Copan Ruins

We spent Saturday night in the town of Copan, which is this really cute, quaint town, and then Sunday we left early to go explore the ruins. The Copan ruins are the largest ruins in Honduras, and are home to an ancient Mayan civilization that thrived between the 2nd and 9th Century AD. It was one of the strongest city states until it suffered a defeat by the Quirigua in 738. I actually visited the Quirigua ruins about two weeks after I went to Copan when Mike and Gretchen came to visit me! The Copan Ruins went from the time they were abandoned in 984 to almost 1000 years later when they were first written about in 1834. They began to excavate this site in 1934. The buildings did not have roofs as they were destroyed by earthquakes and other natural disasters. It's pretty amazing to see the ruins that were unveiled by a city that existed almost 1000 years ago!

Mom and I climbing up the plaza.

One of the ruins.

You can see the structure of the buildings and how intricately it was designed. Pretty amazing for over 1000 years ago!

This is known as the hieroglyphic staircase, which was destroyed by an earthquake and was found all in pieces. They are going through and doing a lot of work on it right now and getting it all put back together.

There were cowboys everywhere and I thought they were so cute! Here is a picture of me with two of the cowboys that worked there at the ruins site.

After I took my picture with the cowboys, our old tour guide with about four teeth left got jealous and asked for his picture with Sharon, who had joined us on our trip!

Mom taking a rest at the top of the buildings.

The acropolis.

It was a pretty cool site to see. On our drive home, we stopped at a gas station right across the Guatemalan border and I asked for "llena de regular" (full of regular). The gas station attendant didn't understand what I was saying. I said, "regular" in my Spanish accent! He said, "Super?" I said, no regular. He had the super pump put into my gas tank already without pumping it yet. I kept saying, no regular. He acted like he had no clue what I was talking about. He called his buddy over and then they were SMELLING the gas cap and trying to tell me that there was super gasoline in my gas tank. It took about five minutes to convince them that I had never put super gasoline in my gas tank and it was really just regular gas!!! It was quite the fiasco! But finally they obliged and put regular gas in there. I think there must have been some prize for the person who sold the most super gas in a day or something. They thought they could convince the stupid gringos or something! ha ha