A Family Birthday Party

This weekend we left Mexico City and drove north to the state of Guanajuato to attend a birthday party for one of Alejandro's cousins.  Besides Alejandro and me, his mother, his sister, his nephew,  an aunt, and another cousin were going.  Obviously we couldn't all fit in Alejandro's car, so he rented a van for the weekend.

By 9:30 A.M. we were on the road.  We escaped the urban sprawl of Mexico City without too much traffic, and headed northwest along the highway to Querétaro.

From Querétaro  we continued westward to the city of Celaya, Guanajuato, where Alejandro had booked rooms for us at the Holiday Inn.  It was about a four hour drive.

After relaxing at the hotel for a while and changing for the party, we drove to the historic, small town of Salvatierra, located 24 miles to the south of Celaya.  Salvatierra was founded in 1644 and is the oldest town in the state of Guanajuato. 

Alejandro's cousin Gina was celebrating her 18th birthday, and the party was a scaled down version of a "quinceañera", the big birthday bash that Mexican girls have when they turn fifteen.  (Apparently, for some reason, she had not had a proper "quinceañera", so this party was to make up for that.)  Prior to the party a mass was held in one of Salvatierra's seventeenth century churches.

After the mass, we went to Gina's grandmother's house on the edge of town.  A tent was set up outside for the party.

 
Gina's older sister, who recently graduated from culinary school, prepared the delicious supper and the scrumptious cake.  It was a very pleasant party, but in several respects unlike a typical party in Mexico.  Other than wine, no alcohol was served.   They had rented a jukebox, but, thank goodness, the music was not blasting at full volume.  One was actually able to have a conversation.  And the party started to break up at a reasonable hour.  By 11:00 P.M. we were on the road back to our hotel in Celaya.

In my next post, I will describe the second day of our weekend excursion.