Of Monterrey

The staff photographer found Monterrey uninspiring. The above picture is from south-central Mexico, but these bull billboards appear on highways throughout the country. It's a liquor ad, but it's a fun liquor ad.

Anyway, since your correspondent did not spend much time delving into the beating heart of Monterrey, there were only two things (barely) worth noting there: the lodging and the food.

The hotel where we had reservation told us at 3:00 or so, when we arrived, that they did have our reservation, but that our room would be ready at 7:00 that evening because at present someone else was still using it. Which would not at all be a surprise at any number of flea-trap hotels we've stayed at in Latin America. While this hotel wasn't "nice" by any American definition, it was a central hotel in one of the major business centers of Mexico. The guy at the desk seemed mostly uninterested in explanations of how "reservations" typically work. Anyway, for some reason we didn't want to just leave all our stuff in our car on the street until 7:00 that night, we wound up at a Holiday Inn.

We wandered a bit on Monterrey's downtown pedestrian mall, looked at their big central park, and then went to dinner at a hotel recommended for its local specialties by the Holiday Inn concierge (of sorts). The restaurant met our basic requirement for air conditioning, and added a tex-mex flair by providing a bowl of chips and salsa as soon as we sat down. It turns out that the local specialty is goat. Not a particularly flavorful goat, just goat, cooked over coals, in a kitchen that was not open to the restaurant but did have large windows on the street in case you wanted to step outside and see how your goat was coming along. Anyway, if you're in Mexico, it seems it wouldn't take much effort to find somewhere a lot more interesting than Monterrey, (for example, anywhere else) but if you're in Monterrey, don't bother with the goat.