A Visit to Santa Maria del Rio

by Sarah Ann
June 15, 2018

First, I wanted to add something about yesterday. We went to a little taco shop at 8:30 p.m. to eat "dinner." That's still a little early for Mexicans to eat dinner. Tacos in Mexico are different than tacos in the U.S. There's meat on a corn tortilla and you can add salsa and onions. One of the kinds of tacos that many people eat is lengua - cow tongue. Marco ordered some for us. We all tried it except Taylor and Christian. I thought it was okay - not great.

cow tongue taco with horchata to drink

At 10 a.m. this morning, Marco and Claudia (our tour guide from when we went to Real de Catorce) picked us up. Ernesto, Marco's son, was there too. My dad stayed home because he wasn't feeling well. We drove for about 30 minutes to a little village called Santa Maria del Rio. It is famous in Mexico for the shawls they make, which are called rebosos. It was neat to see how people in villages lived, as we are mostly going to be exploring cities.

First we went into the main plaza. The plaza had a little garden and a church. Most villages have a church with a small garden outside it. We went inside the church, and it was beautiful!

inside of the church in Santa Maria del Rio

We went to a little shop where the rebosos are made and sold. The rebosos are like big scarfs, and people wear them all different ways-- some people even take classes on all the ways you can put one on! The shawls are completely handmade. They usually take 1-4 months to make one reboso.

The first step is they get 300,000 threads of silk. They put it on this ginormous loom. It is hard to explain what they did, and it looked very complicated, so I will just have to show you the picture:

making rebosas at the little shop

For the last step, they knotted beautiful embroidery by hand! It looked so complicated; I could never do something like that! Finally, for the shawl to pass quality control, the whole Reboso had to pass through a ring you would wear on your pinky- inger. This showed how fine the material was. The final result of the months of hard work was absolutely beautiful!

By then, everyone in my family was hungry. It was 12:30, but we had to remind them that we wanted to eat because they usually don't eat anything big for lunch, but wait until around 2 to eat la comida. We ate gorditas at a little shop. They were delicious--even Christian loved them!

Here are the women making the gorditas

And here we are waiting to eat them!

We also walked through the market which was fun.

some little shops in the market

After buying some pig-shaped gingerbread, we returned to the shop where we bought a reboso. After that, we returned home. It was a great day but now I am not feeling too well either. Maybe Taylor wasn't just adjusting to the food - but maybe he was really sick and now the rest of us are getting it.

Here I am in the store with the pig bread

Tomorrow we leave on our big adventure to travel to several cities. I'm excited!