Hola!

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Thursday 6th April Take Two

Left Fiji at 10pm on Thursday, took a nine and a half hour flight and yet arrived in Los Angeles at 1.30pm on Thursday so get to live the day again! Has taken a while to get my head around the time differences and the fact that I was 13 hours ahead of you guys when in NZ and Fiji, was eight hours behind you in LA and am now six hours behind you while in Mexico. Spent a couple of hours in LA airport phoning and surfing the net to suss out where to go from there. Almost wussed out and flew straight to Cancun as I knew there would be loads of Engligh speaking people there, but decided to brave it and opted for the flight to Guanajuato (just west of Mexico City) instead. It didn't leave until 1am Friday so I had twelve hours to kill in LA airport, but the advantage of it being that I didn't have the hassle of venturing into LA for just one night. The time actually went pretty quickly so it wasn't too bad. Choices of eateries was pretty dire though and so had to resort to my first Maccy D's of the trip, however the plane food on Pacific Airways from Fiji was crap so McD's seemed tasty in comparison!

Land at Leon airport at 6am and am in a taxi heading for Guanajuato by half six. Sleep depravation had obviously addled my brain as it was at least ten minutes before I realised that it was a pretty dumb idea to be arriving in a strange city, in the dark, at that time of the morning when I had nowhere to stay and couldn't speak the lingo! The taxi driver dumped me at the end of a street and pointed me in which direction to head so I tentatively set off. Instead of findng deserted streets, I was amazed to discover the streets littered with people, bands playing and flower stalls everywhere. It turns out that it was Baile de las Flores (Flower Dance festival) on Thursday and the celebrations continue through the night and into Friday. It was a fantastic introduction to the city and made me feel comfortable enough wandering around for a while until it was a decent hour to start knocking on doors to find somewhere to stay. Find the hotel I had chosen from LP hidden in amongst the narrow winding streets and luckily they had a room available, so dump my bags and head back out into the throng of the celebrations. No sleep soon catches up with me though and so I retire for a couple of hours siesta, before going back out later in the afternoon. The crowds are only just starting to thin out from the earlier streets of wall to wall people. Locate the language school that I want to enrol in but it's shut due to the festival so will have to wing it and just turn up on Monday. There seem to be lots of places to learn Spanish here so hopefully one will have room for me. So lookng forward to starting the course as it will be much easier when I can at least speak the basics of the language as no one here speaks Engligh. I can just about manage to utter "donde esta..?" (where is?) but have no chance in actually understanding the response so I'm getting by at the moment with lots of sign language and smiles! It's therefore a relief to meet an Ozzie girl back at the hotel who is studying Spanish in Guadalajara and is just in Guanajuato for a few days during the Easter break. We go out for dinner and I get to pick her brains on the menu and identify the things I really don't like so that I can avoid them. No "pimientos" for me thanks! The food is excellent (Italian, but I was craving pasta!) and later a couple of guys appear, one singing and the other playing guitar. The singer then starts to use the wooden box which he's sat on as a drum and belts out some fantastic percussion. An amazing sound. On the way back to the hotel, we bump into Callejoneados. This is a group of singers and musicians in traditional costumes who make their way through the streets, picking up an audience as they go. We follow and they soon stop and make all the ladies stand on a terrace as they serenade them and make wise cracks in Spanish. A fantastic spectacle and brilliant music, what a way to end my first day.

Have a welcome lie in on Saturday and then breakfast on the hotel's rooftop terrace with panoramic views of the city. Spend the day wandering the streets and discovering lots of lovely plazas where you can sit in cafes and watch the world go by. The streets are narrow and crawl around the surrounding hills therefore making it excellent for exploring by foot. There's hardly any traffic as most of the cars can't make it round the twisting streets are confined to the underground tunnels which avoid the city centre. I take the funicular to the top of the hill to visit the monument of El Piplia. From here there are even more fantastic sweeping views of the city. My stay coincides with a two week cultural festival so there are lots of performances of music and dance taking place in the various theatres throughout the city. Tickets are only 80 pesos (about 5 quid) so think I'll have to go to a couple of those. Go out for Mexcian food in the evening which is great.

Guanajuato is a wonderfully vibrant, colourful city and I'm so glad I decided to come here. Hopefully it'll be even better when I can habla espanol a bit more!

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