We were only in Puebla two and a half days, which really isn’t fair to Mexico’s fourth-largest city. (Did you know that? I did not. After DF, Guadalajara and Monterrey.)

We were pretty fried on Sunday, our first day out, and overwhelmed because it was Palm Sunday. The streets were packed with people.

We wandered around pretty aimlessly and happened across equally random treats, such as this hot dog situation:

It was, as far as I could make out, a hot dog dipped in molten cheese then wrapped in an eggroll wrapper, and then wrapped in bacon, and then deep-fried.

Please don’t extrapolate about Puebla cuisine from this; I think it’s a one-off invention of the guy who runs the stand.

Not far away was weirdness of another sort, a veritable garden of kiddie rides:

We stopped at the railroad museum (doesn’t everyone make that their first stop in a new city?) and cried over the oh-so-recent death of Mexico’s passenger rail. (Our friend Jim took the train from Texas to San Miguel de Allende for a high school trip in the 80s! Argh!)

Later that day, we met up with some real live poblanos, who were kind enough to make sure we saw the Rosary Chapel, one of the city’s major attractions. Which we almost certainly would have missed otherwise, because it’s off the side in one of the churches that was mobbed with Palm-Sunday-enjoyers.

We also went to the Museo Amparo, recently reopened after a big renovation. In fact, it’s still not totally finished. But the rooftop cafe was a great place to get up close and personal with all the church domes in the city.

Aaaand then, back to our regularly scheduled aimless wandering.

Finally, to end this post on an educational note, did you know Chia Pets are, like, a real thing? Here, look:

As a display at the Museo Amparo helpfully explained, sprouts and wheatgrass are placed on the altar, to represent rebirth. And little hollow clay turtles and sheep, covered in chia seeds, are a way of doing that. It was hard to tell from the phrasing whether this is something that’s been going on for centuries, or if Mexicans just like Chia Pets, and incorporated them into the altar? Chia Pets were originally made in Mexico, says-Wikipedia-so-it-must-be-true, which suggests the former.

Cool, right? Who knows what I’ll learn on my next (hopefully longer!) visit to Puebla…

HOLY MOLE!!!

(Sorry, just had to get that out of my system. The whole time I was in Puebla, the home of mole poblano, I had that dumb joke running through my head. But really? The mole? Hot damn, it’s so good.)

Peter and I took a food tour with Eat Mexico, the same wonderful folks we did a street food tour with two years ago in Mexico City. Not only have they branched out to Puebla, but the guide is the woman behind the excellent All About Puebla blog.

Peter and I put on our stretchy pants and met Rebecca in the center of the zocalo. As usual, we thought we knew stuff (mole, cemitas), but we knew jack. She promptly marched us off to a place with molotes, jarochas, chanclas and pelonas, among other things.

Now, as I type, I could not tell you what molotes really are. The shape has evaporated, and I just remember the tastes: we had one filled with potatoes and cilantro, which tasted like a samosa, and one filled with brains, which were silky and surprisingly beef-flavored.

The pelona is clearer in my mind because it’s, get this, a deep-fried sandwich!!!!

Rebecca explained all this rationally, about Puebla’s long tradition of baking a variety of wheat breads and so on, as though it were perfectly normal to dunk the outside of a bread roll in hot oil till it gets shatteringly crunchy, and the fill the inside with something hot and cheesy and fabulous.

Peter and I were so busy gobbling that we forgot to take photos. Sorry.

Then we marched on to a place that called itself a taqueria oriental, which specializes in tacos arabes and tacos al pastor, on dueling vertical spits.

I don’t know why it delights me so to see Arab culture mashed into/absorbed into/flourishing in Mexico, but it does. Tacos arabes are basically shwarma in form, but still Mexican in flavor (the pork helps).

They were allegedly invented in Puebla, in the early 20th century. The skewer technology either enabled or improved the taco al pastor (not sure which–any food historians know?), and wow, the ones we had were some of the best ever.

