Brownieville: Chichen Itza

For those of you unfamiliar with the name Chichen Itza, this post has nothing to do with Chicken or Pizza, although my children have called Chichen Itza, "Chicken Pizza" before jokingly.

Our Saturday in Cancun was spent at a place called Chichen Itza - a Mayan Temple ground. It was an experience both educational and sweaty. Below you can see how enthralled the kids were by what our guide was teaching us as well as the best way to keep out of the sun.

Here you can see the main temple on the Chichen Itza grounds. You can stand at the bottom and clap and hear it echo back to you. Another fun fact is if you want to tell someone a secret and you do it at the top of the temple, everyone down below will hear.

There are lots of cool engravings and faces around Chichen Itza if you know where to look (like - anywhere). There are faces of people (and many different expressions) and snake heads... Here is the face of the rain god that is on the top of the main temple. It kind of looks like he's smiling and you and saying, "Haha! Not today sucker! You should have picked a different day to come if you wanted some nice cooling rain! And those umbrellas will only keep so much sun off..."

There's also a place where they have games on Chichen Itza grounds. Only the best athletes are chosen and if you are the lucky winner, you get to be sacrificed! But from what the guide said about the game, it would have been pretty tough to be a winner whether you wanted to be sacrificed or not.

Here's a panoramic view of the grounds. (Don't look too close or you might discover some alien life forms among the group we are with!)

And here's another one of the structures. If I remember correctly there are a thousand or so stone soldiers around and on the building.

The final thing we did at Chichen Itza was listen to 3 little Mayan girls sing in their native language (probably a native song).

Following our time at the Chichen Itza grounds we had lunch, complete with entertainment in the form of native Mayan dancers.

We also went to go and see (and in some cases swim) in the Cenote. Here's the actual cenote from above.

Here's Turtle clinging for his life to Daddy's back, even though he can swim okay and usually enjoys it.

And here is our Marshmallow, who can't swim without her life vest, scaring the wits out of Daddy because he's afraid she's going to fall off because she's not holding on very tight.