It was quite hot, around 90, and Lilli needed a drink, so we
found the imaginatively named Black Coffee Collection, where she
had a Coke (no alcohol here). I asked in my wretched Spanish for
a tall iced coffee with cream and sugar - what I got was a coffee
frappe with a shot of vanilla and this extremely thick and sweet
nondairy whipped fat substance. There were a few sips of real
coffee in this. I wouldn't say the stuff lives up to the place's
slogan "best coffee in Mexico," but it's flavorful and good.

After walking around the pedestrian zone east of the cathedral a
bit, I found a place with good smells emanating from it and
insisted we go in, as we hadn't had much to eat. It was really touristy-looking (it's called Chavas 'n Charle's, with the 'n),
with a bouncy castle for kids and a maitre d' who spoke good
English. I inquired about beer, and he showed us upstairs to a
deserted but not unpleasant room with a good breeze; I thought
it showed promise, the smells now wafting upstairs toward us.
Lilli was put off by the fact that the place wasn't packed with
Mexicans, but I trust my nose.

I ordered a torta ahogada de carnitas, which is the local
specialty - a chopped pork sandwich "drowned" in sauce, and an
order of beans on the side. The dish turned out quite an
atypical version, its salsa made with tomatillos and mild green
chile instead of the standard thin red chile solution. The
thing itself was a small crusty torpedo roll with a substantial
amount of good pork loin of which sadly almost all the fat had
been trimmed off, topped with pickled red onion rings, quite
substantially drowned in that tangy but unhot sauce. On the
side there was a lovely hot condiment that as far as I could
tell was salt water and ground quite hot chile and nothing
else; I used a lot of it. The frijoles didn't come.

Even after tasting the food and admitting it was pretty good,
Lilli wouldn't get anything, instead going for two glasses of
LA Cetto, the dominant house red wine in these parts (it's
respectable but forgettable). To be fair, when I'd met her more
than a decade ago, she'd represented herself as getting most of
her calories from wine, with the occasional supplement of red
meat, preferably hamburger or steak. Turns out of course that her
palate, though by no means adventurous, does allow for a
reasonable variety of other foods. But not here, not today.

I asked for a local beer, which they advertise heavily and are
supposed to specialize in, but the waiter claimed they didn't have
any local beer at all, so I had a couple Dos Equis ambers.

By the time I got my food, the place was filling up nicely with
brown people, no other whites, but still she didn't want anything
to eat.

The bill came. The beans weren't charged for, and truth be told
the sandwich was quite filling, as were the two beers. It was
touristy - four drinks and a sandwich, tax and tip, $10.
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