You have the feeling of sitting outside and inside at the same time. Ambiente noise and good English music let you speak without being overheard. You can sit at tables or on slightly disturbing, cow-hide covered couches, and shelter from the sun under an umbrella. When it rains, a staff member pops out with a remote control, and an automatic roof rumbles over the courtyard. In a city where the posh people seem to like spending their free time drinking franchise coffee at the suburban mall, La Profética is refreshingly, actually a city hangout.

It’s a great place for languid morning conversations over coffee, a great place to work on an obra maestra with an afternoon beer, (the number of people with Apple laptops can be a bit off-putting, but I have one too so I shouldn’t sneer) and a great place to argue politics in the dim glow of a single tealight with a margarita at night.

Apart from the omnipresent chocolate and chile sauce known as Mole Poblano, the Poblanos seem to be most proud of their Chiles en Nogada, a specialty in Puebla available during for the summer, although with globalization, I imagine they could offer it all year if they wanted. But that would take away from the advertising frenzy and probably from the high prices its three month season allows them.

Chiles en Nogada are delicious, but also overrated. I first heard of them teaching English in Vancouver, where one of my students made a reverential presentation about Mexican food in general, and Chiles en Nogada in particular. It’s a dish that seems to appeal not only to the culinary side of Mexicans, but also the patriotic side. The chile was an important pre-colombian food staple, and as such a part of the modern people’s cultural heritage. The tongue-scaldingly hot chiles that Mexico is famous for are also a logical addition to the diet: street food is rife with bacteria, but the strength of some of those chiles will kill practically anything in your stomach that could harm you. And Chiles en Nogada are particularly patriotic: the dish contains the three colours of the Mexican flag, red for the blood of heroes, green for hope, and the white that binds them together.

More simply put, however, this dish consists of a large, mild green chile, stuffed with fruit (often apple, pear, and peach) and blanketed in a white, creamy walnut sauce (a nogal is a walnut tree). It is then sprinkled with pomegranate seeds (individual drops of hero-blood I imagine) and then often with parsely to reinforce the green colour. They are tasty, although in a strange, sweet, and often tepid way. I would recommend, if two or three people go for dinner, getting one Chile en Nogada to share, and something else as well. But hurry! The season this year is almost over!

I went with the original plan (it was after all, also the laziest plan) and the reality of Independence Day downtown says a lot about my students, Poblanos in general, and Mexico today.
It was raining, so we didn’t even go out until the fireworks started going off. Therefore, we only saw the fireworks from the streets a few blocks from the main square– but this might have been for the best. Instead of an oohing-and-awing crowd the only spectators apart from us were locals who’d come down to the street with their children. A green orb exloded into the nearby sky, while a pair of six year olds giggled in delerious excitement and screamed “Viva México.”

Missing the fireworks display in Puebla

The long and commercial winding road to the Zócalo

Poblanos are a strange breed, within Mexico. Although I’ve found them universally pleasant and helpful my Mexican friends from wherever else in the country claim that they are not particularly friendly, and that they are very conservative. The last is certainly true. “Street Fiesta in Mexico” conjures up thoughts, at least for me, of dancing, singing and plenty of Tequila. Just as Christmas Eve in Havana turned out to be dancing, singing, guitar playing and plenty of rum on the streets. But the Poblanos are definitley lower-key than the Cubans, the Catalans, or even, to my surprise, the Canadians. A band played rousing Mexican anthems in the shadow of the cathedral, and while people danced, I would definitely say the band had more fun than anyone else. We danced in the rain and the spray from the fountain for a while, and then wandered over to the Governmental Palace, to see what was going on there.

The Palace was glowing with Christmas-er-Independence Day lights, visually screaming “Viva México” the way no one actually seemed to be screaming (Mexican Independence began with a scream) and a crowd of people waited expectantly below, alternately gazing up, huddling under hoods or umbrellas in the rain, or bouncing excitedly whenver the television camera mounted on a crane swung their way. We also stopped and stared up at the blazing palace and waited. And waited. A woman told us that something was supposed to happen–everyone seemed a bit vague on what, but we assumed it must be something to do with the scream. This was supposed to happen at 11 or 11:30 we believed, and it was 11 now.

