our best to help them learn and read plaques to practice M's spanish reading etc. But in the end, the most interesting thing to them are always the animals. Here they spotted the first squirrel of this trip. (There are squirrels here!). This little Yucatán squirrel was eating a nut in a tree. The vendors nearby told us that the Mayan word for squirrel is Cis. So we learned another word of Mayan. 

After visiting Chichen Itza we really enjoyed our air conditioned Jeep! We drove about 40 minutes to the eastern Yucatán city of Valladolid to have lunch in an awesome vegetarian cafe. We enjoyed ordering Mexican food that's always made with meet with fake meat instead. =) 

Then we got back in the car and headed north towards Rio Lagartos to try to see some wildlife! 

When we got to Rio Lagartos of course we needed to do some more swimming.Then we ate dinner at a rooftoop restuarant and played on a playground. We then headed back to our room and imagine our surprise when we heard some drumming outside. We opened our windows to see Rio Lagartos's small Pride Parade going by! 2000 people in this town and 100 ish of them are in the pride parade! 

The next morning we took a boat ride that was the best thing so far for the kids. Our tour was with Rio Lagartos Adventures and our guide Saul was great! We saw so many animals and learned so much about the Mangrove forest. 

Rio Lagartos is not a river. It is an estuary and was misnamed. The Spanish thought it was a river. It means Lizard River. But the biosphere is better named Reserva de la Biósfera Ría Lagartos which means Estuary of Lizards.There are no rivers in the Yucatán. The Maya depended on cenotes and/or built huge underground cisterns to collect rain water. In the costal villages they recognized these springs of fresh water coming up in the shallow estuaries as underground springs. In Spanish they call them Ojos de Agua. Or Eyes of Water. In ancient times they used bamboo to create pipes to bring the fresh water to the surface without mixing with the saltwater. More recently metal pipes. 40 years ago when plumbing came to the area (not really that long ago) they mostly abandoned these sites but you can still see where they built structures to support fresh water collection. 

There are two types of crocodile here. The American Crocodile which our guide refered to as the Cocodrilo del Agua Salada. (salt water crocodile) but of course the mangrove swamp is really a mix of salt and fresh water. The other type is Morelet's crocodile which our guide refered to as Cocodrilo de Agua Dulce (fresh water crocodile). 

Of course we also got to see lots of birds. Though the flamingos were at a distance....we did see a flock of them flying and then we saw them feeding but it was too far to get a good view. 

On the way back we did a traditional Maya mud bath. Long long ago the Maya used this mud as a sunscreen and bug repellant! It felt pretty good. But what was better was washing it off at this lovely little beach where a school of bottlenose fish came over to check us out! 

Then we came back to town, had showers, and had lunch at this lovely restaurant with a view. Micah worked on his comics and bonded with our waiter who also paints murals. He showed us photos of his murals. What a perfect morning. The kids slept HARD on our 2.5 hour drive back to Merida. 

Mayan Math Nerdy Post Warning (26 de junio)

This morning while Shoshanna and the kids went to the panadería and leasurely ate their pan dulce I took a cab to the Gran Museo del Maya. A beautiful and amazingly detailed museum on the northern edge of the city. The kids and Shosh had visited earlier on their own but I really wanted to go by myself so I could focus on the museum (I read way slower in Spanish!) and not be as distracted with watching the kids. So glad I went! 

I wanted to make this trip because 70% of my students at Harshman are Latin@. I spend my year teaching math concepts that are often credited to the Europeans (Euclidian Geometry, Pythagrean Theorem) and I know that the great civilizations of the Americas also developed advanced mathematics (and also discovered the right triangle theorem credited to Pythagoras) and I wanted to learn more about them and to give students a chance to explore those concepts through a non-western lens. 

If you speak Spanish....the video from the museum below is as great intro. If you don't check out this webpage on Mayan numbers. 

Now that you understand the basics of Mayan numbers you see them everywhere. In carvings on stone but also in on paper (they created paper out of bark and had a written language of their own though now Mayan is writing using the western European alphabet.)

The museum had this really cool interactive activity that I want to recreate in Desmos to allow you to count on a abucus of sorts to translate our numbers to Mayan numbers. You play with an example, then try to create a specific number as a challenge! Stay posted for my own version of this later! 

At the archeological site of Uxmal, I bought a work book about the Mayan calendar and was able to learn a little about the calendar. Mayan calendar dates are often included in carvings on buildings and they can be decoded. The Maya counted forward from a mythical beginging of the world date that was 3114 B.C. Here are some examples. 

The museum had this cool app that would create one of these for your birthday. So I made mine and then I used this workbook to calculate the date! Maybe the workbook and and the museum use slightly different calculations (this workbook is like 50 years old) but I got pretty close to my birth year! Or maybe leap years factor into the difference because in all those years there are quite a few that would have 366 days. BakTun is 144,000 days, Katun is 7,200, Tun is 360, Uinal is 20 and Kin is 1. I don't fully get the week and month information at the bottom yet but I'm getting the day part! 

