We stayed in a little pink hotel that faced directly onto the ocean, and when I opened the door the first morning, it was to see sunshine, waves and the sparkling falling drops of a little old fountain. We were right by the port, but personally I kind of love watching port activities. There were plenty of beach walks, though no swimming in the ocean—these days I find it makes me a bit seasick. It’s probably because of all the margaritas. However, the hotel also had a lovely, clear, and very deep pool, with was a joy to drift around in. I have yet to figure out how to balance a margarita on my stomach, but I’m working on it!

One highlight was the history train, a set of exhibits in the form of a train, each carriage created by different artists and showing a different event in Mexico’s turbulent and frequently bloody history. The scenes were often done in different materials too: from shiny silver to paper maché to black wood. The accompanying text was unfortunately very long and heavy, which meant I lost the will to live a bit, and accordingly didn’t learn as much as I should have, but the exhibit was great nonetheless. Oh, and I should add: all the figures were skeletons, in a Day of the Dead sort of way!

My other favourites were the various Mexican monsters on display on the third floor. From jaguars to dragons, and many indescribable monsters in between, they were bizarre, colourful, and delicate yet fearsome. This was one of the best museums in Mexico City I felt, and very recommended!

While my sister was visiting we decided to do an easy day trip from Guadalajara, and Tequila is one of the best-known destinations within an hour or so of the city. We looked into the “Tequila Express” all day, touristy party-train, but balked at the $120 (dollars) per adult fare. Instead we took the local bus, which was the usual ghastly affair (stopping, starting, stopping for twenty minutes, bouncing, blaring horrible Mexican singing with backup provided by a choir of crying children). On the other hand, it did cost $30 return for all of us, so it was well worth it!

Tequila is a strikingly beautiful town, and though the tourist trade has a large presence, it seems to be a force for good here. The buildings are well maintained and painted, and the centre is full of the kind of architecture you imagine all of Mexico to be like: green shady gardens, quiet interior courtyards, and lots of colour.

Even the poor vocho's had a tough month, thanks to some Mexican mountain roads

The third reason for my silence had been an intensive few weekends of traveling in the area: to Oaxaca City for Day of the Dead, to Mexico City (I want to live in Mexico City!!!!) and to the small and difficult-to-reach pueblo mágico of Cuetzalan in Northern Puebla.

Since my time in Mexico may be coming to an end, I’ll post on these, and save the bureaucratic nightmares for my comic novel!

However, they were definitely worth reporting on. Huamantla is a small city about an hour from Puebla in the neighbouring state of Tlaxcala, and every year in August they have “The Night Where No One Sleeps.” I was told in advance that “they decorate the streets with flowers,” and had vague ideas of garlands of flowers hanging from balconies and lamp-posts.

However, they actually decorate the streets, with coloured sawdust sifted painstakingly through wooden boxes onto pre-laid stencils, flowers, and glitter. The final result is beautiful, complex and immaculate patterned carpets on the streets themselves that take hours to create. I was livid that my camera was dead….

It was chilly that night, and the enormous crowds, tacky saxophone cover bands playing “My Way” and the endless wait for the fireworks finally drove us away before the parade dedicated to the virgin was slated to make its way down the street, destroying the flower carpets in the process. I’m glad really. Although it’s a religious festival, I felt I didn’t want any religion destroying the colourful, faintly gleaming atmosphere of the “Pueblo Mágico” on a cool summer’s night.

Not a good picture, but this was the lonely pulquería

When drinking in parking lots is not only for teenagers...

I embarked on a fools mission to drink the whole glass, which was not only impossible, but also completely inadvisable, given the roads we still had to travel to get home. The surroundings, meanwhile, became more and more surreal the farther I ventured into that bottomless glass: one of the drunken men wearing an enormous Mexican sombrero detached himself from his drunken group, and came over to give us a demonstration of him drinking pulque without the straw, only with his lips hovering over the drink and inhaling until a stream of pulque poured into him mouth and his moustache. Later, to the Northern Mexican dance music strains of the jukebox in the corner, he danced with himself and his plastic cup, and tried to convince us to join him.

It would have been even more bizarrely authentic with this guy around...

Celestial battles in Tlaxcala

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.

You have the feeling of sitting outside and inside at the same time. Ambiente noise and good English music let you speak without being overheard. You can sit at tables or on slightly disturbing, cow-hide covered couches, and shelter from the sun under an umbrella. When it rains, a staff member pops out with a remote control, and an automatic roof rumbles over the courtyard. In a city where the posh people seem to like spending their free time drinking franchise coffee at the suburban mall, La Profética is refreshingly, actually a city hangout.

It’s a great place for languid morning conversations over coffee, a great place to work on an obra maestra with an afternoon beer, (the number of people with Apple laptops can be a bit off-putting, but I have one too so I shouldn’t sneer) and a great place to argue politics in the dim glow of a single tealight with a margarita at night.

