6/ The Trip to Puebla — OAXACA STANDARD TIME

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Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.

-- Jack Kerouac

As described earlier, the frustrations of our tenuous living situation were making it hard to enjoy our time in Oaxaca. This came to a head when the apartment we were living in after Move #5 turned out to be an active construction zone by day and Party Central by night. It had no AC (a relative luxury here), so to enjoy any hint of fresh air the windows had to be kept open; but those open windows also allowed in the unwanted twin intrusions of general neighborhood bedlam and diesel fumes from the street below. Enough, we declared—we’re getting the hell out of town.

We had seen pictures of the city of Puebla, which was said to possess one of the most beautifully preserved historic Centros in all of Mexico. As luck would have it, it was also the closest major city to Oaxaca, a mere 5 hours by bus. So we booked ourselves a couple of comfortable, cushy seats on a barn-sized ADO luxury bus and headed up the road to Puebla.

The colorful streets of Puebla’s historic Centro.

The City. Like Oaxaca, Puebla is the eponymous capital city of its state. It is perhaps best known as the site of the Battle of Cinco de Mayo in 1862—in which an out-manned and out-gunned Mexican force valiantly defeated the finest standing army in the world (the French), thus saving the fledgling Republic from decades of continued obeisance to European powers. (In the States we celebrate this little-known fact about a forgotten war by consuming upwards of 12 million cases of tequila in one day.)

Puebla, Puebla has a population of 2.5 million people (compared with just over 300K for Oaxaca, Oaxaca). It sprawls across a rolling plain surrounded by volcanic peaks, most of which are still active. The historic Centro reveals a strong influence of French Baroque architecture, which lends it an air more like Buenos Aires (or some of the cities of the Old South). Brightly colored, multi-storied buildings laced with intricate ironwork line the ramrod-straight avenues, and its towering cathedrals house some of the most spectacularly embellished ornamentation to be found in Latin America.

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The Food. Poblanos (as its residents are known) lay claim to a proud culinary tradition, including, they further claim, the birthplace of corn and the invention of mole—especially the dark, bitter, cacao-laced mole negro that many Americans are familiar with. Comida poblana (the cuisine of Puebla) immediately struck us as different from comida oaxaqueña: a stronger emphasis on pork as the meat of choice, with many of the street-food options being fried in lard, as opposed to being dry-cooked directly on a hot comal. There were plenty of interesting options to choose from, including green and white pipians (sauces) dotted with pumpkin seeds, and cochinita pibil (pork, grilled using a special marinade). These latter two were dishes I had actually tasted during an earlier trip to the Yucatan Peninsula, hundreds of miles away—so apparently the poblana influence has spread far and wide. The crowning glory of comida poblana, though, is something called chile en nogada: a huge, roasted Poblano pepper (they, too, appear to have originated in Puebla), stuffed with a filling of ground meat, mixed fruits and chopped nuts; then battered and fried; then served swimming in a creamy white sauce made from walnuts and dotted with scarlet pomegranate seeds and chopped cilantro—thus recreating the colors of the Mexican flag. Around the country, we were told, you can find this famous dish offered year-round; but you can only find the authentic, Poblano chiles en nogada when the ingredients are fresh during the late summer season. So we were in luck: by the beginning of August every restaurant in Puebla was featuring it. I ordered one and it was, in fact, delicious (although a bit too sweet to order more than once).

Cholula. One of the more interesting aspects of visiting Puebla turned out to be its neighbor a few miles to the west, a trio of contiguous small towns known collectively as Cholula. Formerly a completely separate population center, it has been considerably encroached upon by its more prosperous, industrial neighbor to the east.

When the conquering Spaniards first arrived in the Puebla area they found numerous ruins suggesting that it was an important spiritual center at some point in its past. As they did nearly everywhere else, they responded to this discovery by promptly expropriating the stones from old temples for the construction of Catholic churches. To the west of Puebla they noted a large and well-formed extinct volcanic cone whose wooded crest possessed a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. Naturally, they built a lovely little chapel on its summit as well.

Cholula’s Chapel of the Rosary sits atop the world’s largest pyramid, with Popocatéptl in the background. — Cholula’s Chapel of the Rosary sits atop the world’s largest pyramid, with *Popocatéptl* in the background.

Centuries later, it was discovered that this tranquil hill, sitting in the shadow of the gargantuan volcano Popocatépetl, was in fact the obscured remains of one of the largest pyramids in the world—the product of an indigenous construction effort that lasted centuries, spawning multiple newer, ever-larger versions of itself on top of the old structures. Local historians claim that Cholula was in fact THE most important cultural site in all of Mesoamerica, a place where would-be chieftains must come from afar to win approval from the Cholula religious leaders.

Today the hill at Cholula remains cloaked in vegetation, but archeologists have since engaged in painstaking examinations of the pyramid beneath, including a series of exploratory tunnels drilled through the interior. We paid admission to take a guided walk through several of these, pausing to admire the evident engineering skills of the pyramid’s prehistoric builders, revealed as we passed through from one ancient layer to the next. It was fascinating.

Coming Home. Despite the many architectural charms of Puebla, after a few days there we found ourselves growing restive. True, our hotel room was modern, clean and comfortable, the food tasty, the people friendly, and the city’s cultural treasures well-presented and interesting. But when the time came to climb aboard our softly rumbling mega-bus for the return trip to Oaxaca, we were only too happy to do so. And when we finally reached the outskirts of Oaxaca’s state capital, a feeling began to well up from deep inside—a warm glow signaling a welcome return to a familiar place. Dismounting from our bus, we hailed a cab and rode through the streets of “our” city, quietly reciting the street names as they rolled by, a litany of esteemed Mexican heroes and the values that inspired them: Constitución, Abasolo, Murguía, Morelos, Independencia, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Colón, Rayón. We were home.