Guanajuato!

Here are the highlights of my weekend in Guanajuato:

FRIDAY (2/26)
We left CEPE around 11am and none of us went to our first class, again. Cassandra rented a small SUV with a driver for us, so the drive only took like 3.5 hours. I have a feeling if we’d taken the bus it would have been more like 5 hours.

Guanajuato is such a cute, European-type city! It was one of the richest cities during Spanish rule in Mexico due to the productivity of the nearby silver mines. The city is protected by the government so the outsides of all the buildings have to remain the same and there are no neon signs anywhere. The cobblestone streets were narrow and lined with colorful buildings all jammed together. The city is nestled in a small valley, so the residential areas stretch up into the hills, dotting the hillside with all the colors of the rainbow, which reminded me of areas of San Francisco. Our hotel was right in the middle of everything, next to the Teatro Juarez, the original cathedral, and a cute town square. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that Guanajuato was some sort of Disneyland version of Mexico, it was that pristine.

After getting settled into our hotel, Elan, Nikiya, and I went out exploring the winding streets, looking for lunch. We ate at a café in a “busy” intersection in front of the big cathedral. After lunch we decided to attempt climbing up one of white crosses mounted on the top of one of the hills surrounding the city to get a good view from above. We just headed up a street near the café and kept walking up. It turned out that the cross was much farther than we had anticipated and none of us were very prepared for the long trek. We did, however, get to walk through some of the picturesque residential neighborhoods above the city. I took a lot of pictures. The whole thing was a little unorthodox (I don’t think the residents were used to seeing gringos in their neighborhood) and beautiful. I love a good spur of the moment decision. Once we came down the hill we explored the streets some more and then went back to the hotel for some rest.

We all met up with Cassandra for dinner at the restaurant next to Teatro Juarez. I had enchiladas with green sauce and we sat there for a long time. Afterwards Elan showed Nikiya and I an Irish pub he found and we got a few beers before turning in for an early night.

SATURDAY (2/27)
We met for a tour of the city (in Spanish) at 10am, or we were supposed to. This whole trip ran at least an hour late, but I didn’t mind. I’d like to say I could understand everything our guide was saying but I had to ask Cassandra for a lot of translations. We started at the Teatro Juarez, named for the President of Mexico in the late 1800s that funded several theaters all over Mexico. There’s a Teatro Juarez in Guadalajara too. We went all over the city including the childhood home of Diego Rivera and the Alhondiga where the Mexican revolution began in 1810. Both are now museums.

Diego Rivera’s house is a deceptively large museum full of his work, which varied tremendously through his life. One room would be cubist and the next would look like Aztec drawings and the next would be realistic portraits. It was really interesting to see how much one artist can change in a lifetime.

The Alhondiga is the building where all the Spanish fled when Mexican revolutionaries, lead by Father Miguel Hidalgo, stormed the city on September 16, 1810. The Spanish locked themselves inside this storehouse and shot at any Mexicans who got close. Finally, one man strapped a rock to his back to protect against the gunfire and carried a torch to the giant wood door and set it on fire. Once the door had burned down, the revolutionaries swarmed into the building and killed everyone inside. This is what Mexico celebrates on their Independence Day every September 16th. This year is the bicentennial so the party’s going to be big! Now, the Alhondiga is the second most important museum in Mexico and houses artifacts from the pre-colonial period all the way up to independence and onward.

After our tour we got lunch in this really cute square that we hadn’t found in our exploration of the city the day before. It was protected from the street, surrounded by buildings, and lined with restaurants on all sides. The meal I ordered was three courses and it took about 2.5 hours to get through lunch. No one else ordered as much as me so it felt like we were just sitting there for most of the time. It was really good though: tortilla soup, steak in really spicy sauce, and chocolate ice cream!

