I stayed for six days in Irapuato in the state of Guanajuato to visit my former fellow student Jan who is working in this town since about a year. It's actually only the third or fourth time we've ever met as we got to know each other through studies in Hong Kong and Japan and just met once more in Stuttgart. At the same time Jan got a visit from his sister Sina and her friend Jannik, who came from Germany. Since Irapuato is an industrial city and has not too much to offer apart from its cuisine, we spent the weekend with day trips to Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende.
In Irapuato we spent most of the time eating very delicious food as Jan knows the best restaurants of the city. We already started with the best quesadillas I've ever eaten. At the restaurant "Quesadillas El Comal" you can cover your quesadillas yourself with all imaginable ingredients. It continued with an excellent steak house (Argentino) over a typical breakfast restaurant to another steak house (Sonora Grill). We fed ourselves quite well. In between we had some strawberries with milk cream, chocolate and eggnog as the region of Irapuato is known as the most famous strawberry producer of Mexico. There were also raspados as snacks in between. This is ice flaked from an ice block, which is then served in the cup together with different fruits and fruit sauces. One evening we had a barbecue with some of Jan's work colleagues. Furthermore we had some premium tacos which were accompanied by a lot of different sauces and which were served not like standard tacos on a plastic plate covered with a plastic bag (saves washing the hard plastic plate), but on Talavera ceramics. Besides, this street restaurant offered us an extra service. Actually there are only soft drinks, but on demand one of the waiters went out and got us beer from the next shop around the corner. On our last evening Jan and I had tacos at "CarWash Tacos". This taco stand is supposed to be a car wash during the day and while we ate our tacos Jan's car was actually washed.
Unfortunately, the gap between rich and poor can be felt very strongly here in the region. Private secured housing units with brand-new houses and villas are closely connected to run-down residential areas. Furthermore, "La Bestia" runs directly through Irapuato. "La Bestia" is the nickname of the freight railroad that links Mexico's southern and northern borders and is used by migrants - primarily Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans - seeking to reach the United States. Every few hours I heared the penetrating horn when one of the trains passed Irapuato. Once, when we were travelling along the railway line by car, I also saw some people jumping on or off the train.
Write a comment