Fiestas, Ferias y Festivales

The weekend festivities kicked off on Thursday night with the inauguration of Puebla’s 1st Festival of Indigenous Culture and Art. The inauguration included the opening of an exhibition of typical dresses from the various regions of Puebla, dancing, music, and free food (2 types of mole, tamales, wild mushroom soup, corn fungus, and tasting of various cream liquors).

Typical dresses from the Sierra Norte of Puebla

The heads of various sponsoring agencies with their crowns of bread

The crowns from above

Saturday morning was the baby shower for Musmet and her husband Enrique. Mus used to work with us in SEMARNAT and we work with her husband, who is in CNA (national water commission). The baby looks like it is going to come out a lot like me, long. As you can see in the pictures, that def comes from dad and not Mus. The baby's name has already been picked out: Luz Mariana.

Baby Shower is also used in Spanish

Me being blindfolded and about to feed this poor child baby food

Musmet

The parents-to-be and me (note Mus is on her tippy toes in this photo)

After the baby shower I headed downtown, so here are some random picts that I liked from Puebla this weekend

Saturday afternoon I went to a food tasting associated with the indigenous cultural festival. The line for the tayoyos (masa filled with alberjón and topped with green or red salsa and cheese....pretty much the same thing as a tlacoyo, but don't tell that to anyone from Zacapoxtla) was super long, but well worth the wait. I also had some green mole and some big bunch of herb batter in egg and covered in red salsa.

Then a dance presentation started with dances from Huehuetla, Guerrero, Xicotepec de Juarez, a place I forget, and Acatlan.

Huehuetla’s presentation was their carnival dance. (Danza de Huehuetones)

The dance from the state of Guerrero is done for the Dia de los Muertos celebration.

I forget where the next group was from, but their dance was called la danza de Santiagueros. The dancer with the little wooden horse is Santiago. It represents the story of a fight against the conquistadors. At the end of their dance, they passed around 4 small glasses (made from the sugar cane plant) filled with an alcohol made from sugar cane. I was close enough to get one of the glasses.

In case there were any questions about the sharpness of the machetes...

The final dance, danza de Tecuanes, is from Acatlan and represents the struggle between life and death.

On Sunday I went to Calpan for the Feria de Chilie Enogada. The chilie enogada is a chilie poblano stuffed with meat, fruit and raisins, topped with a cream sauce made from nuts, and garnished with pomegranet. Calpan is also home to a very, very old convent.

In addition to selling chilies enogada, there were tons of stands selling the fruit and nuts needed to make the dish (only served in July and August). There were of course all sorts of sweets being sold as well.

Frying chilies and cleaning nuts for the nogada (white sauce made of nuts and cream)

Frying the chilies

The finished product

Random

Ok so this is a random entry of random things, most not all that interesting. So there’s a luchador photo exhibit going on in Puebla and was loving the colors, size, and public display of some of the photos.

There is a car museum by my house that usually has a small collection of old cars that I’m not generally that interested in. However, currently on display is the Papamovil from 1979. That would be the popemobil in engilsh. It’s not every day that you get to see the pope’s old car.

The pandas are just 100% random

On Friday I was in Mexico City for a workshop for the unveiling of the Ordenamiento of the whole country. I work in the area of ordenamiento (which is basically regional land-use planning), but we generally work at a scale of 1:50,000 or 1:20,000. SEMARNAT decided to do a general ordenamiento at 1:2,000,000 for the whole country to be used as a decision making management tool. It is still a work in process so the idea of the workshop was to join together several states in our region and work on correcting or making recommendations on the final zoning decisions. The document is now in a stage of public consult for 6 months.

If you read Spanish you can see all the documents here…..

http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/queessemarnat/politica_ambiental/ordenamientoecologico/Pages/consulta_publica_poegt.aspx

On Saturday I was supposed to go out from some afternoon field work, but the group of us that was supposed to go got invited to eat. A couple pounds of smoked chicken and ribs, several beers, and a couple of tequilas later, it was way too late and dark to head to the field….oh well. On Sunday I headed back to Mexico City to meet up with my friend Jimena. We were in the same masters program and she is back for the summer visiting family. It was good to finally see a friend from my pre-pc life. Before we met up for lunch I wandered around Chapultepec Park. The pictures below are of Diego River’s Tlaloc fountain. Unfortunately I couldn’t convince the guard to let me into the building behind the fountain to see some of his murals.