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| Pinatas at the mercado de navidad |
From Puebla, I took a side trip to Cholula. The bus rattled and ripped through narrow cobbled streets, past tiny groups of houses in nowhere, surrounded by nothing, to a gradually thickening landscape. When I got off the bus near the town square, the first thing I saw was a huge Mercado de Navidad. The square was filled with booths selling tiny clay roof tiles, fabric backdrops that looked like brick, or wood, or desert landscape; treehouse structures to add height to the creche setup; sheets of sphagnum and spanish moss; pumps, rocks, streambeds for tiny water features and fountains; people, animals, and many, many Christ children of all sizes. There was a large creche near the town hall with animals that meant to look inspired but really looked like they were rolling their eyes at the whole scene.
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| grasshoppers and blackberries! |
Cholula has a huge church on a hill, La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de Remedios, built n 1666 right atop a very large pyramid dating from around 200 BC that had been obscured over time, eroded with grass growing on it so it looked like a very symmetrical hill. The pyramid has been excavated and you could go through tunnels to view the work, and murals inside. But there had been a cave in recently and, sadly, it was closed to the public. There was a very nice museum that I had to myself with reproductions of the grasshopper murals inside the pyramid. They were closeup, head-on faces, and looked like aliens. There was also a nice selection of other artifacts, mostly ceramics, collected from nearby showing the progression of technology and design over the centuries. Outside the museo, I was standing under a tree looking over the landscape when I heard the branch above me creak loudly, followed by a fussing bird. It turned out the creaking (as if the tree were breaking!) was part of the birdcall. Creak, whoop, whoop, whoop. The grasshoppers were all over, but not very hoppy. They had very solid bodies and indifferently crept to the other side of the stem they sat on when poked. No hopping! You could get a bag of fried hoppers (chapulinas) with lime and chili-- they tasted like crunchy lime and chile. Also available were bags of potato chips, with salsa squirted into the bag.
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| Cholula from the cathedral |
The cathedral was full of ornate gold frou-frou, and someone had even put a lavender neon tube around a niche with a saint in it. It is full of incense but also really awful elevator music version of Christmas music-- a 2 minute loop repeated over and over. The saints all had that black eyeliner and pallor that made them look like strung out decadent 80s rockers. But the view from the patio was wonderful-- a panorama of the whole city. The hill formed by the pyramid that the church was perched on, was covered with wildflowers and flowering trees that were unfamiliar to me.
Unlike China, Mexico seems to have few mom-and-pop groceries, and it is not easy to get fruit or yogurt or nonfried snacks; but tacos, chips, things like that abound.
Here are some interesting stores:
*Dorian Gray pantyhose
*Farmacia del Dr. Discuente--actually there is a type of pharmacy that sells just generics.
*Stores (popups?) that sell only christmas stuff, including a forsythia yellow plastic tree
*No little man rushing to escape the green arrows here, but signs saying ruta de evacuation.
*Graduation togas-- a whole streetful in Puebla, interspersed with shops selling band uniforms.
*All of the images of the pope around here are of John Paul, not the current one.
*The bus had various icons: a crucifix (of course with a corpse on it); fuzzy dice; and Santa Claus. Just covering all the bases.
