City of Angels

That´s Puebla. It is an almost 2 million person city about an hour east of Felipe´s town and we are totally in love with it! We knew we wouldn´t leave his town very early and that we wouldn´t be in the mood to drive much on Monday so we planned on spending the afternoon here in Puebla. We will definitely come back many, many times. There was nothing about it we didn´t like. Even though it is huge, the streets are named in a numerical order that is easy to follow, there are stoplights instead of topes (pronounced TOE-pays) which was enough to make us love the city! The buildings are beautifully painted, the streets seem clean. There are big shopping malls. The electrical wires aren´t strewn all over the streets like in Cuernavaca and other cities. The plaza was beautiful and shaded, the weather was fabulous. We can´t say enough good things about it. Many buildings have Talavera ceramic tiles around the doorways and windows or actually pieced in between the bricks of the walls. It was truly lovely.

We settled into our hotel (which had a view of the cathedral from our room- Gilfer hotel, 1 block from plaza and rooms ending in 14 have great views of cathedral) and then walked around for awhile, hopping on a tour bus about 3. The only unfortunate part was we sat on the top so we could take better pictures and I wish we had our video camera. Oh yeah... and I forgot sunscreen on my face so my chin and the right side of my face look like I spread hot sauce on them (but only Valentina, yummy). The tour is totally recommended by us but make sure you take the bus and not the trolley because the bus has an English translation via headphones. That was good because no other cities have had that. The tour went all around the whole city and we saw the fort of the 5 de Mayo battle and lots of other stuff. Puebla is a very modern city that is on par with an American one.

After the bus tour we popped into Burger King on the plaza to buy a water and use the bathrooms. There were some teenagers completely making out in the middle of the restaurant. That is one thing here that amazes me. Every park, plaza, restaurant, is filled with young people all over each other. Maybe it's because they don't have as much privacy in their homes here due to large families but good grief! Anyway, then we walked around looking for Talvera pottery because I wanted a few dishes. We found this craft market and amazingly there was a set of dishes we both liked! We just wanted to buy the plates but we had to buy the entire set of dishes! After walking around for awhile and talking about it we decided to do it since it is rare that we both love the same design in anything! I will upload a picture later but I'm running out of time right now.

We finished the evening by eating on the plaza at a seafood restaurant and having some really good shrimp dishes. I looked around for a churro relleno (churro stuffed with chocolate) but sadly the street vendors were not around. From our hotel room we enjoyed a night view of the cathedral while we settled in to sleep.