Acting on my goal to explore beyond the city, I decided to take a day trip to Puebla, and one of my fellow interns, Sergio, came with me.
Sergio is a Columbian who also recently arrived in town. However, unlike me, he speaks Spanish, English, German, and French, and he was also interested in seeing more of the area.
Puebla is a city to the southwest of Mexico City, about a two hour bus ride. Historically, it was founded by the religious orders to be a religious center to counter the Aztec religious center of nearby Cholula. It remained traditional and conservative for nearly its entire history. It is also much closer to the active volcano of Popocateptl, and is well known as a center for the manufacture of Talavera pottery.
Anyway, I met Sergio at 8:30 in the morning at the bus terminal here, and we bought round trip first class tickets on the Estrella Rojo line. The cost of the round trip tickets were less than 250 pesos, or cheaper than a taxi ride from the airport.
We boarded right away the nearly empty bus and took off. The seats were plush and reclined, and it was basically the equivilant or better of any chartered bus I'd ever been on. The movie of the ride was some dumb sentimential flick with Richard Gere and a Akita Inu dog. The plot is Richard Gere falls in love with a lost puppy and then Richard Gere dies and the dog waits for him outside the terminal for a few years until it dies too. That's the movie. Fortunately, the ride to Puebla was a beautiful distraction from the sappiness on the screen.
Leaving Mexico city, you pass through neighborhoods which beome progressively more informal until we came to the foothills of the mountains which ring the city, and the expanse of the slums fills the views with the occational slum cathedral poking up above the sea of concrete cubes.
Mexico City fills a vast bowl which used to contain a system of lakes. This massive bowl has the same effect as Salt Lake City, where the surrounding mountains and volcanos trap the air, leading to the lethal atmospheric problems in the city. One you ascend the edges of the bowl, the entire world changes. Suddenly we were in clear mountain air, passing through forests of pine trees, and down into the highlands, with grasses, a few trees, a lot like the plateaus of Arizona on the way to New Mexico. Really quite beautiful country. The ride in was only about 90 minutes, probably due to the light traffic.
In Puebla, the bus dumped us at the terminal a few miles from the center of town, so we figured out how to take a collectivo (bus) for a few pesos to the Zocalo. I must admit, even without a data plan, I ended up using my iphone a lot simply for the GPS.
Puebla looks like I thought Mexico City would be like. The historic center looks like a historic center, a rigorously gridded city of uniformly old buildings, all painted brilliant pastel colors. Much more picturesque than most places in Mexico City. Not as many pottery sellers as I was expecting.
We were both hungry so we attempted to find a place to eat. We tried a few places in our guidebooks but they were either closed or out of buisiness, so finally we picked a tourist trap with a seat on a balcony overlooking the leafy Zocalo.
Since molé was invented in Puebla, we both opted for the tres molés enchaladas. They were not bad. It was an expensive meal (about $100 pesos each) but we at least could check molé off the list.
We attempted to see the famous cathedral, but mass was going on so we couldn't really explore it to our leisure. So we walked over to the Library Pontifax y Mendoza. This is the ancient library of the eclesiacial college associated with the Cathedral, and its as old as any of the historical libraries of Europe. It was so old, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was on the "new fiction" shelf. The library was one long hall with high vaulted ceilings, and all the walls were lined with bookshelves, accessible by an additional two levels of narrow wooden catwalks. Everything was gorgeously carved from wood.
We next walked over to the Museo Amparo, which my guidebook claimed to be the highlight of Puebla. The private museum has a phenomenal and extensive collection of pre-hispanic artefacts, and occupies two historic mansions near the Zocalo, and has recently been renovated and expanded by TEN arquitectos. Unfornately, after we paid for our tickets (35 pesos, but still), they told us that the pre-hispanic stuff was not on display, and most of the musesum was closed to complete the renovations.
We were able to see some contmporary photography and a few salons which existed as they were in the age of Imperial Mexico, but what made the 35 pesos worth it was the roof lounge. TEN built a massive wooden deck and glass box on top of the old houses, and that's where the cafe is. There are tables and chairs outside, and I would say that at night it must be an amazing bar-lounge. You have some great views of the surrounding city, right at the level of the colorful roofscape. I grabbed a coffee there, and we continued on our way.
