From the Chicago Sun-Times/Associated Press:
Mexico's Mayas calm as apocalypse calendar ticks awayFunny how some people can get so worked up about stuff like this. Besides, it isn't happening on the 21st, it's December 16th right around 4:30PM PacifL1,/U;B9p''[8h]p\98-h=;o@#iO$!87g9O7YI -- NO CARRIER
Amid a worldwide frenzy of advertisers and new-agers preparing for a Maya apocalypse, one group is approaching Dec. 21 with calm and equanimity -- the people whose ancestors supposedly made the prediction in the first place.
Mexico's 800,000 Mayas are not the sinister, secretive, apocalypse-obsessed race they've been made out to be.
In their heartland on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, Mayas continue their daily lives, industriously pedaling three-wheeled bikes laden with family members and animal fodder down table-flat roads. They tell rhyming off-color jokes at dances, and pull chairs out onto the sidewalk in the evening to chat and enjoy the relative cool after a hot day.
Many still live simply in thatched, oval, mud-and-stick houses designed mostly for natural air conditioning against the oppressive heat of the Yucatan, where they plant corn, harvest oranges and raise pigs.
When asked about the end next week of a major cycle in the 5,125-year Mayan Long Count calendar, a period known as the 13th Baktun, many respond with a healthy dose of homespun Maya philosophy.
"We don't know if the world is going to end," said Liborio Yeh Kinil, a 62-year-old who can usually be found sitting on a chair outside his small grocery store at the corner of the grassy central square of the town of Uh-May in Quintana Roo state. "Remember 2006, and the "6-6-6" (June 6, 2006): A lot of people thought something was going to happen, and nothing happened after all."
