This Weekend's Ramblings Part 2: Puebla

After my night in Cholula and breakfast atop the pyramid, I turned my focus to Puebla. I spent the better part of three days in Puebla and it never failed to disappoint. Since sleeping out in the big city was not very attractive, I first went to find Oliver, my host for the next couple days. Though it was not as simple as it first sounded, we did finally connect and he brought me back to his place. Oliver has a pretty big house near the famous Universidad de las Americas and only one housemate (an exchange student from France) so I got my very own room with two comfortable beds and plenty of warm blankets. If that wasn't pleasing enough, he also produced a map of the city and took the time to explain all the spots that were worth checking out and sent me on my way (with helpful instructions on how to return to the house).

The first few places I visited were nice, but lacked the incredibility factor of, say, the tow-lot in Cholula: an old convent-turned-cultural center (though the restrooms were free; that's always a plus), a huge cathedral with a side chapel covered  in gold, a streetwalk market full of Mexican 

hippies and their wannabe co

unterparts ("guanabi" in Spanglish) hawking cheap, natural-looking trinkets and (interestingly) weird poached animal goods (think a hat with a wolf head attached and a gator-skin purse with a real baby alligator head peering out of the side). All this was well and good, but I really started getting into the Poblano (Pueblan) culture around lunchtime in a market south of the city. Evidently this place is the spot for the local gastronomic delight "Cemitas" something like a sandwich that's spent a few years on steroids. Oliver told me to expect huge, but I just wasn't prepared for what came out to my flimsy plastic table. I mean, when two thick slices of ham are used as a condiment, you know things are pretty serious.

I stumbled out of the Mercado del Carmen and walked for a few hours, trying to recover from the cemita. It's a pretty city to cruise through. I'm not a huge architecture buff, but the streets have a lot of texture to them and the churches are sweet. I mean, it can get tiring walking into every single church, but it's a fun little pastime to walk into the nearest cathedral and get a spinning sensation when you realize how massive it is. I mean, I still don't really understand why they built them so huge and ornate, or why they built so many, but the spinning sensation is fun. Funny…some people do weed, others do coke…I just walk in and out of large examples of the Mexican Baroque period.

 

In the evening I went out with Oliver and Ancha to eat some late night tacos and hang out with some friends in a house in Cholula. It was really nice. I mean, that's something lacking in the culture here in CVA. Nobody here believes in just hanging out and talking on a Saturday night. To do so would be a failure. But I must say that I rather liked it, though as I grew sleepy it was harder and harder to keep up with the conversation.

I slept late Sunday morning and had tea and fruit for breakfast before heading downtown to look for a church. I picked one that I liked (because the steeple thing was square instead of the usual round), but left after not too long. I don't know if it's a normal Catholic thing or not, but a dude started coming around with a golden pot hemorrhaging thick smoke and another guy sat up in front ringing a bell and looking like one of those hapless minions in the Temple of Doom. Creeped me out. So I left and ate a hearty brunch and read Colossians. Not exactly church, but at least I understood what was going on.

 

For the rest of the afternoon, I basically just hung out in a couple of Puebla's best coffee shops, reading, writing, and relaxing. I got a little taste of home when I invited a homeless guy to dinner and an americano at a nice café. A native Poblano sporting a sweet grey beard, Erik never knew his parents and has lived on Mexico's streets since age 9. It was interesting to find out that he was very well-traveled, much more so that any of my friends from the middle and upper classes. I know there's a huge culture of work-search migration here, but I didn't know about the homeless circuit.

 

I tried to imagine a life without a trace of flesh and blood family, born onto the streets, but I really couldn't. I just sat across the table from my new friend and watched the wrinkles around his eyes deepen as he laughed out loud at the coffee, set gently upon the table with a few packets of natural sugar and a shiny little spoon. He'd never set foot in a café like that before. He'd never in his 50-some years eaten a bagel-ish sandwich like they served him there that night. It reminded me that, though the vagabond life is strangely beautiful to me, I am far from being a hobo. For starters I have a loving family; it's hard to be homeless when your family loves you. And while old-school, bearded streetfolk only drink a few café-style cups of coffee in their entire lives, my number-of-cups-imbibed is getting close to "countless." So I'm not straight-up, full-blooded vagrant material. In my mind the only other true hobo-types are those with a rough, rough past who are choosing the path of least resistance away from it. So it looks like, unless something serious happens, I won't be a certified vagabond. I may still look like one, though. (I find that my homeless friends have a style that, besides being quite affordable, is very chic to me.)

 

Other good things about Puebla included an incredible art exhibit where the main mediums were tires and cars, finding the Mexican movie soundtrack I'd been hunting since August, and learning how to say "sweet potato" in Spanish (should come in handy when I'm making Thanksgiving dinner for all my friends here).

 

Well, it's Saturday afternoon and all I've done today is play around with the format of some semester projects, got sucked into a slew of bioethics articles on Wikipedia, and written this. But I mean, that's not half bad if you think about it. And I've been listening to music streaming from folkalley.com all the while, so really it's been a very successful Saturday so far, huh? And later? Shopping for large quantities of fruit, dodging the weekend crowd of misplaced Chilangos, and celebrating the birthday of a good French buddy of mine (never thought you'd hear that, did ya?).

 

PS: that was a lot of three-item lists in two little paragraphs.