The Journey Here

The good news is that, with the time change, the first leg of the flight was only 3 hours. We each slept a little, but not well. We were two of maybe three or four non-Mexican nationals on the flight. One flight attendant remarked on it, “Going on vacations? We don’t see many Americans on this flight. Most just go to the beaches. Well the beaches are nice, too.”

Arriving in our stop in Zacatecas, we disembarked to go through immigration. Two employees handed out another form to fill out, this one only in Spanish. It was something I was used to seeing, though, after visiting baby Eitan in the hospital various times: Are you experiencing any of these symptoms: fever, cough, aching joints, etc. I helped an American woman on her way to San Miguel with the Spanish. Then we all herded up in front of two men, one who gathered our forms and the other who, I do not kid, taking each person’s temperature! He had an instant read ear thermometer and disinfectant wipes. He then reported the temperature to the man who collected the forms who wrote it on the form. Peter and I both had 34.2C. I don’t think I saw anyone get stopped based on their temperature, but I wonder what they do if you have a fever?

Taxi to Guanajuato, where we were dropped off many stairs up from our hostel (Gto is made up of many callejones, or alleys, many of them stairs because it is also built into a basin). The driver helped us with our baggage (I had essentially insisted that he call the hostel for directions to get to the street above the hostel rather than climb the 156 steps from below) and a hotel employee met us and helped also – wheeled suitcases are useless in this kind of situation. (Peter suspects that the combination of heavy bags and all those step would have been our doom. DOOM!)

We were welcomed in to breakfast, where the cook (perhaps owner?) gave us gorgeous plates of fruit and mugs of café de olla (coffee brewed in a ceramic pot with spices and often orange peel), and then made us chilequiles. Delicioso. We climbed up some more stairs to our shared dorm room, and were nearly falling over with exhaustion when Peter couldn’t find his Ipod touch. We retraced our steps and I went downstairs to call the taxi company while he walked up all the steps again to look around where we got out. The taxi driver found it and we paid for it to ride the taxi back to our hotel. Finally, some sleep.

Final destination analysis: Sheesh, these stairs! Also, a guy from Spain who was at breakfast said that last winter in Gto was cold and we should consider someplace warmer, maybe a beach. The different colored houses up on the hills are pretty. Lugging your suitcases around always makes for a bad first impression and we have not been to the center at all yet.

Random bits:
• Ran into a former student, Ras, who works at Oakland airport.
• Enjoyed counting the hats on some of the men on the flight – best way to transport your cowboy hat and your giant wool felt mariachi sombrero is to stack them up and wear or carry them.
• One woman at breakfast who was leaving today grew up in San Leandro.
• The view from our hotel includes a baseball diamond.

Peter’s addendum: After sleeping the morning away, we walked down the 156 steps and a mile or so into the town center. Narrow sidewalks line cobblestone streets. Old and sometimes nearly crumbling walls rose up on either side, stone houses lining the tops. I believe the streets here were built in old riverbeds. Including underground, but more on that in a moment. Guanajuato, though infested with Peter’s natural enemies (stairs), is charming. Pedestrian streets lined with shops open up onto plazas and gorgeous buildings. The Centro is modestly sized. Guanajuato is not a large town, with somewhere around 70,000 people. The sidewalks are packed with people in town for the Cervantino. There were street musicians selling tickets for musical tours of the town. We ate dinner in a coffee house/restaurant called Truca 7, which is also the address of the establishment. We had tortilla soup, Juliet had flautas and I had enchiladas in a chocolatey mole sauce. The soup was one of the best tortilla soups we’ve tasted. The broth was dark and rich and the tortillas were nice and crispy. The mole was pretty good, but had a burnt flavor that wasn’t too exciting. Juliet seemed pleased with hers. A three-dollar taxi ride up to our hostel completed Day One of our trip.

What made this evening seem like an adventure:

• Sat down at the edge of the town center to get our bearings. While we were there, 5 or 6 men and women walked by in a line, dressed in old suits or traveling clothes, all carrying suitcases in the same hands. We looked at them, looked at each other, and decided to follow them. Turns out we weren’t the only ones – they had a small crowd trailing them, though nobody seemed to know where they were going. We only got a few feet – they headed into a house. Some of the people ahead of us called out to them, but nobody went in. One woman near me said in Spanish, “What do we do now?” and a young man said, looking at us, “Now we’re all tourists.” The nearby police were also interested in the phenomenon: “Artists?”

• Stopped in a Paleteria (popsicle shop). Of the flavors listed on the poster, there were two I didn’t understand: Grosella and Zapote. The man started pointing out different flavors in the case, and in the end, Peter decided on Grosella and I decided to try Zapote. After we had them in hand, we asked what they were. The man said Grosella is like raspberries. Zapotes, he said, are a large black fruit that grows on a tree. Later, I looked them up in my dictionary, but only found grosella: red currant. Just now looked up zapote and found the picture above -- I have seen that before, maybe even tried it -- it is big -- maybe 9 inches top to bottom?

• One town square had clowns performing at either end, with a whole row of living statues nearby.

• The streets were completely packed with revelers. We are too exhausted to truly partake tonight, but maybe tomorrow.

• As we rode back to the hostel, lightning started and now it’s a full storm with some awesome thunder.

Final destination analysis, part 2: Ok, the center is beautiful, vibrant, very walkable. I could live there if I don’t have to climb the stairs too much.