Started the year with a nice calm photo walk on a rainy day at my hometown, Tampico, Mexico. My friend Luis Perez picked me up and we went to have the traditional breakfast from Tampico: Torta de la Barda, at the place where the exquisite dish started. I wanted to say legendary, but it’s not that well known across Mexico. But the people who’ve tried it have always loved it.

There is a more well known dish from Tampico, it’s called the Tampiqueña, which is a strip of salted steak (cecina) with enchiladas, black beans and fresh cheese, grilled onions and guacamole, but that’s a dinner dish.

The torta de la barda is typically what you would have after a party very late at night…or early morning. The hot spicy green sauce and the mix of all its ingredients make a great meal to set your stomach after some heavy drinking. Some say that spicy food helps removing your drunkness. I don’t have the science to back that up, but by my experience it does make you more alert.

Anyway, last night we didn’t had any drinks at all, since we’ve both been living out of our hometown we only missed our traditional local food.

After our first stop, we decided to walk around downtown and into the market. It was a gray rainy day but that didn’t stopped us from enjoying Tampico’s downtown.

The variety of fish and seafood in the market are great, you can find anything there. And best of all, is that almost all of it is fresh from that same morning.

So we decided to get some fresh oysters to snack later in the day.

After we got everything we needed for our oyster snack, we walked out of the market and into the two plazas: Plaza Libertad and Plaza de Armas.

At Plaza de Armas we visited “El Globito” an old and now traditional lunch place where you can enjoy a good refreshing drink.

This place brings me back memories of my childhood. My father used to take me to “El Globito” to have a drink called Crema de coco (coconut cream) which is coconut mix with milk and some cinammon on top. It is a very refreshing drink on a hot, sweaty summer day.

We wanted to end our downtown local tour with some Churros, but we were stuffed from the several things we tried around the market after our breakfast, and that coconut cream besides fresh is heavy too, so we were stuffed.

You can see more photos of this photowalk at my Tampico Market Flickr set. It was nice to enjoy my hometown again. I missed shooting some photos of other places in Tampico, but I’ll be back some other time to do that. It’s good to go back to where you came from, get back some memories by visiting places, and see how things have changed since you left. The rain added a bit of melancholy to the whole scenery. A nice way to start a year by going back and reviewing where you come from, where you’ve been and where you want to be in the future.