One of the things that makes this town so lovely and relatively car-free is that the traffic is routed through tunnels that go under the town and through the hills. There is a new one being built - which explains the huge explosions we have been hearing since we came here. Lise has blogged about it which is great - so I don’t have to.
This picture was taken yesterday, hers were taken last week sometime.
We just took a quick 3 day trip to Michoacan. 3 nights in Morelia, with one day wandering the streets of Patzcuaro.
Michoacan is the state just to the south of Guanajuato state. The countryside is much greener than Guanajuato, which has its own high, dry beauty. Michoacan is as high as Guanajuato, I believe, but instead of being dry and craggy Michoacan is green and rolling. It feels lush and volcanic.
Morelia is the capital of Michoacan and the city we came very close to moving to, before we decided on Guanajuato.
It is quite big, with a population of over 600,000. I just love it there and cannot put my finger on exactly why. It feels quite urban, which I like, but it also has too much traffic and terrible fumes. Not everyone says buenos dias on the street like they do here in Guanajuato, but every interaction I had there felt really genuine. And the city just feels good to me.
This is a gazpacho. It is one of the most delicious things in the world. It is chopped up fruit - pineapple, papaya, mango, jicama, cucumber with orange juice, lime juice, chili and cheese! Oh my god it’s good. It is a specialty of Michaocan.
There is also a fair amount of green. The city sits in a bowl surrounded by green rolling mountains. (Where Guanjauto sits in a deep basin, Morelia sits in something more like a pasta bowl. ) So at the end of every vista you see green. There are also quite afew parks and tree lined boulevards with huge old trees growing.
We arrived Friday night and wandered the streets.
It was a beautiful night.
The next morning we found a market to have breakfast in.
The whole upstairs was lined with little one room restaurants. I love the way they look like dollhouse kitchens.
We found the one that had the most breakfasty menu - despite that, I had meatballs.
We spent the day roaming the streets and markets. Some of Mikko’s photography:
We loved those walk signals! The running figure is actually quite accurate because the traffic could be a little crazy and unpredictable.
They have cute dogs on roofs there too.
That night we went out for Matthew’s birthday dinner. There is a place that we love called Augustine’s that is a block-long arcade, with arches and columns and lined with separate little restaurants. (Much like the upstairs of the market.) Each one serves almost the exact same thing and has a TV going, often on the same channel. I find the whole choosing process extremely difficult. I’m so stinken’ codependent, I don’t want to hurt anyones feelings… I think I will do a separate post about difficult choices later.
This is Augustines from across the street:
Anyhoo - as we walked up, a number of different women form different restaurants started telling us to come in. We chose the first one we came to. We had brought our own wine and champaign, and had really good, chicken, sopes, pozole - yum.
These are the ladies that served and cooked our food.
Mikko always has a book with him to protect him from boring grownup conversations.
After dinner we wandered into el Centro, where there is a beautiful cathedral that gets lit up every Saturday with fireworks:
It turns out it was a fine year for me to be stuck in the cardiac recovery unit on the 4th of July. We have seen so many fireworks since we have been here.
We saw some pretty balloons too:
There is a street where all the Mariachi guys hang out, hoping to get hired. It is a few blocks off the zocolo. In Guanajuato and San Miguel they all hang out in the zocolo. We were wondering if there is an ordinance in Morelia or something.
They need their bad coffee from the Oxxo too.