So we waited, looking up at the palace and the people in it. People who would approach the flag-draped balcony and look out into the crowded square below briefly, then turn and have their picture taken with their friends. Men in expensive suits. Woman with sleek, shiny hair and dresses the like of which I haven’t seen anywhere in Mexico. Children leaning over the balconies and watching the crowd with a fixed, un-analytical stare that seemed to find nothing strange in a large number of increasingly wet people staring back at them. And military leaders, brushed and badged to within an inch of their lives, gazed over trim, military moustaches into a crowd sporting stick-on, costume Zapatista moustaches, then turned their backs and leaned against the balcony to punch messages into their cell-phones.

It rained and rained, not particularly hard but consistently, we waited and waited and finally it was past 11:30 and still nobody had appeared to do more than wave half-heartedly at the increasingly half-hearted crowd. I started to feel more and more irritable. Some of these wet people in the crowd with me probably make about $200 a month, and here they were, waiting to be addressed by someone whose shirt probably cost more than that, who could see that everyone was wet and who still couldn’t be bothered to put in an appearance to make whatever empty and politically current speech they were here to make.

Enough. I had a cold that wasn’t getting any better, so we left the silent watchers, the band that was much livlier than anyone dancing to it, and the cordoned off military area. Passing more bedraggled military men on the way back home I was struck by the thought: the rich here are frightened of the poor. But given the passivity of all those waiting people in the square (the “agressive people” as my students had said they were) I couldn’t imagine why.

Mexican Pastries, including concha buns

This isn’t exactly the case. I find it extremely difficult to actually find bread in Puebla, and have distressingly found myself eating Bimbo much of the time, but in one thing she was absolutely correct: the pastries are phenomenal. And I live a mere two blocks away from the best bakery I’ve yet to find in Puebla, the entertainingly named “La Verdad.”

Some of the Mexican pastries look vaguely familiar to a North American or European, and others look like they’re from Mars. The classic Mexican pastry is the concha, which is basically a bun decorated with swirls of vanilla or chocolate flavoured sugar, so that it looks like a shell. Another classic (and expensive by the bakery’s standards at 7 pesos) is something that more or less resemble a birdsnest cookie, but make entirely from peanut dough, known as Polvorón de Cacahuete.

Pastries, including Polvorón de Cacahuete, in Panificadora La Verdad in Puebla

Best of all, for about a dollar, so people can stuff themselves into oblivion, to the point where it takes a week to work up another appetite for a Saturday-morning trip to La Verdad.

In this way I found myself sitting for the sixth of seventh time in the waiting room of the Employment Bureau, struggling palidly against a new bout of food poisoning, waiting to talk to the secretary. In the past to weeks I had been in to see the undersecretary, his secretary, a number of women whose job it was to find a job for me, and another random man working there who seemed to know who I was, although I hadn’t a clue who he was. The secretary himself was elusive, and today he was keeping me waiting. I’d already been there and hour. To distract myself I read for about the hundredth time the signs plastering every available wall and proclaiming: “The Bolsa de Trabajo is committed to providing a workplace free from laboral and sexual harassment, without distinctions or discrimination.” Very nice, I thought, nice to see they’re making the effort, since Mexico doesn’t exactly have the best reputation in that field.

Finally I was ushered in to see the secretary, who proved to be in direct conflict with all of those politically correct little signs. A true “viejo verde” as the Spanish say, or dirty old man. He expressed his delight that I wasn’t married, wanted a list of qualities I required in a partner, followed me around his grand spacious office stroking my arm and repeatedly tried to kiss me… on the cheek, mouth, hand… he was impossible to escape. Meanwhile he promised to find a job for me.

I eventually extricated myself and fled back along the few streets to my house profoundly depressed, but knowing that if a job was offered, I would go back to see him… provided the job did not turn out to be as his personal secretary.

Coming out after talking to someone in the department of Medical Supplies, I took a chance and revealed some of my listening weakness: “So, I heard you saying something about a wrestler in there, but I didn’t really understand…” “I was a wrestler,” he replied, “and now I voluntarily represent a group of ex-wrestlers who don’t have any money for supplies, like my friend, and his wife.”

Learning he was a wrestler shed a different light on my previous thoughts that if he did turn out to be a psycho, I could probably take him, but it also added a new dimension to this old, short but strongly built man, who now explained to me that he had traveled the world, including to Canada, as a professional fighter.

