Month two (and a half):Tlaxco

4.) Lauren, who is running track with me here, and I went with our track team to Tlaxco, a small town about an hour and a half from Puebla, to celebrate the birthday of one of our teammates. We went to his grandparent’s and aunt and uncle’s house. We arrived mid morning and they fed us a delicious breakfast of the best tamales I’ve eaten yet, tasty, sweet, coffee, and sweet bread. Then his uncle took us up into the hills for a hike. We stopped by a ranch on the top of the mountain to talk to the owners and give them a bottle of rum as a trade for letting us traipse around on their property. The hike was beautiful and we probably walked a total of 10km. We arrived back at the house hungry and were part of a huge birthday lunch, with probably about 30 family members. We ate some rather strange things, by American standards. First we had a regular soup with rice and vegetables. Then came the “mole de panza” which is a soup made of cows stomach. This was a bit hard to swallow, because of the texture and the way it obviously looked like pieces of stomach in a brown broth. The taste really was pretty good, but the other elements were too distracting to really allow us to enjoy the soup. Lauren and I did our best to eat most of it. Our Mexican friends got a kick out of watching us eat it. After lunch Lauren and I broke out the M&M cookies we’d made. They added to the already overly abundant dessert. At first people seemed a bit hesitant to try them, but later, someone saw one of the grandmothers come back in and snatch about five, wrap them up in a napkin, and head out again. They were also a hit with the little kids and with the team, who managed to finish off the entire box of about 45 cookies over the course of the evening.

1.) The team on our hike.


2.) Teammates with the bottle of rum and a farm behind them.


3.) Mole de panza