Gto, Mexico

Guanajuato is a village of hills, brightly-colored houses and winding stone streets. Old tunnels stretch the length of the town, under and through, remnants of mining days. There are big beautiful churches, cafés, and courtyard after glorious courtyard. Plaza after plaza with water fountains, flowers and trees. There are mariachi bands, sans horns as far as I’ve heard, that play in the main plaza downtown, but it’s not super touristy. Not in the way Mazatlan was. It feels more like a few visitors in a very tight community. There are always people out and about. At 10pm people roam the streets, some stores are still open at that hour, so there’s shopping, or people just going out to be social. The bars get going around 11pm and they get packed. There’s one in particular that’s called Bar Fly. They’ve got this art nouveau/recycling symbol logo that I like. They play great music, modern reggaton and in the back room they have live music some nights, more traditional danceable stuff. And people dance with each other. I love that about Latin cultures, so many of them have partner dance as something people still naturally do.
And the people here are friendly and warm. They are tolerant as I struggle pathetically to communicate in my limited Spanish, and even those who speak English don’t automatically jump to it. It seems they like letting you figure out how to say it in Spanish, which is great. In France, people were so much less patient and often spoke English as soon as I said “bonjour.”
The air here is thick with auto exhaust, and it doesn’t feel like a mountain town in the way Ashland or Tahoe does. There is no fresh mountain air, but the weather is sunny and warm. The nights are chilly, but totally tolerable. And with the amount of walking I’ve been doing, I’ve hardly noticed. EVERYTHING is either up or downhill. I'm staying up on a hill in the neighborhood called the Embajadores, one of many hill neighborhoods where the homes are built into the rock and cemented there amidst small gardens and trees. There are few yards, most homes having doors right off the stone walkway that winds through the ‘hood. There are kids that play right outside the door, and just about every morning, starting around 7:30 or so, guys selling tanks of natural gas for heating and cooking start walking through saying ‘guuuuhhhas” “guuuuuuuhhhas” in a very loud upwardly rising pitch. It’s great if you need gas, but not so conducive to sleeping in. I did negotiate a tank of it for the apartment right after I got here, which was challenging.
It began with me locking myself out of the apartment. I didn’t realize that as soon as you walked out the door, it would swing shut, locking behind you. So, when I heard the gas guy, I ran out to let him know I needed a tank, and the door closed. It was like a slow motion “noooooo!” Fortunately, I had opened the window, and my key was sitting on the table inside. So, in my socks and pajamas, I walked around until I found a stick long enough to reach the key. I pulled myself up onto the ledge outside the window, by the window bars, and angled the stick into the ring holding the key. I was so glad that no one came by, I had since thanked the gas guy for not laughing and said “later.” But I wasn’t about to sit on the stoop and wait for the neighbor, nor was I excited to roam the town in socks and bed-head. After I retrieved the key, the gas guy came back by a few minutes later and ran, seriously, ran a tank up the hill for me. These are 4 foot tanks full of natural gas, and this guy is running it up a very steep hill. It’s impressive. There are guys who do the same with big (water-cooler sized) jugs of water as well. There was some question he had about the gas hookup, or something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I just hoped nothing would explode.

