The Best of Both Worlds

Its been a while since I have updated.  I don’t have a very good reason for that.  With only a week left of school, I have been trying to just bide my time for a bit, waiting for the joyous burst of creativity I am sure to experience after the strains and stress of school magically disappear on March 14^th.   

Sunday I went to Cholula.  The ruins of the pyramid there are the biggest in the Americas, although you wouldn’t know it from the outside.  It looks like a big, green, hill with a church on top—which coincidentally is what the locals always assumed it to be until archaeologists discovered the ruins underneath in the 20’s.  It is a fairly important site in the scope of Mesoamerican history, going back all the way to before Teotihuacan, up until Cortez arrived in 1520.  So I thought it would be an interesting day out, happy to take advantage of any excuse to get me out of the D.F. for a day. 

Possibly the best part of the trip was the unexpected festival I ran into after the bus pulled into town.  Groups of children and adults in costumes, ranging from naval seaman to bulls, all draped in the tri-color, wandered the streets shooting off incredibly loud fake rifles in the air.  Loud and raucous, this was the prototypical Mexican festival I had not yet seen in my year here.  

The zocalo in Cholula is huge and filled with parks and trees in the center.  It really only consists of three sides: one arcaded and lined with restaurants, the other two with nothing but churches and banks, while the last side simply opened up to the jumble of roads leading in from the eastern part of the city.  It was a really nice place to walk around, with all the open spaces affording you the freedom to gaze off into the distance.  Due to the festival it was filled with the aforementioned groups making laps around the outside loop.  The waiter at the pizza place I was eating at told me this was el Carnival de Cholula.  Apparently it doesn’t matter to Cholulans that Lent already started last week.  All the better for me I guess.   

The pyramid wasn’t that spectacular, but interesting nonetheless.  They had excavated some of the underlying structures, including a three sided plaza with giant stone stelae, located on the south side of the site.  It was also cool to see the Teotihuacan style terraces, and the layers of walls constructed in successive eras. As is usually the case in Mexico, the ruins felt real, important; while the church just felt like an average impersonation of Spain.