Mexico, Pt II

Apart from looking totally sweet, this church also has removable floorboards!

Holy crap, I am totally *jazzed* on Mexico right now! Christmas Eve was a fun exploration of the town, including a couple of amazing little churches, a cemetery, a tiny local museum, and best of all, a mystery hunt for pulque, the local booze made from cacti. We made some inquiries and were told that we needed to go find a man called Urbano- he is the sole producer and supplier of pulque in Real De Catorce. In true small town-style, we just asked people on the street, and they pointed us in the direction of his house, where indeed we were able to purchase a liter and a half of pulque for the very reasonable price of 50 pesos. Adventure time! Having said that, the pulque didn’t get consumed till yesterday, as cousin Tero had also brought an excellent bottle of tequila, which we ended up drinking after dinner last night. Being in Mexico has completely over-hauled my appreciation of tequila as a potential choice of beverage. Tequila has (unfairly) acquired a shitty reputation on account of all the douchebags and douchebaguettes that drink it in their awful frat bars. In Mexico, tequila is considered a fine product, to be treated with respect and appreciation, not pounded down before flashing your boobs and puking in the hallway. And, as much as I love my local dive in Echo Park, the tequila here also tastes a lot better than the retch-inducing rubbing alcohol served down the street from my house. No wonder you need all the lime and salt to wash it down. Anyway, the real miracle of Mexican tequila is that because it’s not filthy like everywhere else, it also won’t give you the kind of hangover that makes you consider suicide like you’d normally expect. Hurray!

You can't just hang around the bullring, it's not allowed.

If you pray to a saint and your prayer is answered, you have to make a little painting as a thank you note and take it to the local church. This guy got bit by a rabid dog, survived, and is suitably grateful.

Our travel buddy Jose Luis had the mother of all brainwaves today, and suggested that we should hire some horses and go for a ride after brunch. Lo and behold, for about 10 American dollars each, we were able to secure said horses, a local guide, and set off through the hills of Mexico. I love horse-riding and hadn’t even been near a horse for years, so I was pretty much bouncing off the walls with excitement before we even set off. We ended up spending three hours trekking through some of the most amazing scenery I have ever seen. I was so ecstatic I was grinning away to myself like an idiot for the majority of the afternoon, not least of all when we stopped midway to take a look at an indigenous ritual site. We’d gone up an extra 900ft from the town itself (which is already at the lofty altitude of 8000ft- that shit is no joke since EVERYTHING is much more difficult at this altitude), and the site itself was at the top of a mountain with mind-blowing views of the surrounding valleys and towns. The site itself consists of concentric stone circles, each representing new, heightened states of consciousness, which are attained through said rituals, not to mention the consumption of copious amounts of peyote. Some of us took a stroll through the magic circles, but I personally didn’t feel like disrespecting the local witchiness and getting tagged with some weird curse, so I stayed on the outskirts. All in all, pretty much the coolest, most radically different Christmas day I can remember for a long time.

Without this guy, I wouldn't have been able to get up the mountain.

Today the plan is to drive to Zacatecas, where we are booked into a hotel built in an old bullring. Yeah! The drive is about five hours long, and my butt hurts from the horse-riding, so it remains to be seen exactly how painful the drive will be. I’m pretty confident I’ll survive though.