brain crabs

Days One and Two:

The flights were utterly uneventful. But the Leon airport is so small that we disembarked down one of those stairways that they wheel up to the plane.
A fellow at the airport was holding up a sign that read, “Hauptman” so we followed him and the small group of old, Texan, lady tourists to a minibus parked nearby. We drove for about 15 minutes until we reached a gas station at which point, we were joined by two Mexican gentlemen who informed us that the three of us were traveling separately. So, we loaded our luggage into the other car, got in, and were driven off. We had a moment of, “Oh God. We’re going to be abducted and murdered and nobody knows where we are.” However, were were comforted by the fact the one of the men had given us his “Rafael Tours” business cards and the other was snacking on peanut M&Ms. Everyone knows that killers hate M&Ms.
Anyway, we drove for about an hour and a half through some of the most beautiful country that I’ve seen in a while. We rode almost entirely in silence due to the fact that not only were we completely exhausted but we didn’t know enough conversational Spanish to make small talk with the driver.
It was a relief to arrive.
In San Miguel de Allende, we were met by Kate, who’s renting us the apartment and lives downstairs. She gave us a map, the keys, and brief introduction. We unpacked, rested, and then went and got a feel for the town. The terrain of San Miguel is as extreme as San Francisco but the streets aren’t nearly as well paved. It’s mostly cobblestone with little to no sidewalk. The town is a web of narrow, winding, steep little streets. When cars drive by, going down hill, you can smell their brakes heating and burning. Going up hill, you can smell their tires burning as they try grip the stones. Most streets are subtly and discretely marked, if at all. Nothing here looks new, at least on the exterior. Convenience stores, internet cafes, restaurants, and markets look like squatters in the husks of these old buildings. The facades of nearly every building seem to be uniformly decayed, in a gentle way that seems deliberate and photogenic, as if someone had built their ideal Mexican town from scratch. The town seems to have accumulated gradually in this location and the buildings are encased in a sediment of history and use. Electrical cables, phone lines, and gas meters stand out as slapdash additions to these structures. They’re obvious scars and accessories that are only now beginning to blend in with their parent structures as they wear and rust accordingly.
That evening, we went out for a quick dinner at the first place that looked good (dinner for three at a place that was nice by any standard only cost us 250 pesos -divide by ten to convert to dollars-) and picked up a few necessities at the nearby store (bread, eggs, cheese, and beer -Corona, of course. Driving through Mexico, about a third of the buildings we passed had huge, hand-painted signs emblazoned on the faces of the Corona logo.)
When we got back home, we hung out on the roof-deck and drank our beers, watching the sunset, grateful that we didn’t have to travel any more.
I watched a little TV before I went to sleep. Alien Resurrection was on.

When we woke up, we made eggs and toast for breakfast, making our plan for the day that we would buy some groceries to have around the apartment. So, we meandered around town with a vague idea of where the markets were. We found a large indoor market and the first stall we stopped at was a fruits and vegetables stall run by a single little old lady. We were able to communicate our needs successfully. We got avocados, tomatoes, bananas, cucumber, peppers, limes, spinach a mango, and a nice plastic mesh bag (with an image of the Virgin Mary on it, of course) to carry our groceries in. All in all, it only cost 70 pesos. At a nearby supermarket, we bought some salsa, beans and butter. We found a place that makes tortillas on the premises, watched them roll off the conveyor belt, and they were still hot when we got them home and had them for lunch. After cleaning the veggies in the prescribed manner (soak in a little bleach, etc) we made some guacamole, I cooked some ground beef I had bought, and we had ourselves an enormous, late lunch. It was delicious, to say the least. We just sort of relaxed for the rest of the afternoon.
For dinner, we wandered down into the center of the town and at Kate’s recommendation we ate at a place called Mamma Mia’s. She said that they had good pizza but we were skeptical. Mexican pizza? Anyway, we soon were made believers as it wound up being really tasty. There was live music and we might have been the only people there who didn’t know all the words to all the songs.
When you go out to eat in the States, the bill comes quite promptly. The waiter notices that you’ve finished your meals, clears the table and then immediately brings you the check so you can leave. In Mexico, I’ve noticed, no matter how crowded the restaurant is, it seems as though they expect you to just hang out after you’ve finished. Getting the check from the waiter takes some patience and persistence. It’s a different pace that we’ve got to get used to. It makes me feel like I’m in too much of a hurry.
After dinner, we made our way down to the Instituto but they were having some sort of function and we couldn’t get in. At any rate, we know where it is now and can visit it later. It’s a spectacular place, judging from what we were able to see of its walled in, muraled courtyard. On our way back, we stopped and got a few more beers and drank them on the roof deck when we got home.
Right now, I’m sitting in the central square, looking at the magnificent cathedral using some mystery WIFI connection. The library was closed today, open only to tourists visiting the gardens there.

This entry was posted by jon on Sunday, August 7th, 2005 at 1:14 pm and is filed under personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.