Recovery in Cholula

The plan for the group’s final day in Puebla was to visit the nearby town of Cholula, known for its pyramid with the Nuestra Señora de los Remedios on top, and all of its other churches; as well as to visit the nearby volcanoes. That plan, however, began at 8:00 am, and having only gotten home from drinking at 6:00 am, my plan differed somewhat.

My plan involved this: sleep. Sleep until I could sleep no longer sleep or until the pain went away. Sleep until I recovered from being run over by the overnight tequila truck. Sleep until my newly-crushed soul had time to start mending and the fire between my temples began to turn into mere embers. I slept until 11:00 am.

As you know, after a night of drinking, nothing is better than some grease. I walked around to the zocalo and thought about going to McDonald’s or KFC for some traditional U.S.-style grease, but at the last minute I decided to keep with the Mexican-food only (up to this time) diet and I stopped by a restaurant and had an omelette with chorizo and refried beans. It was actually much better than it sounds. After replenishing my grease reserves, I went back to the hotel.

It had become too late to visit both the volcanoes and Cholula, but the hotel could set-up a tour of Cholula at 1:30, so I decided to do that. As I expected, and as I mentioned above, the top thing to do/see in Cholula was to climb to the top of the Great Pyramid of Cholula and visit Nuestra Señora de los Remedios sanctuary at the top. Even though it is pretty hard to even determine that there is a pyramid there, because it appears to be a hill from a distance because of the overgrowth, it is still a popular attraction.

Cholula is legendary as a town in which the Spaniards, after learning of an ambush by the locals, crushed the locals, decided to build churches on top of all of the local landmarks and that now there are 365 churches in Cholula, one for each day of the year. In reality, there are something between 35-45 churches in Cholula, depending on what you count as a church, I suppose. Nevertheless, there are many impressive and unique churches around the city and it was worth a visit. We also visited some artisan shops and tried some mezcal, but the rest of the trip to Cholula wasn’t very exciting.

I returned to the hotel around 5:00 and I decided that a nap was probably a good idea. After I slept for about an hour or so, a group of us went to Vittorio’s, an Italian restaurant near the zocalo that once held (if it doesn’t currently hold) the record for the largest pizza ever made. Nevertheless, I still went with Mexican food as the menu featured tacos de arrachera with pico de gallo and guacamole. The food was very good, but I only put down a couple of beers as I was still recovering from the all-night tequila bar the night before.

At night, I worked on my blogs for a little while and then called it an early night because we were catching a five-hour bus in the morning for Oaxaca. I’ll get into that in the next entry.