Task # 1 in Mexico quickly became buying a car. Well, probably on my mental list of priorities this should have come somewhere after getting a bank account, a working visa and other more recognizably essential things. But all these things proved to be so difficult that we tried to forget about them and focused on the car instead. Besides, it was so much more fun buying a car, since Puebla, Mexico is home to the Volkswagen Factory, where they only stopped making the classic old beetles, known in Spanish as “vochos” in 2003.

They rumble delightfully through the streets of the old town, and barrel down the highways in competition with the disproportionate lookng SUVs. At least a third of the cars parked daily on my street are vochos, in a satisfying kaleidoscope of reds, greens, yellows, powder blues, and an adorable vocho-taxi, and they range in upkeep from immaculate to practically dragging the floor on the ground as they drive. There’s even a hardcore, rocked-out vocho-van that crashes through the neighbourhood at night like an ailing transformer, audible at least three blocks away.

The place to buy vochos, or cars in general, turned out to be “La Cienega” or “The Swamp,” basically a large parking lot in the middle of a highway filled with people selling their second-hand cars. If that isn’t dodgy enough, there’s a secondary, unofficial cienega just down the road, where more decrepit looking cars sit amongst the trees. La cienega doubles as a surreal alternative-tourist experience, and I sat next to a shy little girl eating something on a stick that might have been fried, or might have been a popsicle, while we discovered what was to become the new vocho on the block…