Culiacán

We rode our bus less than half the way home so Ashley could get the whole downtown experience. We left school around 11:30, so my stomach was good to go for another three hours or so before lunch. Ashley, on the other hand, I knew I would need to feed relatively soon. We passed some landmarks (namely the Red Cross at this point) and got off the bus. We walked the same path I walk to yoga at night. We stopped at the baseball store and Ashley bought a glass. We continued away from downtown to La Lomita, the main Catholic church in town. This is where Marisela’s graduation blessing was. It has a great view of the city, so I wanted Ashley to see it. It also has about a bazillion steps to climb to get to the top (Did you know that “bazillion” is an accepted word in my spell check?!). I had taken shorts and tennis shoes to change into after teaching. I probably could’ve taught in that, but I figured I’d try to remain as professional as possible, even though I often feel very unprofessional at my job. We climbed the steps and saw what there was to see. I must admit, due to the non-rainy season, the view during the day is pretty brown. With street lights and such, the night view is better in my opinion. Now I know.
From there, Ashley had worked up her appetite. We still had about 30-45 minutes of walking/site-seeing to do before lunch.
We made our way toward downtown, stopping in two sport stores so Ashley could compare them to SoccerUSA. We checked out some plazas and chatted as we made our way to downtown. We got to my beloved taco place and took our seats. The beauty of this place is that you arrive, order and receive your food all within about three minutes. I already knew what we were ordering. We got a quesadilla mixta (with meat and things inside) and two tacos to split. I got an horchata and Ashley tried the agua de piña (pineapple water- this is what I was referring to earlier when I said that they call a lot of their drinks waters even when there’s more than water in it). The agua de piña is very yellow, so I was scared that it was really sweet (how yellow correlates to sweet, I’m not sure), but I tried Ashley’s and it was delicious. The food was as impressive as I’d hoped. Ashley raved.
We still needed to exchange Ashley’s money, but it turned out that the banks don’t do that anymore (I’m guessing it has something to do with the fact that they’re getting ripped off every time someone exchanges!), so I just withdrew from my account and she said she’d deposit her cash into my account when she got home. Done. We also had another church (and maybe two) that we wanted to see before grabbing our churros and heading to the mall. We walked to the churros stand as well as my bank to get her money. I was proud of myself as I yelled to a girl, “Muchacha,” since she had left something on the ATM. We stopped by the churros stand, but they didn’t look right. They were too skinny and that would mean to crispy. The girl didn’t look right and neither did the cart. We had seen another cart that looked like the right kind of churros, so we made our way there. By this time, we had made several laps around downtown. It’s small, but it was still a bit bothersome. We got our churros, Ashley’s water, and my coca light, and we copped (or is it popped?) a squat in front of a shoe store. The caramel with which the girl had filled the churros seemed to have mysteriously vanished. And they were cooler than I would’ve liked. But they were still yummy. So far, so good. The only minor let down at this point had been the early dismissal (and considering how hungry Ashley was after leaving an hour early, I imagine we would’ve had to have eaten something along the way or forgone the walk to La Lomita). Everything else had been a smash hit.
We decided against stopping at either church (I mean, a church is a church I a church, right?), and boarded the bus for Forum- the mall.