I was also fascinated by the trade routes. Mayan communities main crops were corn, but also cotton which they have been growing and weaving for 5000 years and honey (made by stingless bees!) as well as salt. Honey, Cotton, and Salt were demanded by the conquistadors as tribute. They had extensive trade routes trading as far north as the southwestern United States! There were all these little diorama of daily life. Here is the one with honey.

Day Trip: Progreso (24 de junio)

Progreso is about 30 minutes by car and the closest beach to Mérida. We drove friday after my classes were done and hung out in a beach club for a few hours. The beach club is my favorite thing about Mexican beaches because yes, in fact, I do want to have someone bring me food and drinks while my kids play in the sand. (the beach club we went to also had a kids pool with three sections, one foot, 2 feet, and 4 feet deep.) Then we walked the boardwalk and got coconuts and ice cream and drove home! It was our kids first time in the Ocean (that they remember...Micah visitied the Pacific as a 3 year old.) Micah loved the waves. Adira wasn't so sure but she went in in the end! 

Around Town 1.3 El Centro (22 de junio)

Mérida is a theater town and every night they have free performances in the plaza grande. We took a cab downtown (It's about a 5-10 minute drive but cabs are plentiful and it was just easier not to walk or drive.) to check out a videomapping perfomance that tells the story of the Casa Montejo a home built by the Montejo family of conquistadors who conquered the region and built the modern city of Mérida on top of the Mayan city Ichkansihoo (T'Ho). They even used the stones from the Mayan city to build the cathedral here.  Check out this wikipedia article for some context.

The kids liked walking around the plaza. Getting ice cream from our favorite place (El Colon which has been serving ice cream in Mérida since 1907. And they liked the show. Micah liked the theater and Adira liked the dancing that followed. 

Micah lost a tooth here in Mérida. Aparently in Mexico there is no tooth fairy, but instead a there is a tooth mouse and he brings kids money and takes their teeth. He even has a name: Ratoncito Perez. So Micah was visited by el Ratoncito Perez and he got $40 pesos ($2) to spend on his own. He decided he wanted to spend it basically right away and bought these light up flying helicopters to launch into the air at the plaza grande. 

Around Town 1.2 Parque Zoologico Animaya (21 de junio)

This week children of Mexico still have two more weeks of school so there are no summer camps. I had already paid for a deposit on Spanish language classes before we realized this so we decided to have a week where I took classes in the AM and Shoshanna took care of the kids. Next week we will travel again and then the kids will do two weeks of summer camp before we head home. 

I've been taking classes at a little school with two other students in the class. My teacher is from Mexico City and was a lawyer. Now that her kids are out of the house (her youngest is at the University) she wanted a slower life and moved to Merida to teach Spanish to foriegners. I've been enjoying going on walks early in the morning to class or later at night when it cools off. But there is limited shade on normal streets in Merida so the middle of the day is pretty brutal for outdoor time. Luckily there is one exception to this no shade on sidewalks rule. Our Merida house is right off of the Paseo de Montejo which is a big wide boulivard lined with trees and with huge sidewalks and bike lanes. Way different from the typical Merida sidewalk. The view from our house is first, then me on Paseo Montejo, then my Spanish School which is about 7 blocks from our house. 

On Tuesday afternoon after school Shoshanna and the kids picked me up with went to one of the two FREE zoos in Merida. We went in the heat of the day but it was windy and shaded and not so bad. We saw lots of native species that are not native to Indy. Tapir, Flaminco, Crocodiles, Green Iguanas, Little Yucatan Iguanas. We saw a bunch of ñandú (Rhea) which I immediately recognized because they are the only animal (and the only word I can think of) that stars with ñ so they are frequent star in Spanish alphabet books. I've seen lots of ostrich but never ñandú in the zoos of the US. The zoo had some super nice shadded plagrounds. I love that this zoo is FREE! They also had hippos, zebras, and giraffes. 

Micah checking out this cool statue about about climate change at the zoo. 

Mini Trip within a Trip 1

Uxmal and Cenotes Mucuychen (17-19 de junio)

We are planning a couple of mini-trips within trips and this weekend we took our first one. We rented a car from a local car rental place (and were thrilled that it is just a regular car with local plates unlike some rental situations). We drove about 1 hour south of Mérida to the ruins of the ancient Maya city of Uxmal (pronounced Oosh-mal). We decided to stay in the fancy lodge right next to the ruins for a resort like experience. We have mostly had the place to ourselves. (I guess when they say off season they mean off season because I really expected Uxmal to be more crowed. 

The kids were really into this pool and we swam like 3 times a day in it. Another highlight was "going down for breakfast" which they LOVE about any hotel. But the fresh fruit and mini conchas and juice definitely beat a typical hotel breakfast. 