Apart from the omnipresent chocolate and chile sauce known as Mole Poblano, the Poblanos seem to be most proud of their Chiles en Nogada, a specialty in Puebla available during for the summer, although with globalization, I imagine they could offer it all year if they wanted. But that would take away from the advertising frenzy and probably from the high prices its three month season allows them.

Chiles en Nogada are delicious, but also overrated. I first heard of them teaching English in Vancouver, where one of my students made a reverential presentation about Mexican food in general, and Chiles en Nogada in particular. It’s a dish that seems to appeal not only to the culinary side of Mexicans, but also the patriotic side. The chile was an important pre-colombian food staple, and as such a part of the modern people’s cultural heritage. The tongue-scaldingly hot chiles that Mexico is famous for are also a logical addition to the diet: street food is rife with bacteria, but the strength of some of those chiles will kill practically anything in your stomach that could harm you. And Chiles en Nogada are particularly patriotic: the dish contains the three colours of the Mexican flag, red for the blood of heroes, green for hope, and the white that binds them together.

More simply put, however, this dish consists of a large, mild green chile, stuffed with fruit (often apple, pear, and peach) and blanketed in a white, creamy walnut sauce (a nogal is a walnut tree). It is then sprinkled with pomegranate seeds (individual drops of hero-blood I imagine) and then often with parsely to reinforce the green colour. They are tasty, although in a strange, sweet, and often tepid way. I would recommend, if two or three people go for dinner, getting one Chile en Nogada to share, and something else as well. But hurry! The season this year is almost over!

I went with the original plan (it was after all, also the laziest plan) and the reality of Independence Day downtown says a lot about my students, Poblanos in general, and Mexico today.
It was raining, so we didn’t even go out until the fireworks started going off. Therefore, we only saw the fireworks from the streets a few blocks from the main square– but this might have been for the best. Instead of an oohing-and-awing crowd the only spectators apart from us were locals who’d come down to the street with their children. A green orb exloded into the nearby sky, while a pair of six year olds giggled in delerious excitement and screamed “Viva México.”

Missing the Fireworks on Independence Day

The long and commercial winding road to the Zócalo

Poblanos are a strange breed, within Mexico. Although I’ve found them universally pleasant and helpful my Mexican friends from wherever else in the country claim that they are not particularly friendly, and that they are very conservative. The last is certainly true. “Street Fiesta in Mexico” conjures up thoughts, at least for me, of dancing, singing and plenty of Tequila. Just as Christmas Eve in Havana turned out to be dancing, singing, guitar playing and plenty of rum on the streets. But the Poblanos are definitley lower-key than the Cubans, the Catalans, or even, to my surprise, the Canadians. A band played rousing Mexican anthems in the shadow of the cathedral, and while people danced, I would definitely say the band had more fun than anyone else. We danced in the rain and the spray from the fountain for a while, and then wandered over to the Governmental Palace, to see what was going on there.

The Palace was glowing with Christmas-er-Independence Day lights, visually screaming “Viva México” the way no one actually seemed to be screaming (Mexican Independence began with a scream) and a crowd of people waited expectantly below, alternately gazing up, huddling under hoods or umbrellas in the rain, or bouncing excitedly whenver the television camera mounted on a crane swung their way. We also stopped and stared up at the blazing palace and waited. And waited. A woman told us that something was supposed to happen–everyone seemed a bit vague on what, but we assumed it must be something to do with the scream. This was supposed to happen at 11 or 11:30 we believed, and it was 11 now.

So we waited, looking up at the palace and the people in it. People who would approach the flag-draped balcony and look out into the crowded square below briefly, then turn and have their picture taken with their friends. Men in expensive suits. Woman with sleek, shiny hair and dresses the like of which I haven’t seen anywhere in Mexico. Children leaning over the balconies and watching the crowd with a fixed, un-analytical stare that seemed to find nothing strange in a large number of increasingly wet people staring back at them. And military leaders, brushed and badged to within an inch of their lives, gazed over trim, military moustaches into a crowd sporting stick-on, costume Zapatista moustaches, then turned their backs and leaned against the balcony to punch messages into their cell-phones.

It rained and rained, not particularly hard but consistently, we waited and waited and finally it was past 11:30 and still nobody had appeared to do more than wave half-heartedly at the increasingly half-hearted crowd. I started to feel more and more irritable. Some of these wet people in the crowd with me probably make about $200 a month, and here they were, waiting to be addressed by someone whose shirt probably cost more than that, who could see that everyone was wet and who still couldn’t be bothered to put in an appearance to make whatever empty and politically current speech they were here to make.

Enough. I had a cold that wasn’t getting any better, so we left the silent watchers, the band that was much livlier than anyone dancing to it, and the cordoned off military area. Passing more bedraggled military men on the way back home I was struck by the thought: the rich here are frightened of the poor. But given the passivity of all those waiting people in the square (the “agressive people” as my students had said they were) I couldn’t imagine why.