1st day...more

hey again!  Today was pretty eventful...my mom and I went into town and she showed me some of our neighborhood.  It is just like you would imagine a neighborhood to look in a historic part of Spain with small one way streets and tiny sidewalks.  All along the sidewalks are every kind of shop you could imagine...bread stores, small stores with snacks and drinks, small stores with all kinds of food and small pharmacies in the back, clothing stores, restaurants, and everything in between.  One thing is obvious here...the women LOVE shoes.  On our 2 hour walk through the city there were probably 4 or 5 different stores dedicated only to shoes...every type and color and all of them looked way too expensive for me. 

We went through our neighborhood and over the "rio de Querétaro", or "Querétaro River" which runs through the city and is lined with walkways and areas to sit and eat, almost like a very long park.  My favorite thing so far has got to be the food.  All the streets are lined with food shops and restaurants, and by the way all of the shops are completely open during store hours, which means no door.  It's not like in the U.S. where you have to open a door to go into the shop, here you just walk in.  Which by the way makes all the restaurants and food shops even more irresistible...because of the wonderful smells that escape from inside. 

My mother also took me to many churches, which are HUGE.  Most of the population here is catholic, so all the churches are pretty much catholic churches, and of course are all open with door propped during the daytime.  We went inside many of the churches (I had never been inside of a catholic church before so this amazed me).  The inside is BEAUTIFUL with ceilings that are too tall to guess their height and are all decorated or painted in some way.  They all had candles lit and many chandeliers hanging from the ceilings also.  There were countless rows of pews all separated by padded wooden strips on the floor to knell on when praying. 

We also went to one of the central plazas which was decorated for the holiday and for new years with scenes and reconstructions of hell, the birth of Jesus, the Garden of Eden, and much more.  All the trees in the plaza and throughout the city are "painted" white around the bottom near the trunk and the roots in order to protect them from insects and such, or so my mother said, or so I think my mother said.  And all the trees are well landscaped and trimmed in perfect cylinder or circle shapes. 

Now let's get back to what's important: the food.  After we returned from our tour through the city my mother cooked us lunch, which by the way is customary to be the biggest meal of the day around 2 or 3 in the afternoon (also something I'm going to have to get used to). She is a wonderful cook! We had spaghetti, which she fixed with only a light very thin cream sauce made with parsley, bread, tomato soup (which was AMAZING...I never thought I would love tomato soup as much as this), and as is customary steamed fresh vegetables (broccoli, carrots, and cayote, which is a green vegetable from the squash family that to me tasted just like broccoli), and pan seared pork chops.  For dessert we had chocolates with nuts inside.  EVERYTHING was soo good especially the tomato soup. 

So far my day has been really good, with good food and good people!  I am still a little tired from the exploring and yesterday's traveling so I can see that tonight will be another early night for me.