Town of Tequila

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yesterday I met two girls, wendy and ling, and they had already planned to go to the town of tequila, where i had wanted to go sometime or another, so i told them i´d join in. at first we were going to go it alone, take the bus there and then just wander and find a tour. after the hostel staff gave us looks like ´´really are you kidding )no question marks on this keyboard that i can see.... we decided to go on the alberto tour. alberto works at the hostel and gives tours, including transportation, tour, and lunch for 25usd. by this time the group included a japanese guy named akira who speaks hardly any english or spanish, ling from hong kong whose english is good but spanish not so much, wendy who is from boston and speaks english obviously and spanish almost fluently. there was another girl with us from mexico city named carina whose english was spotty. it was fun. about the second we left the hostel we ran into one of alberto´s friends who offered to drive us there in his vw golf (fairly new) so the 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 of us piled on in, screamed (and this is the only way anyone drives here in guadalajara) down the road. we stopped at this roadside stand because alberto was in the trunk at this point and he was worried about the mexican army checkpoint, so he moved to straddling the gearshift up front with me and danny. we drove right through the checkpoint and the traffic cleared up. the landscape reminded me of the obscure parts of california. mountains, lots of blue agave cacti which look like gigantic aloe veras and are related. i´m gonna post pictures and everything of the whole tequila making process an other´s i´ve taken so far tomorrow or the next day when everything is closed and there´s little to do. we toured the Tequila la Colfradia factory. needless to say, it´s an amazing process and it´s incredible to see fields and fields of agave. i learned a lot on the tour and started asking questions our tour guide couldn´t answer about their QA process, so he had to get their chemist to come over and explain how they checked the specific gravity and temperature and then used this chart to find the alcohol content, then dilute it down to meet mexican government regulations. i bought some really amazing shot glasses to give to people later that had agave plants on the inside part. when we left, we went to a restaurant and i got mexican tortas, which are 100% different from mexican'american tortas. they´re like open face sandwiches, but it came with mexican margaritas, again... way different than the american version. apparently there was tequila in it, but it was untasteable. it was pretty much water with lime, a smidge of tequila, and salt on the rim of the glass. tasted good though, cuz i can´t stand water plain. danny had not accompanied us on the tour, so we took the bus home. i fell asleep. now i´m chilling out, in preparation for an excursion out tonite. the hostel staff are partying and listening to mirwais. which is awesome cuz i love that band and i didn´t know they´d heard of them down here. ill check in later

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