My second to the last day in Guanajuato

Because the car buying trip took so long, we have put off our departure one day, that still only gives me two days back instead of three, to get everything packed up and do some reflective wandering, preparing to say goodbye. Yesterday turned out to be a lovely day of doing both of those things.

It was Mikko’s last day of school and his class has been rehearsing for a play that the class will perform on Saturday. Matthew and I came up to see a rehearsal, so that Mikko could have the experience of performing it. He was the rain and he did an excellent job, which I wasn’t able to capture here.

After the play I needed to go get my blood drawn for the last time here, so I walked down our callejon into town.

I had a gordita and fresh squeezed orange juice from the first gordita ladies we ever went to – oh so long ago. Delish.

I bought some flowers around the corner at the Baratillo, for the lady who draws my blood.

After my blood draw and saying goodbye to the señora, I headed down to the market to buy some blankets to protect the car seats. There was a march/demonstration going on which always warms my heart. I believe the issue was living wages. There was sign that said something about $50 is not enough. I asked the women $50 for what, and she said monthly.

Then I bought a mix of fruit with chili and lime – and ate it.

I took the funicular home, because I had forgotten my camera earlier and had already gone up the stairs once, plus I wanted to buy some things at the tourist stands at the top, but they were all closed.

I came home and packed a bunch and puttered and at 2:00 Matthew and I went back up to Mikko’s school for a celebration of San Juan. There was a story and a circle dance…

and jumping over the fire. leaping into the future and leaving the bad stuff behind.

We came home and chilled and packed some more – I found another dog on a rooftop.

There was an excellent rain storm – that let up, just when we were getting hungry and deciding to go eat.

It rains so hard and so fast that all the garbage gets washed to the bottom of the callejon.

We had dinner in a fancyish restaurant on the Jardin – I swear this is candid.

Matthew took off for a pulque date and Mikko and I wandered around town doing some errands. The light was beautiful. Here are some of the things that we saw.

All in all a pretty nice second to that last day. Today is packing and cleaning and hopefully having some wine with a friend. Some kids in the neighborhood have signed on to help us carry stuff up the hill to the car early early in the morning.

This has been an amazing, life changing experience. I have met wonderful people and gotten to experience a wonderful way of life. I met my goal of being comfortable talking on the phone in Spanish- or at least not absolutely terrified of it. I believe too that I will be able to work with students and parents coming from Mexico with a much fuller understanding of where they are coming from – and that can only make things better. It is hard saying goodbye to everyone – and everyone asks immediately, “So when will you return?” All we can say is some day.

We are unhooking the internet in a few hours to return the equipment. Thanks to all of you have left comments and to everyone who looks at my blog and makes those blogstats rise. It is nice to know that I am sharing this experience with so many people.

I’m hoping to post some from the road – but who knows if I actually will get it together.

The Rainy Season has Begun

FINALLY !! It has been cool and gray for the past three days. And it has RAINED!!

We are so happy. It is funny, it does subdue the mood though – it is a kind of a melancholy happiness I feel.

We are having a big birthday party on Sunday for 7 people. So Mikko and I are baking a cake for 50 people, or so. I am having Mikko help me with all the calculations as his math practice.

Today we made a list of about a kajillion kilos of cake ingredients (using lots of math), went to the Commercial ( a US style supermarket,) and bought it all, plus a couple bottles of wine and a ream of paper, planning to take the bus or a cab home whichever came first. As we were checking out, the lights went out and then on, and as we got to the door there was a huge crowd waiting inside because it was POURING outside. We waited a bit but just wanted to get home. We stepped out and I was immediately blinded by all the water POURING down into my eyes and over my glasses. I had this ridiculous notion that we could just step out and get a cab. Unfortunately everyone in Guanajuato had also had that notion a few minutes before I did. We waited for a bus for about a half hour and finally gave up on one coming. An hour and half after leaving the store Mikko and I dragged our sorry soaked through asses over our threshold with our very wet kajillion kilos of flour, eggs, butter, sugar… We had ended up walking back and luckily the funicular was running, though it appeared not to be when we first got there, I was ready to leave our groceries behind and truck up the waterfall that was our callejon.

We have now had hot showers and are each on our computers as Matthew cooks a steak dinner and Ella serenades us. Pretty nice

More walks in good ol’ Guanajuato

Just some more pix from some more walks.

This last week…

has been lovely with the Aunties here AND I have been teaching English at Mikko’s school. We planned the Aunties’ tourist week around meals, at favorite restaurants and at home. Therefore, we have eaten very well and had some good card playing time as well. One of the best meals is a city bus ride away at Tamales Purupecha. It is Michaocan style tamales, pozole, and corundas, which are kind of like mini tamales that are wrapped in chard and covered with salsa verde and crema. Oh Yummmm.

Quince and I took nice long walks early early in the mornings. It has been great after my long break from walks during our trip.

Then I took Mikko to school, and generally came home to putter until around 11 when I would go back up and teach. It felt good to be back in the classroom. Everyone should get to take a year off, so they can miss their job, and remember how much they love it. (I have probably said that before and will most likely say it again.)

There were two scorpian sightings, one disturbing one was floating dead in the water that I had just washed my clothes in by hand – which makes me think it was alive in the pile of laundry as I was carrying it around.  The other was up near the ceiling on the wall.  Matthew squished it handily with a book.

Here are some random pictures of the week:

This is right around the corner from Mikko’s school. It has been a good week for burro sightings.

It was the hottest week we have had so far – in the 90s most days. Matthew bought a package of balloons for water balloons – and he Mikko and Mikko’s friend Adam managed to involve the boys across the callejon in some good water balloon fights. Notice the orange blob flying towards the boy in the bue shirt

No puppy news yet.

