June in Morelia

We are entering our last month in Mexico, trying to do everything "one last time": seeing the lighting of the cathedral on Saturday nights resplendant with music and fireworks, eating sopa tarasca at our favorite restaurant, having our fill of the best tacos on the street.  In the meantime, kids still have school and final exams and we are still writing.  Combine that with packing and cleaning and it will be a busy month.


    
a similar view, a year earlier


We'll miss the colonial architecture of Morelia, the pink and red stones of the buildings and aquaduct, the fancy wrought-iron fences and gates, the ornateness of the cathedrals, the many skinny streets that criss-cross downtown.


 

Saturday nights are big times for quince años parties.  Here is the lovely 15-year old boarding her stretch limo with some of her entourage; inside the cathedral behind her was another mass for another 15-year old.  Every day in the paper is a photo-spread of a quince-años party, featuring a very mature looking girl in a bright strapless gown.  These ladies are now "eligible", being introduced to society as women. (this picture is actually from Patzcuaro, though)


This is a view from our dining room window, down to the driveway.  We still gaze in wonder at the abundance of horses in this city: as pack animals, modes of transportation, a seemingly feral animals grazing in old school yards and by the side of the road.



We went to a wonderful exhibit of "feather art" by a local artist.  "Arte plumeria" is a traditional technique where the ENTIRE painting is done by glueing feathers onto the paper.  The results were spectacular.

 


 
 

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This ornate door on "La Huatápera" at the edge of the main plaza is on one of the oldest buildings in town.  The building is reputed to be the first hospital in the Americas (however I have seen some other web sites that dispute this fact).   The other picture is a view from our room in the Hotel Tarasco, looking out over the city.  The ubiquitous red-tiled roofs were quite a change from Morelia.
 

 

Parque Nacional Eduardo Ruiz
On the edge of town is a large, green, shaded National Park.  It is very manicured (cobble-stone walks, waterfalls, streams), it's only a couple of hundred meters wide, and has low species diversity (in the way of plants), but it is a welcome respite from the city and the arid areas around it.
 


 





Uruapan boasts the "worlds skinniest house", only 1.4 m wide!  It is a private residence.  
Although the guidebook says there is actually a narrower house in Amsterdam, we thought this was plenty thin.



Sarah and Don went to see the waterfall outside of Uruapan called La Tzaráracua. 500 and some odd steps down (and another 500 steps back up) but the falls were nice.  It was also nice to see so many people out in the park on a Sunday afternoon (unlike some of the other practically unvisited Mexican parks we have visited).
 


When Don and Sarah went, they visited the village of San Juan Nuevo, where by chance they happened to be having a big fiesta.  We are still not sure just what the fiesta was-- it may have been because it was domingo de corpus, but it seemed more like a festival to bless the crops.  Each of the barios of the village had built a flower-filled alter inside the church and the crowds come in to visit them.  When many of the people walked in they did an interesting "dance" of 3 steps forward and 2 steps back, all the way to the front.  I wish we had been more forthright and had asked someone to explain it to us, because we didn't really figure it out.  

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More from Morelia

Here is a cactus fruit, pitaya, that we found in the local market.  They taste fine, but the color is what is truly amazing!





Margaret and Sarah made a wonderful comida for father's day: noodles with tomatilla-tomato salsa, topped with grated ranchero cheese and fried squash blossoms.

 




And a chocolate-on-chocolate cake for dessert: