Dear bon vivant,

At this moment, we are drinking rakı in the magnificent colonial city Puebla. Metin is singing a Turkish folk song, Fikret is gathering information on the Mayan Gods, and I, Nur, the slave brought from Bolivia to carry out duties in Spanish, am on air to transmit this cheerful situation.

Puebla is a four-hundred-and-fifty years old, clean and flat “city of angels”, with its streets laid out in grids. You put some cologne on our Sultanahmet, it becomes Puebla. There are over two thousand historical buildings and about seventy churches. People are friendly and the ambiance is suitable for rakı…

And thus we gave up on intention of just spending the night, an intention we had when we arrived in Puebla, and we stayed for two nights. We are the only customers of Hotel Casa De La Palma, a prime example of colonial architecture.

Puebla would take two hours’ drive from Mexico City, under normal conditions. But it rained cats and dogs like it doesn’t usually do, and there were floods everywhere. They said the highway sank and there was nothing they could do. So it took us four hours to come to here.

Last night we arrived in here partly with the help of our tortilla brained GPS “Juan Carlos” and partly with the help of young lads from town who showed the way to the people on the roads. And we liked Puebla a lot. By the way, giving names to the GPS and the car is a habit of my fellow travellers. So from now on the GPS will be referred as “Juan Carlos” and the car will be “Corto Maltese.”

Our first tour in the city was when we drove around looking for a hotel. We found a quiet restaurant under a rock bar, and ate our Mexican wraps. In my opinion the wrap was arabesque hot. And Fikret thought it had mild jalapeno aroma. And we opened our first bottle of rakı in town, thanks to our chatty  ‘punk’ waiter.

In accordance with our motto “Rakı tastes better when you share”, we presented Diego rakı, too. Diego lost his punk attitude after he drank rakı. He became more and more chatty in a Mexican way. After we left him, we went to our hotel which was converted from an aristocrat’s house, and finished our bottle.

And of course, we couldn’t wake up early. The sightseeing freak Metin gave me a bit of his mind. And I, as a woman who had traveled from Venezuela to Bolivia in no less than seven months, beat him with a socialist newspaper. After all, we are bon vivants, and the city is not being privatized and taken away!

We visited a bunch of cathedrals and plazas, and sat down and socialized when we got tired. We went in to the atelier of Javier and his master who make Central American string instruments. During the long conversation on Sufism and Shamanism, Metin got bored and started an affair with the Aztec dog of the atelier.

Then Javier so many good things about a village close to our next stop Oaxaca and gave the address of a friend of his who lives there. It seems we won’t be able to reach the seaside before the end of this month.  Javier promised that he will visit us in İstanbul.

Most exteriors of the buildings in Puebla are covered with colourful ceramics called “azulejo.” Under these conditions our day passed by with us keeping our heads up and admired.

We found a restaurant which both satisfied Fikret the “anti-cheese” and Metin the “anti-meat”, and after that Fikret and I the “museum lovers” when to the Amparo Museum. We cultured ourselves on pre-Mayan, Mayan, and after-Mayan eras. The ones I loved most were the giving birth and feeding milk women statuettes from 500 BC. Yet, they threw us out after informing that it had been half an hour since the doors of the museum were closed. So we had to direct out affection to Metin and our rakı table which we sit around at the moment while eating pistachios and listening to Bach.

We drank some amount of rakı. We keep it to ourselves, to avoid setting a bad example.

Tomorrow we will command our white Jetta, Corto Maltese, to “Hit the south, Jack” and set off to Oaxaca, the Aztec capital. If no problem occurs with Juan Carlos, we will be settled by the afternoon.

We say goodnight and go to sleep with your permission…

Edit: Since Metin and Fikret got drunk and went to bed, and I don’t know how to use this thing called backoffice, the diary had to wait for the morning to be published. We will be on the road after some breakfast.

Greetings and love