100 pesos

The last weekend before work began again (January 5th & 6th), Adolfo and his sister and I spent a weekend in Morelia. Morelia is in the state of Michoacan and is about 3 hours southeast of Guadalajara. It is a nice little colonial city and we walked around for hours checking out the interesting houses, the aqueduct, the cathedral, etc. (Adolfo already updated the photos.)

We had received some information about places to eat, and the best of them was the Inmaculada. First of all, the name is great. Who wouldn’t want to eat in the immaculate restaurant? However, as you might expect is more related to religion than the cleanliness of the place. The restaurant is located in the basement of a church.

The first thing we did was change 100 pesos (approximately $10 US dollars) into laminated chips of different denominations in order to pay for the food in the different stalls. The guy who took our money assured us that we could come back and change our leftover chips back into pesos. Also, we thought that we would start small and then go back and change more pesos if we liked.

Then we hatched a plan: Adolfo headed off to get some corundas (a local kind of tamale), his sister spotted the pozole, I got a combination of two enchiladas covered in potatoes and carrots, one fried potato taco and one fried meat taco and I got two drinks for us to share. Everything was fantastic, but we only spent about 40 pesos!

So, then we had a new agenda – we were going to try to spend all the money!

We spotted the stand for sopes and we sent Adolfo to get us sopes to share. We had 2 sopes each and were still left with a lot of change.

Then we had to take a break and recover for a moment. La Inmaculada was packed with large families and everyone looked local. We had ventured away from the central plaza and a significant amount of tourists, and now we were eating in a local hotspot, which was obviously being maintained and supported by the local lower-middle class population. None of us are really sure of how the economics of the place function. We don't know if the people working at the stalls are the church members, how much of a cut the church gets, or why they were playing Frank Sinatra music! (Oh, I guess the last bit doesn't have to do with economics. Still, we were puzzled.)

While taking the break Adolfo spotted some quesadillas made with fresh tortillas and went to check them out. Meanwhile, I spotted a woman patting out blue corn tortillas! It was a very exciting find. I decided I could eat one blue corn quesadilla. And, Adolfo’s sister took the last of the chips and bought some buñuelos for desert.

We were able to spend all the money, but we couldn’t manage to finish the buñuelos.

It was a very good thing that we were a 45-minute walk from the center, and our hotel. We definitely needed it.