criplomats

The Consul General hosted a very nice party in John’s honor on Friday night so the local business community could meet him. Lots of landlords and various business owners and service providers – all of whom do business with the Consulate, and, specifically John’s section – came out to say hello. It was a beautiful venue, up on a rooftop terrace, and the weather was perfect. The CG gave remarks and introduced John, then John also gave remarks – and did a great job, of course! I was very proud of him!

John’s birthday was earlier in the week and we had fun celebrating. His team did a breakfast for him – lots of good food and cake, then later in the day, I took up another cake. That evening he and I walked over to a nice Peruvian restaurant for dinner. We sat outside and enjoyed Pisco Sours and an excellent meal. He got lots and lots of birthday wishes and I think he enjoyed the day!

Saturday we met some Consulate folks in the little town of Tonalá, about 30 minutes from here. Some of the local artisans took us on a tour to see some of the town and their beautiful ceramics at the artists’ homes. First they took us high up on a hill overlooking the town (and you can also see Guadalajara from there). It’s a lovely view, plus there is a beautiful stone church there:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next we visited two local artisans’ studios – which means we went to their house and backyard, basically. The locals artisans are (rightfully) very proud of keeping their traditional arts alive, and have a hard time with the rest of their town, which is known as one of the biggest and cheapest markets around – but lots of the vendors sell stuff that they say is from the locals but really it’s from heaven-knows-where and are cheap knock-offs. I really liked Florentino Jimón’s work (and he is so nice) – here he is signing a decorative plate we bought:

The plate has two nawales on it – they are creatures who can take the shape of anything, sort of shape-shifters, I guess. You see lots of them in the artwork in Tonalá – and I found this one in the dust on a window:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also went down underneath a church to see the niches, where cremains are stored (Mexico is running out of cemetery space), and then we ended the tour at a tiny market where about a dozen artesans displayed their ceramics on tables for sale – fittingly in the old house of one of the town’s first ceramic artists.

Last night we walked down to Cindy and Raoul’s apartment where they had about a dozen people over for lasagna – the food was delicious, and I enjoyed sitting out on their balcony chatting with friends all evening.

The only down side of the week was on Saturday morning around 4:30 AM. I heard an odd noise that woke me up; we quickly discovered that it was water pouring down behind the wall of one of the bedrooms. Turns out the apartment two floors above us had some sort of water problem. Luckily it didn’t do too much damage to our apartment, although it did leak gallons of water into a bucket we put out and a lot of plaster fell off the ceiling!

Here are a few more photos from Tonalá. Click here to see all of them.

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