We hit the ruins early in the morning and totally beat the crowds. We basically had the place to ourselves. Which was good because we could wander around a little with the kiddos. We didn't get a tour guide and I'm so glad.  We walked around as a family and my kids were most interested in iguanas and when they were tired Shosh took them back to the hotel while I explored the rest of the ruins on my own. I bought book outside for about $2.50 american dollars that gave me a sense of the ruins and had lots more information about the region. 

The whole Yucatan region has very few rivers and streams. The Maya depended on cenotes or carefully collected water to support their cities and crops. Uxmal doesn't have a cenote so the maya built huge cisterns know as  chultunes. 

Not all the signs are tri-lingual but some are! We bought a book in Mayan and Spanish. 

The kids were really into the Iguanas but I was into the birds! Especially this one with its fancy tailo that I think I idenified as a Turquoise-browed Motmot. 

After the ruins and of course another dip into the hotel pool we headed into the nearby town of Santa Elena for lunch. Shoshanna and I are learning quickly that our favorite lunch is El panucho. It's a medium thick tortilla that has a thin slice on top and refried black beans are put inside. It's topped with veggies and avocado and pickled onions. The kids like quesadillas which they make with queso de bola and thicker homemade tortillas. 

After we lunch we visited two musuems. First the tiny Santa Elena Museo de Momias which was basically some accidntally mummified children they found while excavating and rebuilding the church. I'm still not totally sure how these coffins were mummified in the humidity of the Yucatan.....but here we go. Micah wanted to go to this museum the most! We also had a nice walk up the stairs to the church and the tallest hill in Santa Elena. 

Next we went to the Museo de Chocolate. Here we learned a lot about the history of chocolate. (Which the Maya grew in mostly dry cenotes--so it was still a special treat for them.) We drank tradicional unsweetend chocolate. The museo had some rescued animals (monos!) and a little playground at the end.  We also apprecaiated the lush tropical lanscaping at the mostly outdoor museo. This was a favorite of the kids for the day. We were too tired to much else this evening and crashed hard that night! 

On Sunday on our drive back to Merida. We stoped at Hacienda Mucuyche which has two cenotes you can swim in as a part of a guided tour. The kids are not much for guided tours but they did their best. They learned that the name of the hacienda "Mucuyche" means Wooden Dove in Maya. Notice Micah looking really bored on the tour of the old Hacienda. They did great in the first cenote and the channel between them but the second one (not pictured) we all went in is more like a true cave with stalagmites coming down from the ceiling. They warned us not to make loud noises or they might fall on us and that was enough to scare Micah into not wanting to spend much time there. But the pool was awesome and shallow enough for everyone to stand in. 

Around Town 1.1 Parque de las Americas (16 de junio 2022)

There aren't a lot of playgrounds in the middle of old Mérida. There is a lot to look at but the kids were missing running and jumping with other kiddos. So we took a short cab to Parque de las Americas. Here they have some playground equipment but in the evening you can also pay a small amound of money (20 pesos which is about $1)  to use bounce houses and drive electric cars around the track! There are also tons of street vendors. The kids goot limon sorbet in cones and the adults got marquesitas. (the kids are not a fan.) 

A note on masks. Mérida just lifted their OUTDOOR mask mandate. Pretty much everone still wears them outside though. Especially in things like this. I saw one older person and one kid without a mask at this park. There is absolutely a mask mandate indoors and there is basically  universal compliance. In Indiana no one wears masks anymore....so crazy to compare. 

Settling In 16 de junio 2022

We had two awesome days exploring Merida! I did not take enough pictures. Will fix that! We walked around. Went to the grocery store.(pleased to find sprouted ezekiel bread and fake meat). We found a bookstore and bought Micah a copy of Diario de Greg 6 (the one we ordered in the US didn't get to our house in time). Feeling lucky that I have a kid that prefers reading in Spanish! And we ate lots of helado but the best thing about our home base house is this little pool in the backyard. The kids want to swim constantly. 6AM, 8AM, 1PM. Even when I was over it and Adira and Shosh are napping Micah wants to keep swimming by himself. 

Here are a few more pictures of our lovely Mérida casa. We are loving this house so far. Adira's only complaint is that she can't reach the doornobs on these giant doors! Independent 4 year olds! 

We are headed on a little mini trip this weekend that I will write about when we get back on Sunday or Monday! Expect another update then! 

We made it to Mérida 14 de junio 2022

After 16 hours in airports and on airplanes (3 flights, customs, etc.) we made it to the Yucatan.  We had just enough energy for a quick dip into our little courtyard pool and a walk around the corner to an Italian Restaurant (because that's what you do your first night in Mexico).  Also around the corner is a sorbet place. As my kiddos like sorbet over ice cream every day this might be a regular stop of ours. We got sandia (watermelon) and limon (lime) last night and it was a great combination. 

This morning we got up early and it is so pleasant outside (though temps are about the same as Indianapolis this week...) and I am drinking coffee and writing this post in our little courtyard while Micah has figured out how to work the TV and moved this little day bed right in front of it. Shoshanna is ordering online groceries and we are looking forward to exploring and also relaxing in the house.