Expediciones Culturales!

This post will be pretty light weight, with mostly photos.

In my infinite restlessness, I've been organizing a bunch of day trips and stuff like that to various strange and obscure places in México, called "Expediciones Culturales!" (with a mandatory exclamation point). Basically, I put the call out to travel to a place for the day, we meet up in a place, and then take the bus to a previously unknown place! The first one was to the Pyramid of Cholula, and the most recent one was to TONANTZINTLA, a small pueblo on the outskirts of Puebla.

It's known for it's church...

The church is pretty much unique in México, because it is one of the very few NOT designed by Spanish artisans. The Spanish conquistadores, for some reason that I'm not sure of, put the indios of this pueblo in charge of building this church.

So, instead of building the traditional heaven over the altar scheme, the indios were told to build what THEY thought heaven/paradise was like. It turned out like this. We were not allowed to take photos inside, so I'll have to use some others:

If you notice, it's not all about angels and stuff like that, even though it looks like it at first glance. Instead of angels and God, the indios put little children, according to their belief that the afterworld consisted of being reborn as a little kid; life's most innocent age.

This was about half of the group.

Later we headed over to San Francisco Acatepec, another pueblo pretty close to Tonantzintla. I don't have so much history about this one, but the architecture speaks for itself...

          Beautiful inside, beautiful outside.

We were lucky enough to happen upon a wedding, complete with mariachis, bolo ties, and wedding cake. Really an amazing treat.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!!!

What the deal is.

Hello everyone, I hope you're all just dandy.

I'd just like to give a little update to what I've been doing lately, and some of the changes in my life obviously. Maintaining a blog is tough to do, because you have to go out and do things and make things happen in order to have good material, that is to say, that I can't actively update this thang while exploring cool places or meeting new people, you, the readers, have to hear it through me.
Admittedly, this is a hard task and , also admittedly, I haven't been doing it very well! Oh well.

At the beginning of the month, I went to a party for my friend's birthday, Camille from France. I arrived in bus after meeting up with my friend Lucy, and from Angelópolis, a mall, we took a bus the the Pyramid of Cholula, which is ridiculous to be saying like it was a normal thing, but that's the way things are, honestly. Don't worry, guys, I still appreciate and love looking at it.

So, we arrived at the party, and I will never get over how beautiful Mexican streets are. Picture a Wilson Farms or 711 or something like that. It has a big sign, fluoresent lights, trademarks, stuff like that. In México, with the exception of OXXO stores and other ones like it, the convinience stores family-owned, relatively unconnected affairs, with awesome names like Miscelania Juquilita or Abarrotes Cristo.

 Miscelania translates pretty well, but abarrotes doesn't. If you'll look at the definition, it comes from the word "to pack", which I take to mean that they are considered the things that one packs. Abarrotes are gum, pop, chips, cigarrettes, but other more local things like tamarind candy, chicharrón (pork skin), and all my favorite brands of Mexican beer (Click here for a bunch of examples).

So, to get back to my original point, these abarrote stores are magnificently decorated, with hand-painted signs, usually dedicated to some saint, person, or idea. So fun to explore in these little places, in a lot of them, if you move too much, you'll knock some stuff over! Imagine the little old ladies who sell newspapers in NYC, the ones that you can barely see, and you get the idea. So much more personal, and a lot more efficient in terms of space!



I'm a sucker for these family businesses, quite honestly.




I recently chatted with the guy who runs one near my house, a store with pretty much anything you could imagine (except deodorant, apparently), but the size of an American living room.



Another interesting thing about these stores is that seemingly without problem, it's common to see 2 or 3 open and running on the same block.

Sorry that this isn't my picture, but it gives you the idea:

Credit to pbase.com

So, just sharing some thoughts on the things that I hope will always stay interesting and weird! Come to México, it is a beautiful and interesting country, full of the type of things that you always thought would be stereotypical, but end up being perfectly in place when you find them.

Much love to all!

New photos!

Easily accessible through these links:

Fun stuff I've been up to

More fun stuff

The rest of the Independence Route

Check them out folks!