Next stop was back to the Cathedral, which we were able to investigate a bit further, and then on to Santo Domingo. The Zocalo and the surroundings had filled with people out shopping, strolling, and gawking at the car festival going on in the streets surrounding the Zocalo. A former site of the inquisition, the center had gone from autos-de-fe to ferias del autos.
Santo Domingo is another cathedral, but its real gem is the Capilla de Rosario (rosary chapel). When you walk in, you are nearly blinded by all the gold. It is a riot of baroque gilt plasterwork, paintings, and carvings, overwhelming, confusing the eye, from floor to ceiling. It's quite an incredible thing to see and worth the trip itself.
Leaving San Domingo, we stopped by Las Ranas, the taqueria which was closed earlier. Another culinary speciality of Puebla is its tacos arabe, which are basically tacos just with arabic flatbread instead of tortillas. Apparently Puebla has/had a large arabic community. This is interesting to me given 1) Puebla's history as a center of Catholic conservatism and 2) "arabian" tacos are made typically with pork.
Anyway, they were delcious, with tons of fresh squeezed limes and green salsa. We ate them on the curb in the shade of another church.
I was able to talk Sergio into climbing up to the forts on top of the hill overlooking the city, a little over a mile walk from the Zocalo. Really nice views of the city from there, although the views to the volcano were across on the other side of the hill. The fort is known as Fuerte Loreto.
In the Catholic tradition, there is a story about the Loreto, the house of the virgin Mary. The home in which Jesus was conceived was not once, but twice picked up and carried by angels like a divine double-wide going down the interstate. Once to avoid flooding, and once to avoid persecution and destruction, if memory serves. The second time it was carried by angels was as late as 1200 AD, which would make the house, a peasant's house with a tile roof, also miraculously long-lasting. Who was that architect, anyway?
Anyway, the house was finally set down in Italy and became the object of veneration of a certain group of nuns. There are actually paintings depicting the house being carried by angels with the virgin in all of her vestiments and divine glories riding on the roof. From that time on, replicas of the house with the same architectural features and dimensions would be constructed and then made into more elaborate churches over time. This was the case of the chapel on top of the hill overlooking Puebla, although the leaders of the city seized the chapel and made it the center of a small fort from which to defend the city and act as a base of military operations.
Anyway, we walked across the top of the hill to get a good look at Popocatepl and then we headed down to the new memorial to the battle of Puebla. This is a new monument of wood flowing over the landscape, also by TEN arquitectos, with nice views of Puebla and inexplicably, a gift shop and a Celito cafe (a Mexican Starbucks equivilant). Benches lift out of the sloping deck almost like surfboards from a wooden wave. It's interesting, but its more of a memorial park in name than in function or appearance. It's new, but the wood decking is getting punched through and ripped up in places. It looks like it's part of a masterplan for the area just below the fort, since there was also an apparently new addition of a pleasure lake. Since lakes tend to not sit well on hillsides, the side of the hill was excavated for the lake, so despite the nice views, it still feels like an open quarry. Maybe in a decade it will all work better.
As we walked down from the monument, the sky darkened and we decided to seek out the Talavera Uriyarte factory, we walked another 3/4 mile across the center of Puebla and it started to pour rain on us. I had an umbrella, but poor Sergio was left getting wet. The talavera factory was closed when we got there, so getting more wet, we hopped into a tiny combi bound for the bus terminal as the rain worsened.
With the crappy weather, the busses filled up. All the seats in the tiny combi were taken, and I and three other people stood in the tiny side aisle. I had flashbacks to human tetris we played in the combi ride to Aguascalientes in Peru.
At a certain point, the driver opened the door and told us we were there. Sergio asked him were the terminal was and the driver said, its right here, in front of us. I suppose, technically, yes, the bus terminal was right in front of us. Across the freeway.
There was a way across we found, and hopped our way across, avoiding puddles, other pedestrians, and busses. At a freeway underpass where we crossed, two guys were calmly standing playing chess on a beat up white table, oblivious the rain and traffic around them. I picked up some local candy made from sweet potatoes as a momento for the ride home.
The ride back was much more full, and took a lot longer. We were well into the Amazing Spider Man (second movie) by the time we got through all the traffic entering the city. The evening sky coming back was spectacular through, massive, hypnotic cloud formations like you see in overly grandiose western landscape paintings. Still a little damp and tired, I got back to the apartment a little before ten.
