One of my favorite things to do in a new place is learn to cook traditional dishes from someone who really knows what they are doing. I booked a cooking class for us as soon as I knew we were headed down here. We walked about forty minutes from our Casita, stopping for coffee along the way, across town to the cooking school. We were joined in our class by a man from Chicago, who was on his third class at the school, and a group of three from Dallas. We worked together with our teacher Marilau to make a cactus appetizer/side dish, a traditional soup that turned out to be more of a risotto style simmered pasta, and a green tomatillo and pork dish. We learned some fun new techniques and a little history as we cooked. We enjoyed all our dishes for lunch before walking back through the market for some souvenir shopping and an afternoon siesta at our little place.
In the evening we made plans to meet up with our new friends Gail and Jay who we met our first night in town. We were told we had to have drinks at the top of the Rosewood hotel during sunset. It has been a bit stormy here in the evenings but we were running out of nights so we took our chances. The hotel was spectacular, it was something I would expect to see in a high end resort area of Hawaii, not central Mexico. Apparently the rooms are quite expensive as well. The view was spectacular though and we sat for a while enjoying fantastic drinks and a couple of appetizers. We were having so much fun talking that we weren’t really paying attention to the rapidly changing weather. The storm rolled right over us and the rain was absolutely pouring. There was thunder, lighting, and high winds. We were stuck under a large awning, which was providing some protection, but we couldn’t get to the elevators without getting soaked. We used the pillows as shields and waited it out. Eventually the rain slowed and I managed to find a fairly shallow path back to safety. The masons didn’t do such a great job of leveling the rooftop deck and there was a serious lack of drains.
View when we arrived.
Same view an hour later – it only got worse!
We decided to run for cover and shared a cab through the flooded streets and ended up at a restaurant that mom and I had pastries and coffee at earlier in the week. We enjoyed a fantastic dinner with our new friends until we were the last ones there. Jay was nice enough to hail a cab for us and we headed home through the torrent.
