So...a few months later I will finally finish our story of going to Mexico. So our last weekend we spent in Queretaro with Ricardo's family and his uncle, aunt, and cousins. It was kinda cool because Ricardo hadn't seen his uncle's family for maybe 19 years or so. We had a really fun weekend. When we got to their lovely home we had a nice lunch with Ana Laura and Mariana, who are Ricardo's cousins who he also hadn't seen for a long time. I thought it was really amazing how many fruit trees they have in their yard too. That evening aunt Lulu and Uncle Arturo took us to see the city. We saw the huge aqueducts that were built by the Spanish. I forget the names, but I guess a spanish Lord fell in love with a nun from Queretaro who ran an orphanage (if I remember right). Queretaro is quite a distance from any real source of water, so she told him that she would not take her vows and would marry him if he would build an aqueduct to get water to her orphanage. Well, he built these grand aqueducts, which can still be seen today, and as for the nun--well, she stayed a content nun the rest of her life :) I really enjoyed seeing the aqueducts. The city had a very different feel from Mexico City. We saw several old churches, each one had its stories. The streets there are very narrow and there are hardly any stoplights because they try to preserve the original look of the city. It is very beautiful and quaint, and people really seem to live a slower pace of life there. When you reach the city center there are outdoor restaurants with bands and mariachis playing, and local craftsman selling their mexican dolls and the like. They even had a frog exibit, which was quite funny. My favorite frog was one that was dressed like the angel of independence that is downtown in mexico city--but of course it was a frog :) I loved the crafts and couldn't help but bring a few home with me :)
We had a very fun dinner that night at a restaurant in the city. Lulu and Arturo's family was all there, including his daughter's Mariana and Ana Laura, and Ana's husband Carlos. We really just laughed a lot during the dinner and that was really fun. I forget how this conversation came up, but while Ricardo was in the bathroom, we started talking about who was going to have the first baby out of the cousins that had gotten married within a couple of years of each other (Ana, Alejandra, or us). Well, evidently Carlos is from a large family and he wants to have I think 8 or so kids. So I was telling him that I came from a big family and had also wanted to have several children. The funny thing is that Carlos kind of teases Ana, his wife, about it because she really doesn't want that many kids. He seemed to be doing so well at persuading Ana that I asked him if he could maybe have a talk with Ricardo :) Ricardo didn't think that was all that funny when he found out. One more humorous thing about the baby talk...well, I guess at Alejandra's wedding or sometime around them, the parents got together and made bets about who was going to have the first baby, and they decided that they were going to pay $700 to whoever had the first baby (yes, american dollars). Well, Ricardo still wasn't convinced that was enough money for him to change his mind about waiting a little bit to have kids. Well then Arturo mentioned that they were thinking about making it $7000! I told him that if they made it $7000 they could choose when we would start, haha. I have to say though...I think Ana and Carlos are going to win the prize ;)