Puebla: Puertas Abiertas

Starting on the 21st, Puebla hosted a festival called Puertas Abiertas (open doors) where many of the historic buildings in the city were open, including some that are private or rarely open to the public.

State Congress Building. It has in interesting mix of styles, including everything from Greco-Roman statues and columns to arabic tiles and inscriptions from the Koran.

Random building owned by one of the universities

San Francisco Church, complete with an undecomposed body inside.

Another random university building

Happy Thanksgiving and the Secretario comes to Puebla

Along with the other vols in the office, we brought in a little taste of Thanksgiving to the office on Thursday. Since we've never really been big on the traditional thanksgiving foods in our fam, I stuck to the potato based dishes, that were comliments to the more traditional dishes of stuffing, cranberry sauce, and green bean casserol made by others. We failed to find the ingredients for a pumpkin pie, but were lucky enough to find one at Costco.

Unfortunately, the Thankgiving festivities of the morning were the end of free time for the day, as the impending arrival of the Secretary of SEMARNAT (think the head of EPA) was arriving that night and one of the projects I am working on is a pet project right now. So after preparing all the information, we ended up having to go to the hotel to wait for the secretary to arrive and review everything in case we needed to scurry and get anything else prepared. So that quickly turned into a late night. The next morning there was a breakfast and a press briefing about the priorities for SEMARNAT in the state of Puebla. During this, much attention was given to the project we are currently involved in, so hopefully this will transpire into more action and money.
El Secretario during the press briefing

From left to right (secretario, president of the municiaplity of Puebla, our delegado)


I have also learned that I am not a good event photographer. The table settings and lines of juice and fruit are much more interesting to me then 1,000 picts of people speaking......


Then afterwards, the secretario came to visit the office, addressed all of us, and took a picture with us all wearing our shiny new uniforms.photo from alysia


Later in the afternoon, we had a baby shower for a woman in the office. This was my 1st baby shower. I'll take this time to explain tacos arabe for a min. Tacos arabe originated in Puebla and is a taco made on pita with shaved, cooked pork. You can buy them by the taco or you can by the meat by the kilo and it comes with salsa and a stack of tortillas or pitas. So for this occasion we got a couple kilos of meat.....you gotta love 2 kilos of meat in a plastic grocery bag.
Then there were some games. Not sure what is normal for a baby shower, but there was some dressing of baby dolls while blind folded, feeding people baby food while both are blind folded, and guess the circumfrance of the mother to be (which I have say I was the closest).

An Early Thanksgiving

Saturday I headed down to Zapotitlan in the southern part of the state to celebrate turkey day a little early. Zapotitlan is in the middle of a biosphere reserve. More info can be found here from my earlier visit (http://newcombblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/from-cactus-to-rainforest.html).

We had dinner at the house of a vol that lives there on her balcony with a beautiful view of one of the churches in town and several cactus-covered hills. With some difficulties, a full Thanksgiving dinner was pulled off complete with a turkey, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, salad, veggie lasanga, cranberry sauce, stuffing, a variation on a pumpkin pie that was made from a combo of a squash-like veggie and papaya, and a birthday cake. The funniest thing is that in the last 3 years I have been in Mexico for 2 thanksgivings and China for one and have eaten much more traditional dinners then I normally ever had at home. Hope everyone has a very Happy Thanksgiving!

the big 2 6

With grand ideas of spending the big 26 in the Sierra Norte at Piedras Encimadas, I had not taken into account illness. So instead the day was spent in Puebla. Thanks for all the birthday wishes from everyone! Here are some picts from around Puebla.

Goodbye to Metztitlan

We had a nice long weekend thanks to Día de la Revolución (which actually falls on 20 of Nov, but a gov’t rules moves all holidays to the Monday of the same week) and so with Janet’s upcoming change, we decided to head out to Metztitlan for one last weekend. While some other people that decided to come were stranded on the highway for up to 2 hours or stuck on second class buses that stopped so the drive could eat, I had my fastest, least interesting trip ever. Saturday we “toured” the normal sites of Metztitlan in the morning: convent, cemetery (still filled with flowers from day of the dead), and the cactus sanctuary.

The cactus with the white hair are called viejitos (which means little old men). Some of the ones in the cactus sanctuary in Metztitlan are more than 300 years old.

This is me with a biznaga.

courtsey of Jen (thank you)

At 3, we got invited by Janet’s host family for esquite. Esquite is a corn dish cooked in a big pot (sometimes with chicken too) and then lime and mayo (and sometimes cheese) are added to it. It was the perfect food to be eating as the cold started setting in.

Somewhere between esquite and several tequilas and squirt, the carnival masks were brought out. In Metztitlan, for carnival, there is a day-long dance that is preformed that winds through the town with all the dancers wearing masks (and yes it is hot) and dancing to Huapango music. Janet’s host dad is one of the dancers that endures this hot, 12+ hour long tradition and before long he (as well as a few of us later) were running around in some very very frightening masks.

Sunday, after a breakfast of barbacoa (sheep cooked in banana leaves in a pit in the ground), tamales, and quesadillas in the market, Janet’s host family was nice enough to load us up in their truck and take us to the laguna of Metztitlan, at the far end of the canyon. Before getting there we stopped at a high point on the road with incredible views of the canyon.

another incredible view....
Once we got to the lake, we were pleased to find that the migratory while pelicans that call the lake home from about November to May, had in fact returned. Just as the cold was starting to set in with the setting sun (and yes for those of you at home its probably a lot colder right now, but its still getting down to about freezing here at night without heat and with concrete and tile houses, so cut me some slack), we headed to the small town of San Cristóbal to see some ancient paintings on the rock walls of the canyon. By that point, the paintings didn’t really get their full deserved attention because we were so cold and already thinking about hot tea and blankets back at Janet’s place.