Puebla

El Zócalo

Well my travels have gotten off to a bit of a rocky start, but it’s all smoothing out now.  The bus company doesn’t accept foreign credit cards online, and I’m not eligible for a Mexican one yet.  So I couldn’t buy my ticket in advance.  I showed up to the bus station Friday over an hour before the bus I wanted to catch was (to Tuxtla), and after waiting over 45 minutes in line, I was told that there weren’t any available until Sunday!  I didn’t want to wait until Sunday to go, so instead I caught a bus to Puebla, hoping I could get a bus from Puebla to Tuxtla Saturday night instead of Sunday.  Except now I was going to be getting into Puebla at like 1am with no hostel reservation.  Oh, and I also forgot my teacher credential, which gets you a 25% discount on all bus trips during the holidays!

The inside of one of many churches I saw

Luckily the first hostel I showed up to in Puebla had a free bed, and I was able to get a Saturday night bus to Tuxtla, so all is good now.  But travelling during holiday times is horrible—the bus stations are all like zoos!  Like imagine how busy airports and stuff are in Canada during the holidays, and then put 5 times as many people.  There are just so many Mexicans.

Loving the hand-painted tiles everywhere!

Puebla was actually really nice though.  It’s only 2 hours from DF, so I think I’m definitely going to come back for a weekend in the new year, as I did not see nearly as much as I wanted to.  Also, in Cholula, the next town over, there are ruins which I want to check out.

The Cathedral...pretty much like every other Cathedral

First I went to the Ex-Convento de Santa Rosa, where apparently the nuns cooked the first ever mole.  There was a museum attached that I wanted to go to, but it was closed for renovations.  So then I checked out the Museo de la Revolucion which was pretty interesting.  From there I went to one of the many markets and had some delicious mole enchiladas.  Mole is just like the best thing ever.  I then went to the Museo Amparo which was incredible! I wasn’t going to go, as I had read that the museum was known for its colonial art (which doesn’t interest me at all), and its pre-hispanic artifacts (which do interest me, but I’ve already seen the best collection in Mexico at the Museo de Anthropologia in DF, and all the other collections kinda pale in comparison).  But I was walking by and decided to look in at what exhibits they had on, and it was free for the 2 weeks around Christmas!  There was an amazing exhibit that was 3 floors of the photographer Kati Horna’s work (who has the same birthday as me!).  She was born in Hungary, and then moved to Germany because of the First World War.  Then she lived in France for a bit, before travelling through Spain documenting the civil war.  She eventually settled in Mexico, and her work was so interesting.  Even some of the shots taken in the 30s looked like they could be today.  The way she captured human nature and had that transcend the time and place which it was shot was really cool.  Like there was a photo of these kids playing while the Spanish civil war was happening around them.  And aside from the clothes they were wearing, it could have been a shot from today.  And then there was this one called Museo de Cera, which was a shot of a couple wax statues, but she caught the unimpressed face of a teenage girl reflected in the glass.  Her husband was a graphic designer, and she did a lot of cool photo-collages with him as well.  I think my favourite though was a group of 3 photos called Muros de Mexico.  Almost all her work was in black and white except for these 3 shots of colourful walls on the streets of Mexico.  The colours were so vibrant!  They were very reminiscent of Rothko, except in photography form.

View from the roof of Museo Amparo

The roof of the museum had a beautiful view over the whole city…you could see all the different church tops standing out amongst the tops of all the other buildings.  The first floor of the museum also had a cool installation piece by Edgardo Aragón.  There were about 15 large flatscreen TVs in portrait view next to each other forming a semi-circle around the viewer.  And on each screen was a musician suited up, standing on some rock of other formation in the middle of the desert.  And then they all started to play, with the background behind each one of them static, and them the only ones moving on the screen.  It was a pretty cool experience.

One of the circus acts at the Posada!

After that I went to another museum where I saw the plans and projections Ernesto Tamarinz made of a number of sculptures and monuments he created around the country.  And then I saw an exhibit by an artist named Fernandez Ramírez Osorio.  He had work in a number of different styles, but I most preferred his abstract work.  I then got a tour of the Palacio de Ayuntamiento (the legislative assembly), before heading to the Zócalo to check out the Posada celebrations.  They had piñatas for the kids the break filled with toys for kids whose families’ can’t afford to get them presents which was nice.  And then they had some pretty cool circus acts.  I couldn’t stay long as I had to catch my bus to Tuxtla, but I’d say it was definitely an enjoyable detour.

And now on to Chiapas!