La Bamba

I’ve spent wonderful ten days in Chihuahua; I met my relatives and friends, did some shopping, visited the beautiful city centre and ate delicious food. I still recall the “gorditas de papa”, they are fried small tortillas made with corn and chili dough and filled with mashed potatoes and topped with shredded cabbage and tomato. For me, one of the best meals you can get in Chihuahua.

The Christmas dinner was sure the culinary highlight in December: For the turkey, Tomás and I prepared two sauces: Real mole and pineapple/ginger marmalade. My aunt Beticho was in charge of the ponche, a typical Mexican winter-drink made out of hibiscus infusion with chunks of guava, prunes, cinnamon and pecan nuts. We added Nicaraguan rum (aged 7 years) to make it taste funnier ;-)

Right after Christmas, we celebrated my grandfather’s 90th birthday with a huge party (over 60 guests!), there I performed a song with my brother, Tomás played the xylophone and I the ukulele.

For those who don’t know my musical side, I have huge difficulties in keeping the right tempo, actually this is major problem if you are a drummer. Well, just picture this situation: My brother and I were on a stage, it was his first performance (in fact he learned to play a song only the night before) and we had no monitors (the loudspeakers used by musicians to hear what they play), and the rule is “No monitors, no idea what you are playing”.
Summarizing it, our version of “La Bamba” was certainly the worst ever played; Tomás did an excellent job, but I failed to keep the rhythm since I was not able to hear neither the xylophone tones nor myself on the ukulele. It was a pity no one filmed it, otherwise my brother and I would be incredibly famous on youtube right now.

After the performance of the “Germes brothers”, we headed home to pack our things. Tita, Tomás and I flew the morning after to Nicaragua.