Noche de Muertos

Here is an altar that they made in the old Palacio for Frida. Apparently this year is her 100 anniversary? Birthday? Deathday? Anyway, it is pretty impressive. A little bigger than our humble altar. Or that of our landlady, which we got to go see. We barely ever see her so when she was out watering the other day I stuck my head over the edge and said hey, and how is it and did she make an alter? And she said yes and I asked if we could give her a candle to put on it? And she said sure. And she came up and we showed off ours, because we are very proud of it, and then we went down and saw hers which had the proper three levels and everything, but no walnuts so we said, oh, we have extra of those, do you want some? And she said, Okay, we'll do an exchange and she gave us a bread baby and I went up to get the walnuts and gave her those and then she gave us a sugar skull and then I was afraid to give her anything else because we were going to end up just putting our altar downstairs and hers upstairs.
But it was very nice. I really like her. And it was a good thing Flor, the lady from the school we are going to, told us that you could do that and it was a nice gesture to offer people things. Later than night when we went to Señora Claudia's house she was explaining stuff about her altar to us and I told Flor about it and she said that traditionally people buy enough stuff for their own altars and then have a pile of other stuff that they bring over to relatives houses when they visit. So everybody ends up exchanging gifts.
We also ate tons of sweet things that she had made, like miquatole which looks like white cheese but is really tastes like compressed cream of wheat, hot chocolate with eggyolk bread (chocolate caliente y pan de yema), calabaza en dulce which is pumpkin cooked in a sugar reduction sauce and ends up black and tastes like molasses, arroz con leche (rice pudding) and finally tehocotes which are little apples done up like the pumpkin. And we saw the borlas (red flowers) and sempasuches (marigolds) and all that. It was great. And here is our own little altar. I put Gramma Ines and Gramma Nana and Pop and Gramma Audrey and Grampa Pete and Caddy and Uncle Terry.
After the food we went to the general cemetary (panteón) with Flor and some other students to see her parents. That is where we saw the creepy big grave (pictured above) in the center of the cemetary and the coolest grave I've ever seen, which is the big hand reaching out of the ground. There were some really tasteless ones as well. Then we followed around a couple of street parties where people were dressed in very scary masks and had hired bands and went around dancing and asking for food or mezcal from the houses. It was great.