The Lucha Libre, the Mexican Professional Wrestling, is an institution here: the garish masks are sold on street corners, the matches themselves are attended from everyone to groups of foreigners having a laugh to deadly earnest eighty-year-old women, shouting and swearing as the action unfolds. A recent free photography exhibition in the main square details the golden age of wrestling in Mexico, and as I walked through the galleries of scowling but irresistibly camp leotarded men, I couldn’t help but look behind every mask, to see if I could catch a glimpse of the prosaic eyes of my new friend.

The president was nowhere to be seen, but there was an enormous group of elected official inaugurating a sculpture, and many other important looking people schmoozing around. I stood on the fountain in a sun dress and told myself I should go and start a schmoozing conversation of my own with a man holding a “Social Development” folder, but ultimately chickened out and started walking home slowly, peering into unfamiliar interior courtyards as I did. In the entrance to one, and old man passed me, and turned to say good afternoon. I muttered it back at him and continued on my way.

Half a block later there were pounding feet following me, and the old man caught up, asking me how I was, and if his suggestions had been helpful. We had a bizarre conversation for the next ten minutes, during which he tried to convince me he knew me and I replied (suspiciously) that he definitely didn’t. Apparently he worked as security for the house of culture, and I reminded him of another girl who’d been asking for tourist information. I was skeptical, but I was already having the conversation, so I asked him if there were any jobs at the house of culture. There weren’t, but he was absolutely convinced that he could get me a job somewhere. I shied away–who was this man anyway?– but he convinced me to come with him, just down the street, and he would introduce me to some men who would vouch for his character.

Popular wisdom and general common sense dictates that you shouldn’t go with strangers, especially if you’re a young woman alone, but given that it was broad daylight, and he was suggesting a destination only a block away, I went. And hour later, I had been security checked, had stood in the beautiful tiled courtyard of a government building, had talked to a number of the elected officials that I’d seen from a distance in the square that same morning, and I had a reference letter from one of them. Suddenly I had the PRI, the famous and infamous party that had ruled Mexico for seventy years, interested in my job search.

My new friend wasn’t even finished with me yet, and I decided as he arranged to meet me the next day, that talking to strangers can definitely pay off.

The police in Mexico range between downright scary (men with guns glowering down from open-backed vehicles) and plain silly (lower ranking pairs that bounce through the disastrous roads in glorified golf carts. These were the scary ones, but not nearly as scary as what the next corner held: a soldier in military fatigues with a machine gun. I sidled nervously by him; the only time I’d even seen a machine gun before was in an American airport, certainly never on the street.

The next hour or so was spent moving nervously and as unobtrusively as possible down the street, hoping a wasn’t going to get caught in a shoot out between the police and some desperate criminals, crossing the street to be as far away from the armoured tank as possible, wondering what all the road blocks were about. Until the lady at the bakery explained it for me: the president was in town.

They rumble delightfully through the streets of the old town, and barrel down the highways in competition with the disproportionate lookng SUVs. At least a third of the cars parked daily on my street are vochos, in a satisfying kaleidoscope of reds, greens, yellows, powder blues, and an adorable vocho-taxi, and they range in upkeep from immaculate to practically dragging the floor on the ground as they drive. There’s even a hardcore, rocked-out vocho-van that crashes through the neighbourhood at night like an ailing transformer, audible at least three blocks away.

The place to buy vochos, or cars in general, turned out to be “La Cienega” or “The Swamp,” basically a large parking lot in the middle of a highway filled with people selling their second-hand cars. If that isn’t dodgy enough, there’s a secondary, unofficial cienega just down the road, where more decrepit looking cars sit amongst the trees. La cienega doubles as a surreal alternative-tourist experience, and I sat next to a shy little girl eating something on a stick that might have been fried, or might have been a popsicle, while we discovered what was to become the new vocho on the block…

This was the best idea in the world. Even during take-off I had that old excited feeling that I don’t get much any more when flying. The absolute delight of leaving a place without feeling pulled into pieces over it, knowing I’ll miss certain things, but not too many. And the feeling at the same time of going somewhere completely new, probably wonderful, and a guaranteed adventure.

This excitement didn’t prevent me from sleeping for most of the flight, but I roused myself as we reached the destination 5 1/2 hours later. Darkness was falling on the ground, but the sky we moved through was glowing with light and shadows in shades of pink, yellow and grey. The mountains loomed around us as we began our descent, hazy with sun and nightfall combined, the city below even hazier under its protective blanket of smog.

And then suddenly, with a last rush we were lower than I would have thought, semi-derelict but clearly lived-in houses, and landing smoothly a minute later in my new country: Mexico.