The Day I Stood Within 5 ft of the President & Almost Blew Up the Kitchen

It turns out that holidays in Mexico can be some of the most exciting days of all. Today Guanajuato celebrated the Toma de la Alhondiga. Two weeks after the Grito of Hidalgo, the fight for Mexican independence moved to Guanajuato. The Alhondiga was a granary that the Spaniards holed up in but were defeated by the Mexicans because of the bravery of El Pipila, our local hero. It is a storming of the Bastille story, just in Mexico. Every year there is a huge parade through the streets of the city and everyone turns out to watch. Schools and businesses are closed and everyone participates.

I went to the parade. I love parades, but my real motivation was to see the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, who attends every year. Sure enough, he was there and I was able to stand within 5 feet of him. It was pretty neat. I did find it interesting how little security there was. There was a helicopter that flew in circles around the city and there were security guards on the roofs of the buildings around the Plaza de la Paz, but that was about it. He walked right through the streets and there was very little fuss. No one tried to talk to him or bother him. Still, it was a neat experience.

The parade lasted for three hours. It was eternal! Every school in Guanajuato sent a marching band to participate, all the government offices had people marching, and every organization in Guanajuato was represented. Just when I thought we might be getting to the end, all the cities in Guanajuato state marched through with their representatives and then the policemen, firemen, red cross volunteers, and every type of rescue people had to march through.

I joked that today would be the best day to commit a crime in Guanajuato and the worst day to have an emergency because all the policemen and emergency response crews were in downtown Guanajuato. It was an impressive display for sure.

After the parade, my friend Jessica and I decided that we were going to bake cookies since we didn't have class and we were craving chocolate chip cookies. This turned out to be a bigger challenge than we had originally thought. We went to the Mega which is like a Mexican version of Wal-Mart supercenter. They have everything, you just have to know what it is called in Spanish. We finally found all the ingredients we needed and headed back to my house to make the cookies.

When we arrived, my host family was out so we had to figure out how to light the gas stove all by ourselves. We looked up on youtube "how to light a gas stove" and then proceeded to follow the instructions. The lighters that my host family had in the kitchen were almost out of fuel, so keeping them lit while we waved them in front of the pilot light was extremely difficult. We couldn't find any matches, so we settled with a candle that we found in the kitchen. All this time I had been turning off the gas while we were in between flames so that we wouldn't blow the whole kitchen to kingdom come. We did finally get the oven lit; however, it was with a huge whoosh of flame that blew out of the oven. I don't think Jessica or I had ever moved so quickly in our lives. Nothing caught on fire and we were ok, but it was a moment before our hearts stopped pounding. We now know to ask someone before we try something like that again.

The oven knob had no temperature markers, so we just had to guess how long to cook the cookies. We must have had it on 700 degrees because they only took 4 minutes to bake. The cookies were delicious despite all the excitement and some substitutions with the ingredients. I personally think that if a person can bake yummy cookies in a foreign country with foreign ingredients and no standardized measuring utensils, they are all set in the cookie-baking category.