Horseback Riding!

I spent the day today horseback riding in Calpan, a small pueblo about an hour outside of Puebla, with some friends from the school who are leaving tomorrow.

The trip was great! We were picked up in front of the school at about 9a by the guide who drove us about an hour into the countryside to Calpan. The country here looks a lot like the country in a lot of other countries I have been in... the paved roads are pretty well maintained although with a few holes here and there, once off the main road, many roads are dirt except in the towns, and everything you see around you is farmland. But don´t think US farmland where you see miles and miles of corn. People don´t own that much land here and many don´t have plows, so we´re talking more along the lines of an acre of corn, an acre of beans, some squash, some more corn, etc... And everything is a bit dusty.

We got into town and had a great breakfast. They guy told us to eat a light breakfast while he got the horses ready, but all the place really had was chicken dishes and carne asada. I had a great dish with chicken and a green sauce whose name I already forgot... something like Grabone or something like that. After a nice relaxing breakfast, we jumped on the horses and rode around the countryside, down into a canyon, up the other side, through people´s cornfields, etc... for about 3.5 hours. We galloped a few times in the fields and up some of the steeper hills, which was awesome!

After we got back (and were thoroughly exhausted), we got back to town for a few beers and some lunch. I had Chiles en Nogado, the official dish of Puebla, which is basically a chile stuffed with meat and fruit (most raisins), fried, and then covered with a really sweet cream sauce (that tasted like it had tons of nutmeg in it) and topped off with pomegranite seeds and parsley. The dish looks red, white, and green, for the colors of the mexican flag. See picture to the right. The dish was freaking delicious! I´ll have to have it a few more times before I go... I definitely like it more than the Mole Poblano that Puebla is so famous for.

After lunch we checked out another ex-convent and then came back.

Just like when Beth and I went horseback riding in Argentina, the guide for this trip was awesome... really chatty, a great outlook on life, and a really wonderful person all around. We talked to him the entire trip about everything from the large concentration of people from Puebla in Philadelphia to improving tourism in his part of the state, to the place in the park where I can go tomorrow to find myself a "girlfriend" for the day =)

Ver mapa más grande