A Feast For All Senses

Thursday, October 23...

We arrived in Puebla late, around 11:30 pm, tired, unwashed and hungry. After a quick hotel checkin, we walked the three blocks to the zocalo and there was one little restaurant that was still open, with "comida típica". Jake and Laurie have been to México many times, but never to this area. So we had a so so mole poblano and a lousy chile en nogada and a real lousy chicken in pedían sauce. Lesson...forget the restaurants on the main plaza. But we had no choice at midnight. But the mole was passable and they had a really nice bottle of red wine from Baja. And we were hungry as hell, so,we weren't complaining. 

This morning Amy and I were up fairly early and had a nice little walk in the neighborhood. Lots of antique shops and small restaurants. 

Our hotel, Meson de Sacrista, has a good breakfast. We had eggs with chile and onions. Also, great home made hot chocolate. 

At noon, the four of us boarded the city tour bus, one of those double decker buses where you sit on the open top.  The bus took us around Puebla, up to the fort at the top of a hill where you have a great view of the city. 

People cheering on the double-decker bus tourists: 

For lunch, we went to one of our favorite Puebla restaurants, La Fonda. The speciality here is Chiles en Nogada and this made up for the lousy one last night. It is a large chile, stuffed with ground pork, dried fruit, spices and other things, deep fried and then covered with a whitle walnut sauce. This is then sprinkled with pomegranate seeds and parsley, so you have the colors of the Mexican flag, green, white and red. Just awesome. 

We then walked around town some, searching for a couple of talavera shops we went to two years ago. We could only find one of them and they had beautiful pottery. 

This evening we went to our favorite Puebla restaurant, Los Murales de Puebla. During the months of October and November, their special of the house is Huaxmole, also known as Mole de Caderas. This is the goat hip soup I've been talking about. This concoction consists of both hip and spine parts, cooked for ages in a lucious red mole. The meat is as tender as you can imagine and falls off the bone. You really aren't supposed to eat it with knife and fork, but grab the piece with your fingers and suck the delicious meat right off the bone. It's really one of the best things I've ever had in Mexico and found in very few places. Saturday we will go to a festival dedicated to,this dish. We washed it all down with a beautiful Shiraz wine from Casa de Madera, a winery in the north of Mexico that was founded in 1597!!

Friday, October 24th

Today we went out to the town of Cholula, about 5 miles west of Puebla. Cholula is one of the 60 or so Pueblo Magicos, small towns that have been chosen by the Mexican government for special promotion, towns that are small, old and have retained their colonial character. In Cholula there is a very old pyramid, about 1500 years old or so. When the Conquistadors arrived they thought it was just a big hill, as it was covered in shrubs and trees. But they put a church on top anyway. In 1999, the big earthquake here extensively damaged the church, but none of the pyramid, including the parts that archaeologists had uncovered, were in the least damaged. Karma long over due?

We hiked to the top of the pyramid and got a wonderful view of the giant volcano, Popocatepetl. It was smoking big time from its crater and was quite a view. Lots of tourists were enjoying the scene, including 5 nuns who were visiting the church. 

For lunch we went to the town market. We love eating in markets, as the food is very good and quite inexpensive. Laurie and Amy had a chile with Huanzotle, an herb kind of thing, covered in Mole Poblano. Jake had a Chile en Nogada, which wasn't so good, so he had part of my pork in a green mole sauce. Delicious!

We took a local bus back to Puebla and got off about a mile from the hotel. All of a sudden it started to pour rain!  We ducked inside a small museum, where they have the old kitchen where they invented mole poblano. Eventually, we decided to walk back in the rain. We soon found a place that sold umbrellas, so we got four. 

Tonight we will have dinner in the hotel and then watch the World Series. Tomorrow it's off to Tehuacan and the festival of goat hip soup!