Pre-Inca pottery

Wakayama - Month 3

2010-03-12T10:32:00.000-08:00

I have been in Wakayama for three months so far, and still the people are not used to me. Several times a day people scream " Outsider!" and run away from me. I am teaching English in a rural junior high school with an extremely long name. The students seem to want a Japanese teacher, but they behave very well. The Onsen (hot springs) here are amazingly warm. After all,

Wakayama is famous for these springs. This is a picture of one.

For four months I have been here teaching the students, and still they are a bit...timid. Everybody here clings to organization. Even a school lunch is something of a ritual. It is called the triangle pattern. First, you pick up some rice with your chopsticks, and put it in your mouth. You repeat this with meat and salad, and then you eat it.

The textbooks here are also censored, saying nothing unfavorable about Japan. The books go on and on about the atomic bombs, but the invasion of Nanking is not mentioned. This happens in America, namely with some new conservative bias in Texas textbooks.

Maya collapse

2009-11-09T12:40:00.000-08:00

My collapse theory is that the Maya simply farmed themselves out of power to feed their city-states, war efforts and religion. They were organized into city-states that fought endlessly, and required a lot of food to feed the warriors. These city-states also required vast amounts of food to feed the people living there. Maize (corn) was considered sacred, and every man had to plant a blood crop, maize seeds doused in blood from when his umbilical cord was cut. Crops had a great value to the Maya, so they toiled the soil so much that it lost its fertility, forcing them to abandon their great cities lest they all starve.

2009-10-22T11:21:00.000-07:00

The Chanchay were a people with an odd sense of humor. This was reflected in several pieces of strange artwork, such as the one below.

A strange-looking Chanchay doll.

The Chavin tribe built temples, tombs and monuments around 1000 BCE.

A tenon-head on a temple.

The Nazca people were most famous for the patterns they carved into the earth, known as the Nazca Lines.

A spider design in the Nazca Lines.