Christmas in Puebla

The streets of Puebla
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The family and I went to Puebla for Christmas.  It took us 4 hours to travel from Mexico (City) to Puebla, a trip that usually takes an hour.  When Mexico has 'traffic' - they have traffic!  But we played a few games (I got to see how many vegetables I knew in Spanish...) and the time passed quickly enough for us kids in the back.

In the afternoon I decided to check out Puebla City on my own.  Puebla is famous for talavera pottery, pretty tiles, and mole poblano!  The town centre is sweet with open restaurants, the zocalo gardens, old buildings and many churches.  I took my time looking at everything on my 3-hour walk taking photos, exploring markets and eating yummy good candies.

Parroquia de San José
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The next day was December 24th - the day they celebrate Christmas in Mexico.  After breakfast we drove to Cholula to visit the Nuestra Señora de los Remedios; a beautiful church built on top of the largest pyramid ever built.  The pyramid mostly looks like a hill now with grass and trees on it, and not much like a pyramid.  But it is a pyramid with tunnel systems you can walk through.  Walking through these tunnels was a lot more comfortable than the 2nd pyramid of Giza!  We entered the tunnels on one side and emerged out the another, and climbed to the church on top.

Nuestra Señora de los Remedios and ruins
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The church was impressive, and very ornate on the inside - as many churches in Mexico are.  The view of Cholula, Puebla, and the volcanoes Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl were great.

We walked down the pyramid and past the Mayan ruins at the bottom, which were impressive but looked out of place with the modern church on top.  Then we drove to the Santa María Tonantzitla church nearby.  2 churches by 11.30am, I was doing well!

We returned to the Puebla shopping mall where I had the BEST crepe with nutella, banana and ice-cream (no Jenny Craig here!).  Then we headed back to the hotel to chill out before the big Christmas dinner.

And BIG CHRISTMAS DINNER it was!  We got there about 8pm and I discovered this was a very formal affair.  The Christmas table was set for about 20 adults (the kids ate on the run, they were busy playing).  The table was laid out with shrimp cocktails, cold meat platters, seafoods, other tasty nibbley bits, and the finest crystal and china.  Wow, it was big.  More guests arrived later and we had some pre-dinner fireworks (70cm sparklers!), before sitting down for dinner at 11pm.  At midnight everyone got up from their meals and hugged each other, very sweet.  After dinner we had some more fireworks, and I got to bed about 2am!

On Christmas Day the family returned to Mexico; they were on their way to a cruise in the Mediterranean, nice!  I headed to the Puebla bus terminal to find out what I was going to do.

I caught a bus to Tlaxcala, and walked up and down the little town in a Valley (with a 15kg pack on my back!).  I visited the Basílica de Ocotlán and Parroquia de San José churches, saw the wall murals at Palacio de Gobiernno and had lunch at a restaurant overlooking the zocalo, before returning to Puebla to catch my night-bus to Guatemala.