PHOTOS of the market in Guanajuato. Click on the title of today’s entry or paste the following address into your browser: http://homepage.mac.com/rachelsair/fulbright/PhotoAlbum32.html
We all woke up when someone knocked on our door. I don’t know how she did it (as I’m usually in a comatose state for the first half hour after awakening), but Miriam answered the door and the hotel worker said, “I’m counting how many rooms are occupied.”
We went down the hill, towards the center in search of breakfast. We ate in a restaurant/bar where the service was horrible; Andi ordered a bottle of water that never arrived, but it did appear on the bill. I went to the store next door and bought us some water bottles. More importantly than the service is the food, which I really enjoyed – sunny-side up eggs and baguette bread to soak up the yolk.
Afterwards, we walked to the market where I took many photos and bought some toys for my classroom in Wilmette to replace those that are broken, after many years of wear and tear. I bought a “Jacob’s ladder” the wood blocks that are connected with a ribbon running down the middle, and they continually flip down when it’s held from the top. When I asked the old woman who had sold it to me what it’s called in Spanish, she began demonstrating how it works. Another vendor didn’t know what it was called but two others said it’s called a “tablita mágica” (magic tablet).
The four of us sat in a plaza and had a drink. It was perfect and a good rest away from the mass of people. At night we ate well at a restaurant called La Oreja de Van Gogh (Van Gogh’s Ear). We began with guacamole and chips and I also enjoyed a tasty hot bowl of Azteca soup (just another name for tortilla soup). The soup was a bit too spicy for me, my lips were beating and my throat burning for quite some time, but Miriam helped me out with finishing the soup. Both Miriam and Andi must have some Mexican blood (they don’t actually) as they can and in fact enjoy eating the hottest of foods topped with the spiciest of salsas.
In the plaza in which we were eating, there were circles of people around the clowns putting on performances. Against the wall of the restaurant, behind our table a line began to form. We asked a woman what it was for and she had to ask the person next to her in line. It turned out that it was for the theater that we were planning to attend. During the day I asked someone at an information booth about tickets and they said that we didn’t have to buy any. I walked around the side of the restaurant and saw the plaza where the theater was going to take place. When the usher found out that I am from Chicago, he said that I could enter, but said he couldn’t allow all four of us to enter. However, after finishing dinner, we went over there and he allowed us to enter.
It’s a good thing that we didn’t have to purchase tickets to enter as we could only stand to stay about 20 minutes since it was horrendous. It was an interpretation of Don Quijote. Most actors wore masks and none used a microphone while performing in the open-air plaza. There were some characters that looked like the white, puffy Michelin men, but these had private parts – extremely strange!
After we escaped the madness, we went to the Plaza Principal (main plaza), on the other side of the street from Teatro Juarez. There was an amazing amount of people there, so we sat in a restaurant that had a great view overlooking the plaza and enjoyed some drinks and later dessert, I had the “pay de limón” (key lime pie). The night couldn’t have ended better – we returned to the hotel, I flipped on the TV and saw on ESPN that the White Sox had won the first game of the World Series.
