About 45 minutes-ish by car from Puebla is the city of Tlaxcala, capital of the state of the same name, where I headed with some friends. I can’t say we did an exhaustive tourism of Tlaxcala, but we did see inside the town hall, some beautiful murals, typical in Mexico, depicting the history of the region from pre-hispanic times to the present, using every wall and snaking of the grand staircase at one end. Colourful and vibrant, they gave us a taste of an ancient market, with doctors performing painful-looking cures and women selling corn in all forms, and of a battle between the Spanish (whom the Tlaxcalans sided with) and the Indigenous people, complete with fiery gods combating in the sky. At the far end, the murals unfortunately became more portaits of important Mexican historical figures, from Benito Juarez to the short-lived French Emperor Maximilian, and lost a lot of their fluid and gaudy drama along the way.

Accross the main square from the murals was a small gallery featuring an exhibition of recent works by famed Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Previoulsy I’d mainly known his sculptural work, in particular the famous fat cat at the bottom of Rambla de Raval in Barcelona, a beloved mecca of everyone and their camera. These works were paintings and sketches, and while they were undeniably the work of the same man (the massive figures, whether human or animal) they were much more serious in theme. They dealt with the never-ending violence in Colombia, and paraded images of shootings, torture, rape and funerals before us. My favourite though, was atypical, in that there were no humans in it: it depicted a car bomb.