Roaming Rileys

After our adventure through immigration and customs in Mexico City, we loaded up the luggage and hopped into our giant white SUV. Our traveling companions (we’ll call them Alan and Eve to protect their identities 🙂 ) proceeded to drive us to Alan’s home in Puebla.

As the ride began, I was struck by the poverty surrounding the airport and the greater Mexico City area. This was certainly a cultural shock and disturbed my middle class New England sensibilities of cleanliness and affluence. I was initially saddened and angry thinking that the world was an unfair place. I could see first hand how both the Mexican government and America with its imperialistic NAFTA policies had been impoverishing millions of people for decades. We don’t see this side of Mexico on television though at home. All imagery of Mexico today involves beautiful beach resorts and sensational coverage of illegal immigration and drug trafficking. We never get to see the poverty which lies at the root of these sensationalized images. After having seen this first hand, I completely understood why someone would walk a thousand miles and risk their life and family fortune to cross the desert into the United States to work for less than minimum wage. This led to the sad realization that despite what some of our news channels in the US would have us believe, these illegal immigrants are not criminals, its the American businesses and both countries governments that are creating the problems.

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far thank you, and I apologize for the political rant. I feel much better now though.

We reached Puebla in around two hours after a drive through the mountains and past Puebla’s three majestic volcanoes. One of the volcanoes can been seen spewing forth ash everyday, and Alan informed us that it sometimes is so heavy that it covers everything with a fine layer or dust.

Alan’s home was modest but comfortable and we were happy to relieve ourselves of our luggage and to stretch our legs. Once we were all settled in, Alan took us over to downtown Puebla where we walked around a bit enjoying the main plaza and the beautiful colonial architecture. Puebla has several beautiful churches and there were few tourists. It is a working city instead of a major attraction so we were happy to join the locals by sitting on benches in the plaza mayor enjoying the music drifting out from the open air cafes and enjoying our first warm evening in Mexico.

As we grew hungry, Alan guided us to one of his favorite spots in downtown Puebla for chalupas and pazole. The food was amazingly better than anything I’ve had in the United States. I am not sure whether the ingredients are different or if they’re simply fresher. Perfectly ripe tomatilles for example must make a better salsa verde than ones that must be picked before their time and sent on a truck thousands of miles to my local supermarket! The pazole soup was by far my favorite. It contained chicken, peppers, onion, and hominy and was spicy, but not overly so. It was a delicious end to a long day.

Up next our recap of a visit to Puebla’s neighbor, Cholula, its pyramid, shops, and the Azteca solstice celebration. I will try to get some pictures up soon, we took hundreds of them! Thanks for reading and please comment and let us know how we’re doing.

Brian

We apologize for posting our trip to Mexico late, but we had a spotty internet connection the entire time.

We touched down from an uneventful flight into Mexico City right around noon time on Saturday the 20th and proceeded towards immigration to get out passports stamped.  Our traveling partner went first and got through with no issues, but when we approached the counter we discovered that we needed to fill out the bottom section of the form.  This section has wording that makes it look as if its for business travelers only, but don’t be fooled! They sent us over to an empty counter to fill out that part of the form and thankfully told us to come back up as soon as we finished (the line was quite long at this point).

We filled out the bottom section and went back up towards the counter, but the woman who sent us to fill it out was on her way out the door escorting a man to a different area. No what do we do! We don’t want to get back in line, and we didn’t want to make a scene so we patiently waited. After about 10 minutes, another immigration official took pity on us and called us over to her desk where she stamped us in.

Our traveling companion was able to collect all of our bags in the interim and was waiting for us when we walked through the doors. We had but one further obstacle before we were home free and in the country … the infamous button. For anyone who has never traveled to Mexico before, the airport (at least in Mexico City) has a button that you must push which causes a light to flash either red or green. If you get the green light you may leave, red and they search your bags. I got the green light and Amy got the red light so she had to have her bag searched. This was lucky as I had the cart with all of the other luggage which would have taken quite a bit of time for them to go through.

Our traveling companion had brought a ton of luggage that was primarily stuff for her boyfriend who lives in Puebla who would be giving us the tour of both Puebla and Oaxaca. In order to accomadate the four of us and all of this luggage, our traveling companions decided to rent a big SUV from a company called Sixty. We stood outside their office for over an hour (no exaggeration) as they tried to locate a suitable vehicle for us an negotiate a price. We had further issues with this company later on in the trip (more on that later) so I cannot recommend them to anyone traveling into Mexico City.

Once we had the car in hand, we headed out towards Puebla with our Mexican friend at the wheel. The ride through the mountains was beautiful but our first glimpses of the staggering poverty around Mexico City was an eye opener.

More to follow ….

Well, only 2 more full days to go before we are on our way to Puebla. We have an early flight Saturday morning out of JFK and arrive in Mexico City shortly after noon.We're not sure what the itinerary looks ... [Continue reading this entry]

Well, we're down to 11 days before our short trip to Mexico begins. We will be flying out of JFK and into Mexico City and from there heading down to Puebla to stay with a friend. We don't have a ... [Continue reading this entry]