Photos from R & R in Belize

These are some photos from our time in Belize after the house building adventure when we toured some of the Mayan sites.

Belize vacation photos 

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Mayan History & Culture

Much has been written on this subject and I could post a very long excerpt from Wikipedia but I found this slightly more succinct version on a website called:  https://www.livescience.com/41781-the-maya.html   This describes some of the history and amazing culture of this civilization about which we sadly do not know much as large parts of the history of the Mayans was destroyed by the European colonialists. "The Maya refer to both a modern-day people who can be found all over the world as well as their ancestors who built an ancient civilization that stretched throughout much of Central America, one that reached its peak during the first millennium A.D. The Maya civilization was never unified; rather, it consisted of numerous small states, ruled by kings, each apparently centered on a city. Sometimes, a stronger Maya state would dominate a weaker state and be able to exact tribute and labor from it. Mayan calendar A system of writing using glyptic symbols was develop
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Day 5 the final push, the spirit is willing but...

We were up at 6 a.m. as usual after a fitful night’s sleep. MAC has developed a persistent cough and this disturbed both of us. Soon we were at breakfast and when MAC became vertical, her cough was better. We set off for the build site at about 8.30 a.m. and soon were preparing for a brick makingg demonstration. We needed gravel for this and had to use the hand crusher machine to fill up a wheel barrow with gravel, This contraption which is straight out of Rube Goldberg is put together from parts from an old Coca Cola bottling plant. By pushing a handle up and down, a large disc crushes the rocks into small gravel. It is sometimes necessary to put the residue through the crusher twice in order to get the correct grade of gravel for brick making. When the gravel was prepared we retired to where the brick making machine was and the gravel was mixed with sand and water to make a suitable consistency of mix. Aiden demonstrated how this consistency could be assessed by scrunching the
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Day 4 the pace is starting to tell...

Today we rose at 6 a.m. as usual but there was a significantly less  amount of energy in our rising end MAC who had been coughing during the night definitely did not feel that good. We went to breakfast but there was a general feeling that everyone was feeling the pace of the heat and the workload. I felt really tired and drained. Nevertheless we proceeded to the site where the preparation for the application of stucco was well under way. We fixed a few small areas of the chicken wire which needed to be bedded against the bricks and then the stucco work started. This is back-breaking work and consists of filling a square board of wood on a short handle called a ‘hawk’ with stucco mixture which is the consistency of a thick gravy and then placing the hawk up to the wall and scraping off the stucco onto the wall with a ‘float’ or rectangular flat metal applicator and them smoothing it out over as much area as possible. This is not at all easy especially as the wall is rough and cover
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