Cholula

Cholula
Originally uploaded by Michael Hollander

I took a trip to Cholula today, which is a town about 10 miles or so from Puebla... The bus trip over there was fine... I took city buses and would have gotten there in about 30 minutes if it weren´t for the fact that the granddaughter in my house gave me _slightly_ wrong directions. I stood at a bus stop for about 30 minutes waiting for the bus to come by marked "Cholula-centro," all the while apparantly watching buses go by every two minutes that said Cholula-xxxx. I finally asked someone if those go to center of Cholula and they said yes. So I jumped the next one and made it there.

Cholula itself is a pretty neat place. There is an amazing zocalo and a million churches (the lore is that they wanted to build 365 churches there, one for every day of the week, but I think there are more like 40, which is still impressive for such a small place). The most impressive feature of the city is a church built on top of a giant hill. Although it isn´t just any hill. It turns out that the grass and trees on the hill cover the widest pyramid in the world. It isn´t clear whether the church was purposely built on top of the old Aztec? Mayan? pyramid... some historians think yes, some no.

Anyway, the whole place is pretty great. There are some tunnels that go through the pyramids that you can walk through and then you can wander around teh base of teh hill and see a lot of the uncovered ruins of the base of the pyramid. After that, you can wander up the hill and check out the church (which was fine, just another church) and the view (which was spectacular - 360 views of the whole area).

In wandering around the town, I had some awesome food as well. A quesidilla from a little street "restaurant" where they made the tortillas right in front of me and stuff the thing with cheese, squash blossoms, and mushrooms. Later I wandered around a fruit and vegi and meat market and found a little makeshift fod stand and had "gorditas." Contrary to Taco Bell menu folk lore, a gordita is actually more or less a tortilla topped with salsa (red or green), onions, and a bit of cheese. Que rico!

I´m going out with some school folks and guides tonight. We´ll see how late I make it. We´re not leaving until 10p, which means they will all probably stay out until 5a. I, on the other hand, will likely crash far earlier being that 1) I´m super used to getting up at 7a everyday and 2) I´m gonig to a soccer game at 11a tomorrow and I want to enjoy it a bit rather than have a hang over and fall asleep during the game.