Our last day in Mexico City so we packed our bags before breakfast, then took a taxi to the bus station to catch a bus to Puebla. It was quite confusing when we arrived at the bus station, there were so many differently priced tickets available, and it was difficult to know what the correct ticket and price was. We eventually found one bus for 73MXP which was the cheapest and it left in 10 minutes.

We did find out later that the Mexico bus system has an excellent website (Ticketbus) where you can browse schedules and book tickets. We used this several times during our time in Mexico and it made travelling around the country so much easier.

We boarded the bus and it left on time and headed out of the city. After a while we left the city limits and started to climb up through the mountains, we then descended and headed into Puebla, Mexico's 4th largest city. Just 2 hours after leaving Mexico City we were dropped at the bus station in Puebla where we took a taxi to one of the hotels recommended in the Rough Guide, the Hotel Virrey De Mendoza. It is quite nice, laid out around a central courtyard and costs 300MXP a night.

Puebla, the capital of Puebla state, is one of Mexico's oldest and most famous cities. It is renowned for it's Talavera pottery, and in particular the tiles, many of which adorn the cities most beautiful buildings.

After leaving our bags in the hotel we headed to Uriarte, one of the Talavera pottery workshops. Unfortunately we were too late for the factory tour so instead had a look around the shop. We both bought some presents, I bought a plate for my mam and a gigantic mug for myself. We then went for a walk around town. It is a very picturesque town, there are lots of colonial style buildings and many of them are decorated in tiles.

We were hungry so we tried one of the restaurants as recommended by the guy in the tourist office earlier. The food was OK, Katerina tried the mole poblano which was invented here (mole is a sauce made from chillies, spices, nuts and a little chocolate). After dinner we walked around the town, visited the artists quarter and admired more buildings including the huge cathedral.

In the Zocalo we stopped to watch the musical water fountains, which are a performance show of water fountains set to music. The fountains are lit by variously coloured lights and change in time with the music and are very popular with the crowd.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a jewellery shop where we got chatting to the owners who were a very nice Mexican couple. They were very interested in our travels and recommended some places to visit. After some time in the hotel we headed out to find a bar and have a drink. We found a small square where there were quite a few bars, we sat inside and had a couple of Coronas and a plate of nachos.

Woke up after a terrible nights sleep, there is so much noise in this hotel, there was loud music from a bar until the early hours then the people next door had their TV on very loudly. I knocked loudly on the wall to tell them to turn it down and subsequently knocked a chunk of plaster out of the wall!!

It was quite late so we decided to skip breakfast and have some lunch. After lunch we headed for the main museum in town, Museo Amparo (Amparo Museum), described in the Rough Guide as the "undisputed jewel in the landscape of Pueblo's museums'.

The museum is housed in a beautiful colonial building, set around an internal courtyard and contains mainly pre-Columbian artifacts along with a small selection of Hispanic art. We looked around for an hour or two, it was not that exciting, the most noteworthy display was a wall chart of the various civilizations on each of the continents throughout the ages. It was notable that Europe was dominated by the Greeks and not surprisingly America was dominated by the Mexicans.

We then wandered around town for a while admiring the fine colonial buildings. Next we visited the huge cathedral, with marble floors and apparently statues of an English king and Scottish queen flanking the altar! After a rest at the hotel we headed out to find somewhere to eat, and decided upon a simple, traditional Mexican place.

It was simple in that it opened onto the street and the kitchen was in full view of the diners, ie. we could watch as the frozen chips were taken from the freezer and deposited into 2 inches of dirty oil. Anyhow, once we had tried to forget the intricacies of preparation it turned out to be a reasonable, and more importantly, cheap feed. After devouring the milanesa (a typical Latin American dish of beef steak coated in breadcrumbs and fried) we headed to the Zocalo for the last time.

It was very busy, mainly with families enjoying themselves, there was almost a carnival atmosphere in the air. We wandered around the square and stopped for a while to watch a street artist using aerosol paint to produce some excellent pictures of everything from the Beatles to fantasy SciFi scenes via religious images of Jesus on the cross. He worked so quickly using some interesting methods, averaging about 3 minutes per picture, and all the time we watched there was always a buyer immediately for all his works (20MXP each).

Next to him was a guy using his hands to paint scenes of Puebla (mainly of the nearby volcano, Popacatepetl) on white plastic plates, again the quality was excellent, although he did use a small brush for the finer details. We walked back to the hotel and popped into the bookshop/bar next door asking them to turn the music down in order for us to get more sleep than last night. As it turned out it did not make that much difference....

Oaxaca