A little bit of sunshine!

After nearly one, two, three, four,.....weeks of rain, the sun decided to shine a little bit for us. Hopefully the wet season is getting to the end.

When we arrived, the weather in San Cristobal was:

 And so was the weather yesterday:

Grey skies all the time.  Anyway, after doing lots, lots of homework I decided to put my Wellies on and enjoy the wet garden:

Tortillas, the Mexican bread.

Tortillas seem to be present in every Mexican meal.  In the U.K. you can get some  in the supermarket (made in the Netherlands by the way) but the taste is absolutely different.

Tortillas have a very mild flavour and you can put nearly anything inside, cheese, meat, veggies, they had become my lunch time favourite.  You can find tortilla shops nearly in every street in this town.   I ask my mum to explain me how to make them, of course she had no clue, so we visited one of these "tortillerias" and found it out.

They had big mixing machines to make the dough basically with maize flour and water, and another machine to cut and roll the dough out into circles and "cook" them. All in one:

But that is the industrial way to make tortillas, here is a version to make them at home, you can always get the flour on line and use a rolling pin instead of a tortilla machine:

Buen provecho!!

Love horses.

Today I started my riding lessons.  Bismillah (not sure about the spelling) is a calm friendly horse.  First thing I had to brush her mane and stroke her.  It was great, there was a connection immediately, she's soft and has a soft personality as well.

Today was a rainy afternoon but still we enjoyed it and had time to look around for some beautiful plants and flowers growing in the area while we were with the horses.

I'm very lucky that my tutor Tess, is a Brit-French girl who spent most of her life in the South of England.  There was another immediate connection.  She's great and fun and .... I can understand what she says, yay!!!, but she says she will teach me to give instructions in Spanish too.  Bismillah turned to be a bilingual horse!!  or tri??

Horses are wonderful!! even my brother Mickey had a go.

A walk in town.

Mum and I decided to go out for a walk in town.  San Cristobal is surrounded by a few mountains   Everywhere you look you see those mighty green giants.  But one of them is actually an extinct volcano called "Huitepec" which has one of the most valuable ecosystems in the world:  the cloud forest.

The town was very busy and colourful.  In the main square we met a great French storyteller, we saw an actual loom behind one of the textiles shops, a balloon seller, shoe cleaners, all sort of new things for me.

In the market, we were amazed by the scents of the spices and food  and of course we saw the chillies stand.  By the way, did you know that the Naga chilli from Dorset is still hotter that any variety in Mexico?!

Our last stop was the crafts market, its so colourful.  I saw a bamboo recorder decorated with nice flowers, but I was completely disappointed when I realised it wouldn't play, no matter how hard I blew, it wouldn't play, yet I still think is beautiful and I can pretend that it plays lovely music.

Days off the school.

We had a couple of days off the school because of  the Mexican Independence celebrations. It was a wonderful time to go into the attic and unpack our most precious treasures. My brother Mickey and I found the old rocking horse, the fabulous lego bricks, the  board games, the book collection, the illegible book that I made when I was two, and my mummy's version of it, but the most interesting finding was Mickey's home made "camera obscura", I spent hours looking to the world trough it.  I want to do one myself and I promise to share the instructions.

I have to say good bye for now, my mum discovered that I'm still wearing pijamas and decided to put the "accomplished activities' pegs back on the fridge to organize my free days...