A walk

Shane and Denise left yesterday. It was so great to have them here. We took many walks (even an epic one) and did many touristy things. Over the next few days I’ll be posting more, but here are some pix of a walk that Denise and I took the other day.

We walked up a hill on the other side of town and decided to go through this tunnel. Have I talked about the tunnels yet? This town is full of them. Most of the cross town traffic uses the tunnels that go under the city, that were originally dug to divert the river, which would flood the town, but it had flooding problems down there too, so they diverted it to even deeper tunnels and made the first river tunnels into roads. (Is that sentence too long?)

This tunnel is actually up on the hill though.

We found ourselves at the temple of Guadalupe. We were going to go in but it was closed. I think it may have had something to do with Kings day that was coming up. Notice the huge wasp nest in the right, top corner of the window.

I just love Jesus. He’s so pretty.

We came to a nice little neighborhood at the top of our journey, and were greeted by dogs on rooftops.

And once we got to the top, we headed down.

There’s Pipila in the distance.

Once we got to the bottom, I found these fairies serenading the virgin. Makes sense to me.

Hence the name

I finally have a collection of photos of perros en techos, (y otros lugares.)

One day we were in this callejon, taking this picture when we heard barking from above. We looked up to see this little fluff ball with his head sticking out the window barking at us like mad.

There were two other dogs on different roofs too, but they moved to fast too get their pictures.
This is a neighbor dog who actually gets to leave his roof sometimes.

THE OPTIMIST
This is our neighbor dog . You may recognize him from the header of this blog. I call him The Optimist because he is always looking down into the courtyard where his family is, wagging his tail, sure that they are on their way up to him to give him some loven’. They rarely are though. I took this picture from the callejon.

This is our normal view of him from our balcony, in melancholy moment:

THE RAGS

We keep track of these guys from our balcony too. They are pretty well camoflouged by their filth, so it is exciting when there is a sightning. Mikko will yell, “The Rags!” It took me a while to stop looking for flying laundry.

10/24

Today was a good day for La Ultima Wipe in beautiful ‘ol Guanajuato. It has gotten quite cold and blustery all of a sudden, so that is nice.

As I was walking to pick up Mikko, up the long long hill (as seen in the following pictures,) I started chatting with a woman who I see each morning. She invited me into her house and I met her husband and son, who was reading La Jornada (the progressive, lefty paper.) She was actually advertising her weekend amusement park type business and encouraging me to come with my family. (At first I thought she was just inviting us to all go out there together, then I realized is was her business.) It looks like fun, there is a trampoline and scooters to ride and other diversions. She was so sweet and after a nice little visit she said I should stop by her house anytime.

It was perfect timing because I was feeling so disappointed yesterday after my acupuncture appointment that was with a woman from Orcas Island. She was very nice, and is involved in some cool things, but she filled me in on some gringo gossip and we spoke English the whole time (obviously.) I keep getting worried that I will just fall into these gringo circles and not get to meet or get to know any real Mexican people, or speak Spanish.

So today was good. I started out at the lab getting my blood drawn and chatting with the lady there in Spanish. Had a whole day of Spanish at school, met the lovely woman on the stairs, then chatted with Victor outside of school, half in English half in Spanish (he is totally bilingual and is very gracious and patient with me.)

Picking up Mikko was a joy. He continues to be very happy and perky. (It turns out there was a boy in his class who was a bit volatile and unpredictable, who has now been expelled, and Mikko has been much happier about school since then.) As Mikko and I were coming down our callejon steps, I told a man coming up carrying a crate on his head that I liked his hat. He didn’t smile BUT Mikko understood what I had said. Then some teenagers were coming up the steps. We live about 2/3 of the way up to the Pipila. The boys were on their way there. When they came around the bend and saw that they still had a ways to go they wailed, and I yelled to them that they could do it!! They smiled and laughed, and trudged on up. That made me feel good. We came home and I had my little lie down and then made delicious enchiladas with the leftover mole.

I went into town to get my blood results, (which were too high, so I am a little worried, but not too worried, mostly just annoyed, ) and went to an internet spot after faxing my results to Kaiser. When I came out it was just after dusk. The air was chilly, there were open shops and beautiful buildings with people shopping and visiting and living their lives and I really felt like I was in Mexico again, not the amusement park that the Cervantino festival turned this town into. Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to experience it, but I’m happy to get to experience life after Cervantino now. Then as the total clincher to a good day – I walked all the way up our callejon without needing to stop and rest.

The wind is blowing really hard right now. It is cold enough that I am actually wearing a few shirts and socks for the first time since we got here. I might even put an extra blanket on my bed.

“shortcut” between our schools

This is starting at the panoramica road about 10 blocks from Mikkos’ school. My school is 5-8 blocks up the road from that big school in the middle of the picture.

Each picture is taken from the last spot you can see in the previous picture.

The nice lady’s house is on the right.

Turn right at the last landing.

go down

and down

turn left at the tienda

This is a gas man. (It might be Charley, a story for another time.) Every morning of the week the gas man walks through the callejons yelling “Gas.” If you need a new tank, you run out and get them. I just realized that they each have their own variation on the word gas. The guy in our callejon sounds like he is calling for Anne, every morning. In this callejon it just sounds like a loud, ERP.

The fact that they carry these tanks up these hills is amazing. It is the same with water. I saw some guys carrying three of those big 5 gal. water bottles up this callejon one day.

and down

and down

Then I walk up this street about 8 blocks and I’m at school!

I took pictures coming up as well, but they aren’t as pretty- or as realistic, because all I really look at, when going up, is the next few steps. I have found that the trick to going up is just to walk really slow.

And, believe it or not, I no longer need to stop for a rest on my way up.

resting on the way up our callejon