Tepic and back

Well well, this week we started out on a trip to the capital of the state of Nayarit, Tepic. It has about 300,000 people and…a Wal-Mart…which we shall be discussing later. I really wanted to go there due to the fact that a lot of the native Huichol people live there and have many stands where they sell their gorgeous handmade crafts. I’m including a picture of something we bought for ourselves. It’s a sun and moon in gorgeously vivid colors, and all those colors come from teeny tiny glass beads that are glued onto a wooden back. It’s all hand done. I also bought a ton of jewelry for myself and for gifts to bring back.

The ride to Tepic from Aticama was quite a stomach-churner, its all switchback through mountain jungle for two hours. Poor Philip got quite green, but luckily we got there a little earlier than expected and there was a beautiful park where we sat to let our stomachs settle before exploring. It was a bit jarring to be among so many people again. But nice at the same time, it felt so much more energetic. We first headed to the zocalo where there was a beautiful cathedral that we poked our heads into during Mass. It was standing room only, and we felt a little out of place, so we didn’t linger. We walked around for a while trying to find the place where most of the Huichol stands were concentrated. Luckily, right in the center, there was a tourist info center and someone pointed us in the right direction. There was a large row of stands all down this one street. Behind every stall was a line of kids/teens all traditionally dressed and working on dozens of crafts. Apparently the Huichol are very anti-assimilation. They really wear their traditional dress, worship their own deities, and live apart from most of the big cities. Philip got his first taste of haggling in Spanish. This has been something that we have been hesitant to do out of fear that we might insult someone. But in all our guide books it says that haggling for everything in a market to taxi rides is permissible and expected. And the thought of having to bargain in a second language is a bit intimidating, but he got the hang of it.

After I had gotten my fill of jewelry buying, we stopped and ate some cold barbequed ribs that we had made the night before. So…good. We actually came across BBQ sauce in a small store in San Blas and naturally we had to have it. Philip doctored it up really well and we ended up with the leanest, tenderest ribs we’ve ever had. Granted it took us about 4 hours to make, but we certainly didn’t care. It was so worth it. Oh, and I also had some of the best soft-serve ever in Tepic, and I am a self-proclaimed soft-serve addict. It beat my old fave DQ hands down. We also ate some bananas we’d brought that were actually from some of the wild ones growing on the farm. As soon as one of them starts to ripen on the stalk you have to bring them in and hang them inside, otherwise the birds get at them. And apparently whenever a banana tree makes a bunch of bananas, that’s the end of it, you chop the whole thing down, and it has to start all over again.

After our market trip we were determined to get to the biggest supermarket we could. Wal-Mart loomed so familiarly down the road, singing siren songs of more selection than we could dream of. We could not resist. The minute we stepped in, I could just feel our recipes that we’d come up with at the farm getting better. We stayed there for hours just salivating. We actually didn’t end up buying a ton as we would have to trek it all on our backs back home. But real yogurt, flour tortilla mix (they were deLISH btw), Jose Cuervo Tradicional, fresh mushrooms, whipping cream, and a big bag of cacahuates dulces (basically a praline peanut) came back with us. We also came back with, very strangely, a bag of totally un-sour limes…they were very strange and disappointing. We headed back home before dark so excited about all our new purchases.

Tuesday, we had a visitor. While Philip was making amazing fajitas out on the grill, he heard this piteous mewling noise off in the distance. It got closer and closer and finally a little spotted kitten with big green eyes showed himself hovering around the light from the house. He was really skittish and we tried to shoo him away to get him to go back home, but he was obviously lost and all alone. I finally lured him towards a saucer of milk and after the first little pat on his head, we were best friends. He LOVED us. The minute we went inside to eat and left him alone outside, he would cry and cry, even jumping up on the window sill wherever we were to see us. He followed our feet wherever we went outside. I was concerned he would cry all night and keep us up, but he stopped after a while after we went to bed. But when I woke up at 6:00 the next morning, there he was, crying at the door. We figured out that he probably belonged to a small house at he bottom of the hill from the farm. We knew they had a ton of cats there, and he probably just wandered up the hill and got lost. So the next day we took him down and lo and behold, there were a bunch of other kittens all his same size, and the minute we put him down, he seemed at home. We went back to check on him today, and there he was, happy as can be. Mission kitten rescue accomplished.
The rest of the week went by without much ado. Amaranth actually left last Sunday for Arizona to help her mom move there from Washington DC, so it’s just been us and Wally on the farm. In her absence, she asked for me to keep up the house for her, so that takes up an hour or two of my morning. And we have had to go sans her lovely lunches and fend for ourselves. Philip and Wally completed the hen-house. The goose laid an egg; a massive thing that took her a whole day to deliver, poor thing. Then Philip and I dug up a completely new garden in the back of the cono. It was very hard work, pickaxing and then getting all the clumps of grass out to make the new garden. Then we hauled ancient dirt from the chicken coop as well as ash from the fire pile to mix into the dirt to make it extra fertile.
As usual, there was there were many yummy meals cooked. I managed to make speatzle and meatballs with a mushroom sauce…yum. I baked cinnamon rolls from scratch which we then gifted to some of our friends down in town. Philip made a true fire-roasted salsa as well as a gorgeous pineapple/shrimp shishkebab ring, the aforementioned ribs, fajitas with the homemade salsa and homemade tortillas. Then tonight’s orange-beef stir fry. Yummy.
Wednesday we got another animal surprise. We were down by the casita at the bottom of the hill, and on my way back up to the cono I saw Opie (one of the dogs) barking like mad. I thought he was just being silly, barking at us because sometimes he doesn’t recognize us. I was yelling at him to hesh up when I saw something rather large moving through the grass in the space between us. It was a HUGE snake, the thickness of my arm and about as long as me. I could see that it wasn’t poisonous, a constrictor of some type (thanks middle school science Olympiad). I want to say it’s a boa constrictor because of the gorgeous pattern on its skin. I yelled to Philip to “come see this HUGE snake” “huge snake?”, I could hear the doubt in his voice. I felt much better when he saw it and made the appropriate impressed noises. The snake made its way into a stand of grass and got into a defensive position all coiled up. We stayed back enough just to get pictures, we'll add some on here, but you should click on it so you can actually see him, he blended in so well. Philip managed to get some video of him slithering around too. Then after about 10 minutes of gawking we left him alone. Philip saw him again later on and managed to get some video of him. But we haven’t seen him since.
Today we went to Casa Manana to get their Wifi and we managed to book our first hostle stay in Guadalajara. We will be staying at Hostal de Maria from March 5th through the 9th, it had great reviews and the last wwoofer Gina had stayed there on her way here and liked it very much. Going from Aticama pop. 900 to Guadalajara with 6 million people will be a big change. But there are so many things to do there. Gorgeous churches, museums, parks, huge markets spanning 30 city blocks, ballet floclorico, tequila distilleries, and hopefully our first Mexican theatre experience are all things we are looking forward to. And it is less than a week away now. After that we are planning a trip north to Zacatecas, then back down to Guanaguato, then to San Miguel De Allende for another stay at a different wwoof farm. But that one will only be for two weeks. After that…who knows? Hopefully we wont be broke and can get the chance to head down to Oaxaca. Time will tell.

Today we were supposed to get a new roommate, Pheobe. But as yet it is 8 oclock and dark and she hasn’t shown up yet. We shall see.

Saturday it's whale watching!

--Julia