If I continued with this blow-by-blow account, we’d never get anywhere. Suffice to say, we also stopped for strange and wonderful cookies and candies I’d never heard of, detoured for mysterious candy apples, and, best of all, walked for a while, out of the historic center and into a part of the city we hadn’t yet gotten to see. On the way we passed a peaceful protest.

By the time we got to the market we were bound for, our appetites had been magically restored. We strolled around ogling all kinds of things, and asking people pesky questions. We bought a kilo of homemade mole. We saw huitlacoche in situ!

And then we ate cemitas. Just as Rebecca promised, every component of this amazing sandwich was perfect.

You can’t see all the gorgeousness in the photo, but the string cheese was unstrung into fine threads, the milanesa was hot and crispy, the chipotle was homemade, all smoky and brown-sugar-sweet. (Ohhh, so that’s what chipotles en adobo are supposed to taste like!) A man came along and sang a sad song on a guitar, and a woman rolled up and sold us a big plastic bag full of fresh pineapple juice. It was one of those crystalline this-is-why-I-love-Mexico moments.

Then, as if that weren’t enough, we went and drank sweet-and-boozy drinks on a tiny balcony in a pretty arcade.

Puebla. So much more than mole!

Anyone who has been reading my stuff or following me on Twitter knows that I’m fond of Mexican wrestling. It hits the sweet spot between kitsch and real, folkloric, theatrical performance. I mean, I even loved Nacho Libre.*

The gods of travel scheduling were smiling upon Peter and me, because we happened to be in the city of Puebla on a Monday night, when the weekly lucha action goes down. And it was easy walking distance from our hotel.

Still, we almost didn’t go. We had eaten a very large dinner (surprise, surprise) and were feeling vaguely sunburnt and jet-lagged. Plus, Puebla is 7,217 feet above sea level. I tweeted this pitiful thing:

Fortunately, Rebecca of All About Puebla saw my public near-wimp-out and urged me to go. “It’s so bad, it’s good,” she advised. She didn’t need to explain the appeal to me.

Start time is 9pm, and we rolled up to the Puebla Arena about 9.30–there was a big mob of people, because we were in line for the cheap seats. It was a huge all-ages crowd: families with tiny kids (one baby freaked when her dad put on a wrestling mask; hadn’t learned object permanence yet, obviously), old folks, couples on dates.

Inside, the arena was medium-size, and slanted very steeply–even four rows from the back, we still had a great view, without the risk of a wrestler actually landing on us. Food and beer vendors threaded through the crowd. One was carrying a huge basket of steamed shrimp, which seems like the most unlikely coliseum snack ever. But people were buying.

I briefly tried to see where we were in the program, and deduce which luchadores we were dealing with.

That was silly. It didn’t matter. Every match was pure mayhem. There was an old-fashioned bad guy, a man with a huge belly and skinny legs and the old-style skinny-strap unitard, and some new-fangled baddies, all with gnarly-looking black-and-red costumes. Several wrestlers’ masks had mohawks on top. The biggest crowd-pleaser was campy-sweet Maximo, who didn’t wear a mask but did wear pink spangly pants and a blond fauxhawk. He disarmed one opponent by kissing him. Maximo even signed autographs for kids in between matches, which the bad guys didn’t.

Here’s a typical move:

(My first animated GIF! I’m so proud.)

After about an hour or so, the show was over, rather suddenly. We were caught a little off guard. We all filed out, past the detritus of the evening.

Peter said he liked the one we saw in Queens better. Which was, admittedly, more dramatic, and had midget wrestlers and child wrestlers, and a bad guy called La Migra. It lasted for hours.

But here in Puebla, this goes down every week. I realized we’d walked in to one episode of an ongoing soap opera–a tag-team telenovela, I suppose. We left on a cliffhanger. Maximo was up…for now.

Tune in next Monday at the Puebla Arena for more thrilling adventures…

*In Mexico, Nacho Libre totally “counts” as a real Mexican wrestler. You can buy Nacho Libre masks!