Cuidado, Baby

We away for Labor Day Weekend (yes, we celebrated with a long weekend, just like at home) with our friends Kate and Antonio, who work at the CDM, and Amanda, a friend from spanish school, to San Miguel de Allende.

If you aren't familiar with SMA, it's a medium-sized town about 4 hours north of Mexico City, just around halfway to Zacatecas. At one point, it was, and still claims to be, an artists colony of sorts, but it functions more as a retirement community for folks from the US (notice I don't say americans - it's because mexicans see themselves as americans as well...and they are). It's quite like a DisneyLand version of Mexico, with it's beautifully maintained streets and buildings, etc. Of course, this is only in the center of the town. A ten minute walk away lives everyone else. The people who retire here are able to live for a lot less than in the US, assuming they bought an apartment or house before the prices rose into the millions in US dollars. Crazy. We did see some awfully big houses, some of them nice looking too. There's a lot of talk about how people live on their Social Security checks, but honestly, I don't think that's realistic. We talked to one woman who bought a house here in 1986 for 12,000USD and it sold recently, though not by her, for over 400,000USD. Like I said, we saw some sweet places, but the 2,500,000USD for a house there just seems a bit excessive.

There's a ton of restaurants, which was actually really exciting after the eh food here in Zacatecas. The restaurants were actually pretty pricey, though the food was pretty decent. The wierdest thing about the place is that there is very little spanish spoken. Most of the old white people don't seem to speak it. We went to this one italian restaurant where the waiter asked us to speak english as he doesn't speak spanish well - he's from Italy. It was really different from being in Zac., where no one speaks english except for the people you already know. I like speaking spanish.

We stayed at a hostel that right on the edge of the centro. It was a nice place, that was almost empty, so that was cool.

There was a woman staying there who was probably more than a bit mentally ill. We had a bunch of weird interactions, one of them involving her wearing a strange blonde wig and claiming it was in honor of Madonna having passed away that evening. She came out for a drink with us and said some strange stuff about all kinds of things. We ended up that first night at Limericks, a Guinness-serving Irish bar, according to Lonely Planet. Of course, they had no Guinness, so I settled for a wheat beer from the tap.

Awesome interaction: I was going to the bathroom through a relatively crowded outdoor patio and tripped over a foot. An arm reached out and grabbed mine to keep me upright. "Cuidado, baby" said a deep voice ("careful, baby"). I look up and a huge black guy is holding me up. He was the first black man I'd seen in Mexico and he'd been living here for, I think, around 16 years or so. A nice guy, but I had to get to the bathroom, so we didn't speak long.

I just love that - cuidado, baby.

Anyway, it rained crazy hard the next day, when we tried to go to a cool botanical garden place. We hung around under a shelter for a bit, but took off once it was clear it would keep raining for a while. The rain got so intense there was literally flooding in the streets. The water was about 5-6 inches deep in some places, if not deeper, and it was actually like a rushing river at times. The town is on a hillside, so it all goes right downhill, making these little rivers on many of the streets.

We just kind of walked around the town, ate some good food, including at an almost-vegetarian restauran, and slept. On the way out of town on Monday, we stopped at a pretty nice hot springs, about 20 minutes away. Natural hot springs, are cool, and being that there's not really anywhere to swim in Zacatecas, it felt really good to submerge myself in water.

Ok. More later.