Puebla: students, cemitas, tattoos & feminist fury

A wise friend once observed that the coolest cities to visit are often university towns. If memory serves me correctly, I believe it was Salamanca, Spain’s most important university centre, that inspired Amos’s epiphany. It makes sense if you think about it: lots of young people, abundant energy, oodles of thinking and creating, and plenty of cheap rent, booze, food and entertainment. All this, completely unconstrained by the nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday mentality. These are cities perfectly poised to entertain visitors any day of the week.

It doesn’t take long in Puebla to realise that it is a university town. In fact, it is only second to Mexico City for the highest number of universities in the country. It is a stunning place, filled with low-rise colonial architecture painted myriad pastels and primaries centering on a gorgeous tree-filled zocalo. 

After the relentless heat of the Pacific coast, it was nice to be in slighter cooler climes, strolling through cobbled streets and sitting in shaded arcades.

We visited Museo Amparo, an excellent museum where, in addition to the pre-Hispanic treasures for which it's known, we checked out two great contemporary exhibitions that happened to be showing.

The first was the work of a Oaxacan artist called Dr Lakra, a tattooist who essentially takes defacing/doodling in magazines to a whole new level. In this exhibition he'd endowed images of 50s pin-ups with prison and religious tattoos and decorated posters of respected politicians with Maori moko. Muy bien.

Next up, Cristina Lucas, an artist who comments on patriarchal domination. Dodgy, predictably, found the exhibition "boring and predictable" and was in and out in under five minutes. I came out half an hour later still laughing to myself.

The two pieces I found most memorable were:

• "You can walk too" - a photograph of a dog on its hind legs in an alleyway. The piece reflected on a passage in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in which she quotes a music critic who said: "A woman composing is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all". It reminded me of Mad Men's resident alchie, Freddy Rumsen, who commented that watching Peggy work creative was like watching a dog play piano. It wasn't long before Freddy peed his pants and Peggy got his office. 
• "Rousseau & Sophie" - a video of a park in Madrid where local women and girls reacted hilariously to the philosopher's theories about women as outlined in his book Emile, or On Education by smacking the shit out of a bronze bust of Rousseau. My favourite: a nine-year-old girl. She paused, handing her aunt her lollipop, saying, "Hold this, and don't eat it", before throttling the bronze head with a plastic bottle while shouting, "You are a naughty man!". Then, to hammer her point home, she instructed her friend to "Pull his ears!". 

I can't go on without mentioning the food in Puebla. It is a mecca, but we were short on time so I honed in on a local specialty, the cemita. A cemita is essentially a sandwich - a sesame bun filled with quesilla (string cheese), avocado, white onion, delicioso goat meat cooked in an earth oven (which tastes smokey and reminiscent of hangi), and papolo leaves (said to be similar to coriander, but unlike anything I've tasted before). Dodgy was in love and thought that Sunny - our sandwich fiend and burger aficionado friend - would be in heaven if he ever reached Puebla.