After lunch Nikiya and I took a taxi to the Mummy Museum a little outside the city. The mummies of Guanajuato are odd because they are unintentional and the circumstances which lead them to be put on display are equally strange. In the 1840s the government started taxing the people for their cemetery plots, and if the family didn’t pay for three years the body was exhumed. It was only when they started exhuming bodies that the people of Guanajuato discovered that the natural elements of the soil created accidental mummies. These mummies were put on display in the museum and started drawing tourists in the 1850s.

A lot of them still have clothes, hair, skin, everything. I was pretty creeped out the whole time but Nikiya loved it. She even bought a key chain replica of the smallest mummy on earth (a tiny little baby on display with its mom). The only interesting part to me was that some of the mummies had their life (and death) stories posted next to them. We were both a little disappointed by the exhibit because we had heard that there were 119 mummies but we only saw maybe 40. It only took us half an hour to get through the whole thing, so we decided to kill time by walking back. On the way back we went into the Mercado Hidalgo, a smaller version of the market San Juan de Dios in Guadalajara. We wandered around for a few hours, taking our time to get back and browsing the stores, and met Elan to take a look inside Teatro Juarez. It’s a beautiful Greek-style building on the outside that reminded me of a smaller version of the Paris opera house on the inside. It was really very pretty, but most of the building was blocked off so we could only see the theater and one of the salons upstairs.

After that Nikiya and I went back to our room and Elan went off exploring by himself again. He came by around 9 and we all went in search of pizza. We found a pretty ghetto place in the same little square we’d had lunch in and each got little pizzas. I have fun with these guys.

After dinner we were supposed to meet Cassandra at the karaoke bar across the street from our hotel but we wanted to wander around a bit first. We wandered into a bar called Why Not? because, why not? There was some sort of birthday party going on inside and we struck up a conversation with some of the people there. One guy, who must have been pretty drunk at this point, kept calling me and Nikiya “gringas” which got old, but the rest of the people were nice. Cassandra started texting me so we decided to leave and meet up with her. I was reluctant to go because Why Not? was really fun, but oh well. The first bar we went into with her had a very loud live band and we were seated right in front of them. I couldn’t hear anything so I got a little grumpy. Then we went to check out the karaoke bar but there weren’t any songs in English. It seemed like all the songs were equivalents of Elvis or Britney Spears or Journey as far as the enthusiasm in singing along. Cassandra and Nikiya sang a Julietta Venegas song, “Me Voy,” and by the time they finally got to go it was like 1 am the bar was pretty much empty.

SUNDAY (2/28)
We had breakfast around 10 and left the hotel for San Miguel de Allende about an hour behind schedule. This, only to find out that our driver had left the headlights on and the car was out of batteries. He didn’t have jump cables so we had to sit around for another half hour while he went in search of cables. He got one taxi driver who claimed to have cables but apparently he didn’t. What a weird thing to lie about. Elan said he hit another car as he was leaving the parking lot too. Our driver eventually found another taxi with jump cables and we were on our way.

San Miguel de Allende is another colonial town about an hour east of Guanajuato. I learned today that it’s also the home town of Miguel Hidalgo (the priest that led revolutionaries to Guanajuato in 1810). In a lot of ways I like San Miguel de Allende better because it wasn’t as pristine as Guanajuato. It looked like people actually lived there but at the same time it felt like stepping back in time, not like stepping into Disneyland. It had the prettiest church I’ve seen in Mexico so far and several lush, green town squares which were full of people because it was Sunday. There was a big market that had a lot of really good little shops. Their specialty seemed to be metal work which makes sense since that area made its money from the silver mines back in colonial times and still. I bought myself a cute little ring for my left pinky. I had never found a ring I felt like I could wear every day before, so when the woman said it was 120 pesos and I only had 140 left I still felt like I had to have it. This turned out to be a big mistake because I still hadn’t eaten lunch. Cassandra offered to pay for me so we went to a place inside the market and had some delicious chicken tacos for 30 pesos. It turned out she owed me money for going to the Mummy Museum so it all evened out in the end.

After lunch we wandered around the city for half an hour or so. I wish we’d had more time and that I’d had more money, but so goes life.