Monday, August 30, 2010

Mexico - 8.20.2010

Even after going to bed so early, we slept until about 8:30.
I did wake up at about 6ish to pee and peeked outside the window and saw no magical mist.
Maybe Jacquie had some magical eye boogies that made her early morning vision blurry.
Or maybe I didn't step outside far enough.

The bus was picking everyone up for adventuring at about 10ish so we got ready.
Looking at my sweat soggy jeans from the day before, I started to pout, so Matt offered up a pair of his shorts and a belt since I had no other pants.
Such a sweetheart, that one.

Breakfast was another buffet with tortilla chips, red sauce, crumbled queso blanco (these 3 together are like mexican cereal), beans, fruit, y pan de dulce.
The coffee was excellent. So was the orange juice. Lime juice was surprisingly bland.
Maybe cuz the limes grew too big and diluted the flavor.

After breakfast, we loaded up in the bus and drove through the little town square of Teuchitlan.
The bus smelled like pee cuz of the jiffypot in the back and the a/c was broken so we were pretty cranky on the ride up to these ruins the locals discovered about 6yrs ago.
While looking at them, I was trying to figure out why the hell they were only discovered 6 years ago....but then we saw one that wasn't uncovered and it looked like this:

So, that made sense.
We got a quick lesson in mexican spiritualism and numerology which coincides with the calendar we use today. It was really interesting - a quick study on the #13.
The "ballcourt" story was cool and while our english speaking tour guide gave us the run down, I started listening to the spanish speaking tour guide cuz his group was laughing and he was so animated with hand gestures. He was describing what they wore and how they played and our english speaker was telling us about how it being called a "ballcourt", actually meant...like....court.
That's where the ancient folks settled disagreements - by playing ball.
And the loser got sacrificed.
At the same time we got that rundown, the spanish speaker was doing these hand motions like his guts were falling out of his belly.
Apparently, the ball was kinda smallish and really hard and went really fast and if it hit the dudes playing, it would sometimes puncture through whatever skin was unprotected and their guts would spill out.
La pelota for the win.

We walked around there a little more (and acquired giant mosquito bites) and piled back in the bus.
This time it had a/c.
THAT was truly magical.

So then, we drove about 20-30mins away to this place:

Where this dude (el himador):

Does this to a bunch of agave plants:

And then he puts them here to be cooked in that little house that smells like sugarcane:

And then they come out the other side lookin' like this:

Where they get juiced and the juice goes in these:

Then it gets barreled to age or bottled - depending on what taste they're after.
XO means its been aged over 3 yrs.
We tasted about 4 different bottles and found that the XO was the smoothest and didn't result in those weird tequila faces that usually happen after knockin' one back.

After about 4-9 shots, back on the bus we went to the actual town of Tequila.
The wedding party was supposed to leave on one of the buses at 5 to get to the rehearsal and when we got to the town square it was about 4:30.
So we ran through the square to the Cuervo distillery, skipping the tour (since we'd already seen the process), and found the bar where we tasted some other barrel aged liquid gold and got mango margaritas in souvenir barrel mugs.


That's Clint sayin' "damn...the wedding party has to go!!"
So they all left to catch the bus and off to the rehearsal they went....

-OR DID THEY?!?!-

.....to be continued.....

dun dun dun.

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