I’ve spent the better part of my first few days here wandering the streets, checking out the stores, getting groceries and sitting in a café or the main square where I can get a pretty good internet signal and doing some research for grad school apps. It’s a little more difficult than I thought it would be to find articles online by the profs I’m interested in studying with, but I’ve found some.
Oh, and there are cannons fired off at random. Because of the holiday time, there have been extra firings and festivities. There was Día de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe the other day, and all the kids dressed in traditional clothes, the boys with bandanas tied round their heads and little fake mustaches drawn on their faces. There’s generally a kind of dull din or noise happening most of the time. At night, the birds in the trees along the main road at the bottom of the Embajadores squeak and squawk loud enough to hear it up here. It’s actually kinda cool. Another neat thing about the neighborhood is that from the outside, it’s hard to tell what the inside of each place is like. There’s generally a small door in a stone wall, perhaps a gate to a tiny courtyard and then a door, but when you get a chance to peer in, some of these places are beautifully furnished with tapestries and rugs and plants. Lots of character to every aspect of this place. Under the trees with the birds at the bottom of the hill is an outdoor marketplace where you can get fresh fruit in cups, fresh baked rolls (freaking delicious) just-made tortillas and a host of other things. From pirated DVDs and CDs to tchotchkes of all kinds, there are temporary stalls there just about every day. I’ve seen a few stalls with hang-woven scarves and traditional looking clothes too, but mostly it’s inexpensive trinkets. There’s a big market further downtown in a big hangar with awesome food stands, produce, dairy, spices, meats and groceries, as well as gifty things and clothing. I haven’t eaten at any of the street stalls, just trying to play it a bit safe, but they all smell so good. My first day here I went to this awesome little café and ate the best chicken mole ever. And the café has so much personality, warm red interior with pictures, masks and little things hanging all over the walls. As with any good trip, there are certain things I’m sure I won’t find anywhere else, so I’m enjoying them to the fullest while I’m here. I’ve had a couple of really fun nights out with friends, I actually had a bit of conversation in Spanish – mostly listening – and met a French girl at a bbq who’s in Gto studying Spanish, but mostly hanging out. My French is totally mixed in with the Spanish at this point. I remember quite a bit of Español to my surprise, but not how to conjugate verbs in any tense except the present. I tried to slip back into French, but it just wasn’t happening. Sophie (French girl) was the most understandable person here so far though. I got most of what she said in Spanish to my surprise. The bbq preparations were my sister’s worst nightmare. There was raw chorizo being cut next to the vegetables that went, raw, into the guacamole. I had fortunately brought some chips and managed to swipe some avocado unsoiled by the cutting board, which had probably not been washed since the last use. It wouldn’t matter if I knew I could tolerate it, but I think I lack the bacteria in my guts to deal. The people at Bar Fly (bbq location) are the tattooed, dread-y, pierced kind and for the most part very friendly. They even seem to understand me with my partially mimed communications. They say hey to me on the street when I’m walking around solo, and their preferred word is “chido,” which means, simultaneously or not, “cool,” “hi,” “later,” and probably a few other things as well. Today, while eating lunch, one of the gang came by and was talking with me, and eating a bag of Cheetos. I had to suppress giggles at the use of “chido” and the eating of Cheetos all at once. The guy did not grasp the irony.


I can already feel Guanajuato romanticizing itself in my mind. The streets, the people, the sun and the colors. There are several paintings being sold in the main square that I would happily take home with me. Gto is one of those places where it’s difficult to take a bad picture – due to the light and everything else just mentioned – and it’s easy to capture in paint without seeming overdone.

Back to the apartment in Gto. There’s a water heater that must be heated with gas, and it’s a 30 minute process, which some of the time, does not end in a hot shower. It’s actually easier to boil water on the stove and take a “whore’s bath” than it is to get the shower going. Apparently there are scorpions that will crawl into your bags and shoes if you leave them on the floor, but I have yet to see one, thank god. The walls inside are teal colored – which I like, they need red though, like tapestries or curtains. The only thing is that it’s cold all the time. Even when it’s 75 outside, it’s 65 inside. It makes it difficult to motivate. But that is the only thing that really bugs. It’s easy to deal with inconveniences when you’re on vacation. If I had to function as a student, I’m not sure I could live there.

Last night I went down to one of the plazas and saw a traditional pageant (are there any other kind?) and was a little surprised to see little girls in devil costumes as part of the show, just following the nativity scene. I wished I’d had a translator with me, as I wondered what it all had to do with the birth of Jesus, but couldn’t make it out. It had started out so nicely with the nativity and the wise men and all, and a few minutes later, there’s Satan… everyone watching thought this was hilarious. Something in me cringed at the idea of pairing the prince of darkness with the birth of Jesus, but everyone else seemed entertained.