Guanajuato State

The city of Guanajuato itself is located in a ravine.  This means it is very vertically built, with lots of little winding alley-ways and tunnels for the cars.  The disadvantages of living here would be high rent, lots of tourists clogging the streets and no parking.  However as a visitor it was gorgeous though it looked straight out of Castille or Italy.  The network of tunnels snaking through the town and allowing access to the outside world were different though and definitely enhanced the idea of being transported to somewhere different.

Of course there was the very pretty and unreasonably numerous collection of churches, which seemed to have one cathedral per architectural fad.  As the location of the Cervantino, there is a definite Don Quixote theme; statues, T-shirts, bumper stickers, murals.  There is also a museum of Don Quixote iconography from paintings by Picasso and Dali, to pottery, chess sets (which J loved) and statues.  There were hundreds of them, from all over the world and all different cultures.  Some had replaced the windmill with a mushroom cloud, in one he led the refugees of the Spanish Civil War seeking a home.  It was amazing how big a symbol he has been to so many people.  And while the literature that Cervantes was satirising has largely not survived (at least not for popular audiences) Don Quixote has and has transcended that simple understanding to be reworked as a character and set of values in times and cultures far beyond the text.  Also it was free as it was Tuesday so that was great too.

In the evening our couchsurf offered to take us to Leon which is a much larger city nearby, and where he had lived until recently.  He had a friend we could stay with who was coming back to Guanajuato on Thursday.  He felt we had missed several things in Leon so we set off there.  We met his friend, who although she spoke a little bit of English, it was a great chance (and easier) for J to speak Spanish.  This was great as we are trying to learn Spanish and when people speak fluent English it's just much easier to do so, so these opportunities are a good thing.  Also, she (well, her dog) currently has a litter of ADORABLE puppies.

In the morning we wandered around the downtown of Leon, where there was a really cool art centre running all sorts of open classes and hosting local exhibits.  We also went the University Library, which while very large, had surprisingly few books in it given the space available.  But libraries don't hold books these days, they are rather Institute status symbols.

However there was a really good museum nearby, which had lots of interesting bits from the importance of food in Meso-American cultures, to mining in the region (Guanajuato supplied a third of the world's silver in the 18th century), to showing local examples of the architecture of different political periods (Colonial to Independence to Revolution).  During our walking around, we crossed a bridge over the large motorway running through Leon, where there's a cute local thing of couples putting their names on padlocks and attaching it to chains that run along the top of the walkway.  There were scores of them all the way along.

Thursday we knuckled down the difficult and serious task our couchsurf (back in Guanajuato) had set us; that is, of eating lots of tasty local food.  So we had bombas, which are diced pineapple and cucumber and jicama (which is very juicy and tasty), along with lots of fresh lime juice, (optional) dash of chilli powder and crisps and cheese on top.  This was followed by tequila ice-cream for J and rumpope (an egg-nog-like drink apparently drank on Day of the Dead) ice-cream for C.  Yay-ness all round.  We returned back to Guanajuato in the evening and chilled out in one of the squares, people watching and making flowers.  There was much to see as the city is heaving for the festival with all kinds of street theatre and music on each corner.  We chatted for a while with a guy from Honduras, who possessed a fine looking drum.  He told us we'd love Honduras as it is very pretty.  Also that many people there watch the Scottish football league as two of Celtic's players are Honduran.  Apparently this will assure us of a warm welcome.       

Today was another sunny day so we went out for a hike in the surrounding hills.  It was beautiful and the air was noticably cleaner than it has been in the cities, over the last week or so, we've both felt like we are getting the start of a cold a lot of the time and our mucus has been a little bit on the bloody side.  Locals tell us this is normal.  In Leon especially the massive factories are a somewhat obvious suspect, people telling us about the very nasty chemicals they have had to work with right in the heart of the city.  Since Mexico City is quite famous for it's pollution we'll see what that's like.

After our hike we went to the Museum of the Mummies, where the dry atmosphere and mineral-rich soil had caused very rapid natural mummification of some of the bodies buried here.  They're pretty interesting and creepy to look at, including little children, often ornately dressed up to give them into the care of particular saints.  Often the mummies have little stories told in the first person on their display case- kind of creepy and playful at the same time.  Mexico is famously cultural obsessed with death, and the museum and the huge, ornate, busy, slightly chaotic cemetery behind it seem to fit in with this.

There's a sense of life and continuance around the cemetery that we've never experienced in Europe.  People here who have also lived in the states say they have definitely noticed a difference too.  Like Europe, America hides the dead and dying and fears them, often culturally killing the old by cutting them out of their lives long before they actually die.  Here, you don't get a chance to do that among all the ceremonies, books, art and brightly painted dancing skeletons.