The City of Frogs

Until fairly recently, this past weekend was the final unplanned weekend left on the schedule this semester. This was partially because we have a lot of plans for November (the agenda features Puerto Escondido, Revolution weekend, Thanksgiving/Oaxaca and Chiapas/Cancun), but also a reminder that my semester in Mexico is coming to an end. When did it get to be November?!?!!? As I lay here in my bed, wrapped in a blanket and fleece jacket and nursing a mug of tea, I should make a sidenote to comment on the unexpected turn that the weather has recently made. It turns out that it gets cold in Mexico during the fall months. Really cold. Which wouldn't be such a problem except that there's no heating system in most buildings and my room is positioned such that it has never EVER seen a direct ray of sunlight. Luckily, the sun warms everything up during the day and I have enough layers, blankets, and Sleepytime tea to stay warm at night.


Ok, off that rabbit trail and back to the main point of this: the weekend in Guanajuato. Mexicans and exchange students alike have been raving about this city for months and we finally found a weekend to go. Unfortunately, this specific weekend was also the final shebang of the annual, monthlong Cervantino festival hosted by the city in honor of Cervantes. You might be thinking, "What is a city in central Mexico doing having a festival to celebrate a 17th century Spanish author?" I will answer your question with another question, "Why not?" Although the festivities made it mucho más difícil to find a hotel and to navigate the city, it was exciting. We mysteriously managed to always be walking against the crowd and had a significantly lower piercing-and-dread per head quota than the typical MexiHipster festival attendee but enjoyed the colorful town nevertheless.
In order to save a fistful of pesos, we decided to travel early (think 4:30AM departure) Saturday morning and avoid a Friday night hotel fee. This seemed like a great idea (we´d just sleep on the bus, right?) until I ended up in the backseat over the shockless rear tires for 5 hours. I never thought that I would miss my stonetable of a mattress at UDLAP, but it turns out that even that is possible. We definitely took advantage of the whole day and hit up Guanajuato´s main attractions:

1. Don Quixote museum. If you´re going to dedicate a whole month in a Mexican city to a Spanish author, you might as well dedicate an entire art museum to said author´s fictional character.
2. Diego Rivera museum. Although I didn´t end up seeing the Diego Rivera mural in Mexico City, this was almost as good. Diego Rivera´s childhood home has been turned into a museum of some of his early works and preliminary sketches of several murals.
3. A historically important building-turned-museum that had something to do with Fr. Hildago, a massacre, and a turning point in the Mexican Revolution. By this point I was feeling that 4:30 wakeup and not really registering much information.
4. The kissing balcony, the setting of Guanajuato's version of Romeo & Juliet. Guanajuato is famous for its winding streets and complete lack of city planning, which leads to some strange intersections and narrow alleys. One such alley used to be home to a rich española on one side and a poor, indigenous man on the other. Their balconies were close enough to facilitate some shenanigans, until the tragic couple was caught in the act by Juliet´s short-tempered father, who stabbed her in the back to preserve the family´s pride. ¡Qué romantic!

This brings us to the lesson of the day. The first mini lesson was "don´t tell a caricature artist that you want to be portrayed with a weightlifter body unless you are really serious". The second was "don´t eat in a hotel restaurant called Restaurant". If they didn´t take the time to name the place, they probably also won´t take the time to fully microwave your soup or to fully cover your tostada with American cheese. Not that you wanted microwave soup or an Oscar Meyer ham & American cheese tostada in the first place. Needless to say, we did not go back for lunch today. We were all pretty exhausted by bedtime and enjoyed a relatively calm evening of Toy Story 3, PictaPhone and order-in pizza (to make up for Restaurant).
I knew Sunday would be a good day when there were Oreos on the breakfast table. Ok, so imitation Oreos, but still.* We went on a tour of La Mina de Valenciana, one of the world's most productive gold mines still in operation. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what our guide said. He was apparently on a tight schedule and talked like it was going out of style. The mine was interesting and stumbling down the narrow, uneven steps made me appreciate that I was born into modern middleclass America and not into the 16^th century Mexican semi-slavery. After emerging from the mine shaft, blinking in the brilliant sunlight, we hit up the obligatory souvenir area before heading off to our final attraction.

The Mummy Museum.

This museum's name is a bit misleading because, as the tour guide pointed out, mummies are purposely embalmed and preserved bodies. The specimens in this museum were buried in regular old coffins in the Guanajuato cemetery but the hot, dry climate preserved them. Upon running out of space in the cemetery, city officials began exhuming bodies to make room and discovered that the bodies were almost perfectly preserved. The logical next step was to put them in a museum: typical Mexican ingenuity. As far as I gathered, they have been gradually adding bodies to the collection over the years and at one point had to start over because the first batch wasn't encased to protect against temperature, humidity or visitors' oily hands. Again, I can only answer your "Why would you touch a 200-year-old body?" question with another question, "Why not?" Highlights of the mummy cast included a morbidly obese woman, a HUGE man who must have been the tallest, strongest guy in the whole pueblo, a newborn baby, and a woman who was accidentally buried alive. It was interesting to see how perfectly the skin, hair and clothing of the mummies were preserved, but my stomach was definitely starting to turn by the end of the tour. Also, it's a good thing I don't believe in zombies or this museum would have scared me to death (ha. Mummy pun.)
*If you have not figured out by now that my mood improves directly with quality food, you haven't been paying attention.