Channeling David Phillips

Anyone who has traveled with David Phillips knws that he is the undisputed King of public transportaion. No matter the mode, he knows all the schedules and gets you to the stop exactly when the train/plane/bus arrives. It´s magic!
I am trying to emulate him on my route 77a bus that takes me to school and back. The busses arrive frequently, so you rarely have to wait more than five minutes, if that. Today´s driver trained at Monte Carlo, with the most hard stops, jackrabbit starts and swerving in and out of lanes I´ve ever seen. He had no decoration on his bus, save the rosary around the rearview mirror and a Guadalupe holy card on the dash

Saturday adventure in living color

Here are the towers of the church. This is a beautiful carved cross outside the church.

This is the well where the holy water is. Outside the church...

The actual well is 40 feet down, as they

built up the land to build the churdh

Here is where Jesus would by meat: The Little Jesus butcher shop!

Saturday adventure

This Saturday, Karla, Aubry and I went to the shrine of St. Michael the Archangel near here. We had to travel on a bus and a combi (a small VW bus) to get there. What an adventure. I had great directions, which we needed because it was quite a long trip (an hour and a half) through very unfamiliar territory. When we got to Nativitas, we took the combi up to the church.
This shrine is the only one dedicated to an angel, not a saint or Jesus or Mary. St. Michael is depicted with feathers on his head like an indigenous warrior, but his face was very feminine. Aubry is an art historian who is writing her thesis on this shrine, so we learned a lot. The gift shop guy showed us around, and we even got to see some paintings that are very old and in the parish office for safekeeping.
St. Michael appeared to a guy there, and asked him to dig a well. After not doing it for while, he finally did, and the well is still there, and you can still take some water home. I didn´t, because they only had liter jugs, and I just didn´t want to haul that home. I´ll find a smaller bottle to take to Guadalupe!
Here it´s interesting: to light a candle you have to bring your own. I´ll post some pics so you can see!

La Casa de los Alfeñiques

This is where I went to tour the second day I was here. It´s the Casa del los Alfeñiques. This man wanted to marry a woman, but she wouldn´t marry him unless he built her a house that looked like Alfeñiques, which are Arabic sugar candies. Well, he did, and this is it. You can tour the house and see how wealth Poblanos lived a long time ago. On the first floor are two carriages, one of Porfirio Diaz, who ruled Mexico, and another that belonged to a bishop, which is much grander. There is also a lovely chapel and a really cool kitchen, with ceramic dishes hanging all the way up to the ceiling. The kitchen is on the top floor. Interesting.

At school

This is the doorway to our school. It´s old and heavy, on a street downtown.

This is the courtyard inside.

This is Rosalia, the school secretary. She helps us with everything

Here we are

Here is my class. At left is my teacher, Elisa. Next is Teah, who is from Utah and Rebecca, who is from Austin. We are in our little classroom where we work from 9 until 1 pm.

Breakfast of champions

Wow, no such thing as pop tarts here! This morning Eduardo and Lorena gave me a tamale "ojo de platano" for breakfast. It´s a tamale wrapped in a banana leaf with bits of chicken and salsa and lots of garlic. It was delicious! (Muy delicioso, muy rico.) With it I had about a half a mango slathered in yogurt with cinamon in it. Yum.
Eating here certainly is an adventure. This weekend I found my little cajeta pancakes that I´ve been dreaming of since I was here in 1981. They are goat-milk caramel patties in between things that are kind of like communion hosts. They are lovely. I´ll try to bring some home but they are not too prevalent here. I also found the coconut hockey pucks that I used to eat when I was here in college.
More about my weekend adventures later...