Thursday

. . . . This morning before leaving for work Natalia and I were talking about Ricardo, the man who had introduced me to her originally via the internet. I mentioned that I had not yet met him and wished to, I asked if she had his phone number and she immediately phoned him. He had no plans for today and offered to come by and pick me up. I told him I had no particular place I wanted to see so he took it from there. He was here with his van at 10am and were gone all day. We were never more than 20 miles from town but we visited several places he enjoys showing people, one of them was a Tequila Factory out in the sticks at the end of a dirt road. They even grew a lot of their own cactus in the nearby fields. I was offered a shot of their poison and said yes. Ricardo said to take a deep breath and swallow the whole shot at a gulp. I did and the stuff sucks. It is no good as a sipping drink either. Later Ricardo showed me two different farms where fighting chickens were raised, very large fields, out in the open where each chicken is leashed to his own little plastic A frame. The leash keeps them from getting near each other because when they do one of them has to die [by the other one]. They kill each other on sight.  I have added pictures to my collection and putting it all together for YouTube presentation is going to be a lot of fun. The two Cities we visited were El Quelite and El Lenora. At the moment I am not certain about the correct spelling of the latter. . . . We were back about 4:30 and after paying him the requested fee I lay down to read. I awoke at 6:30. It was a fine day to be seeing the country. I had asked Ricardo about the cost of renting a joy ride in a small plane to see the city from the air and he said he would get back to me on that. I have since changed my mind because taxi to the airport is about $50us on top of the flight expenses. Tax time is coming around soon and I am afraid I will be paying enough there next month. Natalia arrived at 6:45 with two bags of groceries and an appetite. I started work on my blog while she fed herself dinner. It was a long day. Natalia had forgotten Coffee so she left for the market one more time.