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University
The new university buildings Guanajuato Guanajuato is without a doubt the most beautiful city in Mexico, built in a shallow but steep-sided valley, the city is built up the sides of the hills. It is also the first town I´ve visited here in Mexico (and almost the first in whole of Latin America) not to be built on the traditinal Spanish grid system, so Anne and I spent some of our time here just getting lost in the miles and miles of gorgeous little back-alleys all complete with steps, high walls and lovely views over the city. The city is full of lovely little plazas and wide but winding tree-lined streets, the atmosphere only slightly tainted by the traffic which whizzes around the town all day and into the night belching out the traditional Mexican fumes, really the only stain on the beautiful city-scape. Whever there is a break in the traffic I like to image the next vehical coming around the corner is a horse and cart or an old fashioned bicycle and the picture of the perfect mountain town really is complete.
One of the most interesting features of the town however is the attempted solution to this traffic nightmare: miles
Guanajuato
The view from the hill overlooking the town. of under-ground, 2-laned carriageways which carry all the traffic across town, including the buses. According to Anne's guidebook, the tunnels originally formed part of the city's protection system against flooding, carrying the river, and our taxi driver told us that the modern road system was started in 1982 but new tunnels are still being built. The ceiling is suported by both stone and wooden arches and cross-bracing stone and concrete butresses and they cut not only through the mountains but right under the city too. Inside the tunnels the cars race at Mexican-speed with liberal use of headlights for the obscurity while those waiting at the underground busstops just have keep thier fingers crossed that the bus will arrive before Carbonmonoxide poisening, but they really are an excellent engineering solution to the problem of getting people around town.
Among the highlights of the city were the Teatro Juarez an amazing old horse-shoe style theatre inside and built in the Greek classical style outside and the Hidalgo Market building, housed in a traditional arch-based, station-style building, it was here we bought the vegetables to make our dinner in the hostel. he new university building is a modern building which was
Kissing Balconies
Callejón de besos originally considered an eyesore, but is now widely accepted as an example of fitting the new into the old and it´s hard to imagine the city without the rampart-style skyline. We also went to Callejón de Besos, the narrowist street in Mexico (alledgedly) where, in the late 19th century, a pair of lovers prevented from seeing each other exchanged kisses across the balconies between the huses which nearly touch, before her father found out and killed her (good solution mate?!).
We took the cable car up the hill side to the monument which overlooks the town where there were amazing views right over the city. The buildings are so colourful and make the city look even more beautiful from above, it reminded me of flying into Quito in Ecuador when my journeys began 7 months ago. We also went to the Guanajuato legends museum - a terrible collection of fake-looking tableaus depicting local legends with incomprehensible Spanish commentry. Anne and I laughed our way through the 45 minutes of what would otherwise have been agony.
I decided to give the mummy museum a miss as I had seen more than a life-time´s worth of them in Peru but
Tunnels
The road tunnels under the city Anne headed there to have a look and said it was "interesting". Well that´s about that then really.
On the more successful side of museum visits we went to the Don Quixote Iconography museum and the Diego Rivera Museum. Don Quixote (pronouced Don key-hotty) is important to this town, which every October holds the annual Cervantine festival, celebrating all the works of famous Spanish author Miguel de Cevantes. I was disappointed that we would not be here to see the festival, but signs of the town's links with the works can be seen in the may Quixotic statues found accross town. The museum, while small, was full of paintings, scultures and other Don Quixote artifacts and has really mtivated me to start reading my new copy of the original text that I´ve just bought under recomendation from Guillermo, my friend in Chile. he Diego Rivera museum was also interesting but it is all just art to me really, nice but I can´t pretend to understand it all.
One of the nicest things about this city is the music. Music is everywhere. In the evenings we walked around and watched the wondering musicians, who do a musical tour of
Don Q and me
Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and Charlotte in Guanajuato the city if you´re daft enough to pay for it or a free show if you do the wondering to find them. It´s a neat idea though and everyone did seemt get a free piece of random Spanish pottery in way of a ticket (?).
San Miguel de Allende We took a day trip from Guanajuato to the nearby town of San Miguel to Allende, a pretty but small town about 50km from Guanajuato. We looked around the buildings of the town and did a bit of souvenir shopping in the artesan markets. We also spent some time the lovely park until it started to rain. Back in the centre, a group of quite old ladies were doing a traditional dance shw and getting wet while guys in some sort of old unifrom wondered around on horses which were behaving very well dispite the massive thunder claps and lightning which were making everyone else in the square jump like rabbits. Overall though a nice afternoon.
Unfortunately, the day trip was slightly marred by our retun journey. After seeing all we wanted to see we waited in the rain for 2 hours to catch the bus back,
Teatro Juarez
The theatre in Guanajuato in which we then spent 2 hours sitting still on the road behind what looked like a terrible accident. The most frustrating thing being that when we finally drove off we can´t have been more than a 10 minute walk from Guanajuato´s bus statin anyway, oh well, at least we got to the see the end of the film. A taxi driver at the station then refused to take us after we asked to see his ID before getting the cab, making out like he was really offended and saying that he wasn´t accustommed to robbing women, right... so we had no trouble getting into another taxi then with a normal driver!
Now we´re back in Guadalajara after another long weekend on the buses, quite pleased we´re not going anywhere special next weekend and thank goodness we only have another 3 day week (4th in a row!).
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