Visiting the Big City

Last weekend we descended the 2,000 or so meters and made the 1-hour bus-ride to Tuxtla, to visit G’s family and friends. While Sancris is colorful and airy and stone-built, Tuxtla is haphazard and hot and concrete. Not to say it wasn’t fun, but, all in all, this is where I’d rather be.

While we were away, we spent an afternoon with G’s niece and nephew, taking them for the most beautiful handmade popsicles I’ve ever seen. On a galavanting, meandering night with G’s friends, we went to a couple of a certain type of party, where people our age fill the front courtyard of a house with plastic tables and chairs and serve food and drink a lot of alcohol. Pretty bad reggae-tone music at the first, awful karaoke at another.

For lunch one day, we ate what is pictured above. In a “snack” bar with impossibly loud music and then a mariachi band, and all sorts of men singing along and everyone drinking, we feasted on a plate of slow cooked meat in adobo sauce, amazing black beans and fresh, hearty flour tortillas to go with. Before that we had a plate of fresh tomatoes, cilantro, and onion, as well as dried shrimp. Too salty for my taste. All washed down with a few shared pitchers of Sol doctored with lime and chili.

At amazing restaurant, G’s friends put one of the flip-flops he’d casually slipped off his feet into a crate of beer bottles on the ground. When we realized it was missing as we got ready to go, it was nowhere to be found. Shoeless, G took me to the home of some friends of his, a married couple who have shared a house for thirty years. From the street it looks like a concrete wall with graffiti, like a forgotten place, but inside it was filled with art and plants and books. They were nice.

G’s parents took us to one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, Mexican style. We were resistant but it was pretty damn good. I recall a past when I could do three or four plates at an occasion like that, but this time only managed one and a half.

Other than that, some insane cab rides, amazing street art, and finally seeing marimba park, a place full of people dancing G has always told me about. But we missed the people dancing part. We got there when they were milling about, but the gazebo in the center was cool, all the ancient benches lined up and facing it, like sun’s rays. Maybe next time.

More pics of our Tuxtla weekend here.