Christmas season and mountain biking

Saturday I headed to the nearby Zocalo and saw the city putting up its Christmas decorations! Not sure if this is only for this week (there were some youth choirs / orchestras on Sunday playing in front of this tree), but I'm pretty sure it will stay all month.



Also, I was invited by a Mexican friend to go on a bike ride (not a race) with him on Saturday night. I've never done anything like it, so I of course agreed. It wound up being a tough (for me) 21 km ride at night, up and down some small hills. I started out okay, but I ran out of gas on the return trip and wound up lagging behind the rest of the group...luckily the pro's and guides were pretty nice about helping me along and making sure I didn't get lost in the dark! I am a bit sore, but not as bad as I thought I would be--and of course I wore my helmet!

Concierto de las Campanas

So the Concert of the Bells was last night in Cholula. There are approximately fifty churches in the immediate area, and on this night, they all play together for an hour. I had thought it would be really organized and synchronized to some sort of musical score, but it turned out a bit random. The famous church in Cholula is up on a hill, overlooking the city, and so I headed up there for the concert. It was hard to hear the churches further away, but you can catch some on this video if you pay attention.



Yesterday (Nov 20th) was also the 100 year anniversay of the Mexican Revolution, so there have been a ton of other festivities as well.

Weekend chess tournament

Last weekend I wound up going to a chess tournament, which was kind of fun. I lost every match I played in, but I learned some interesting differences compared to back in the day...

1) People here don't say "check." Now, I've never actually played in a tournament, so maybe that's normal internationally?
2) The Mexican version of "bug house" is called "taxi" and is different from what I used to play, which threw me off a lot. The general idea is the same (teams of two, and when you capture a piece you pass it to your partner), but there are (at least) three different local rules that changed the game:

• They play with a 3 minute clock (as per the Wikipedia description). But this meant that every game ended on the clock, which for me was not as fun...I started playing the clock instead of my opponent.
  
• No putting pieces where the king is in check, which meant a more subtle strategy.
• If you castle, you can remove a piece from your teammate's opponent.
  

Day of the Dead

Sunday I went to a community called Huaquechula, famous for its non-traditional Day of the Dead altars. They tend to be all one color (predominantly white, though we saw one blue one) and a bit more "modern"--angels, etc. You can contrast that with a more traditional Mexican altar (black, orange, and with catrinas), which I saw on Monday in the Casa de la Cultura in Puebla. The event at the Casa was so popular, a line formed outside and down the block!



On Tuesday, I happened to be downtown with a friend, and we walked by the Cathedral. Wondering what the line was all about, we formed up. Apparently once a year they open the crypt below the main pulpit, where they have entombed previous fathers of the church. One time a year!