more pictures at last!

I've been preoccupied with returning to work and procrastinating on our cumulative Mexico project, but I FINALLY found some time to post some more pictures!  There are, of course, more where this came from--you'll have to find me in person to see the rest. :)

Even Guanajuato's alleys are pretty!

The room Jenny and I shared

Apparently, the city provides the bright colored paint for free--residents just have to provide the manual labor to paint their houses!

The church across the street from our hotel

 

A twist on window boxes

 

 Jenny and me up on the hill overlooking the city--the university is over Jenny's right shoulder

Jenny scaling the pyramids

The estudiantinas performing for us

 

The ladies of the group with one of the performers

 

 The students in a kindergarten class we visited--I had to restrain myself in order to avoid stealing the little boy on the far left.

Helping some middle schoolers with their English assignment

The theater across the street from the main plaza--a major hangout for the local high schoolers and university students

Crossing my fingers that this upload will work--here's a taste of the estudiantina street performance!

Touring around

For the past couple of days, we've been doing a lot of touristy stuff. On Saturday, the whole group went to San Miguel de Allende, a town about an hour and a half away from Guanajuato. We saw a church that is known as the "Sistene Chapel of Mexico," and there were indeed some wonderful paintings on the ceiling, though I think the comparison to Michangelo nay be a little optimistic. The town also has a beautiful cathedral at its center with an incredible golden altar. Incidentally, they were holding a beauty pageant in the plaza right outside the church ... Cognitive dissonance?

San Miguel has a fantastic market, so we spent a lot of the afternoon shopping and bartering. I made friends with a jewelry maker named Alex who lived in Portland for two years, selling his work on the street! He offered to custom-make a quartz ring for me, so that was pretty cool.

Before we left, we visited the Nigramante, a former convent in the center of town. I need to do a little more research because our guide was all over the place, but I gathered that the building was financed by a crazy guy who later claimed to be a medium and worked a lot of references to the occult into the art and architecture. There are a lot of interesting details, including circles that turn into hearts as you walk toward them and a painting of a chupacabra (Mexican goat sucker)!

Jenny and I have spent the last couple of days laying low in Guanajuato. Today we visited the mummy museum, which is a) the city's main tourist attraction and b) deeply disturbing. Just FYI, if you are buried in Guanajuato and later exhumed and you don't have any family in the city to claim your body, they will put your corpse on display. I suggest you don't die here. Apparently there is some sort of lime deposit in the city's soil that acts as a preservative, resulting in some eerily well-preserved bodies. It's an experience I don't feel the need to have again anytime soon.

After the mummy museum, we felt a little dirty and in need of some culture, so we went to the Diego Rivera museum, which is located in the same house where the painter grew up. It was fun to see some of his early work and. Learn about his work to advocate for the poverty-stricken campesinos, as well as his relationship with Frida Kahlo.

Our other main activity has been eating everything in sight. I'm becoming addicted to agua fresca, which is basically just cold water blended with lots of fresh fruit and served over ice. My favorite is a strawberry-guava blend--mmm!

Tomorrow is our last full day in the city, and we'll be back in the US on Thursday! I'll be sure to update with pictures once I'm home.

Back to school

Sorry for the longish absence! We've been very,very busy for the last couple of says.

On Thursday, we visited a kindergarten on the outskirts of Guanajuato. The school had been selected to receive assistance from the local Rotary club, and we saw so many needs there--there were no bathrooms or running water, and the classroom looked like it could double as a storage shed. The kids obviously loved school, though, and it was so much fun to play with them and see how much they're learning despite their lack of resources.

We had lunch with the Rotary club that day, and they described the other projects they support in the Guanajuato area. Their current focus is a large housing project--the clubbed constructed 120 houses in rural areas so far. Since there are no sewer systems available outside the cities, they are now installing sanitary systems and water tanks for those families. It is striking to stay in a lovely city with a large middle class and know that there are so few resources available to the poor outside the city limits. The Rotary is working hard to make things better, and they have a lot of creative and cost-effective ideas. We didn't have an interpreter that day, so I got to translate for our group--a very tiring task! Luckily, my (limited) Spanish abilities to the Rotary members, and I made friends with rthe president and some of the other officers, who found out I lived in spain and spent the rest of the afternoon making fun of Spanish accents.

On Friday, we visited a primary school and a middle school to observe classes. My general impression is that Mexican schools are efficiency-oriented: lots of long, straight, whitewashed hallways, uniforms for everyone, and 40+ (very well-behaved and attentive) kids to a classroom. In fact, even the buildings are used efficiently--the secondary school kids go to school in shifts, from 7 to 1 and 1:30 to 7:30, in order to allow more students to attend. We got to chat with some of the students, all of whom wanted to know where we were from and were amazed to discover that some of us could speak Spanish. We spent some time in an english class, but everyone was too shy to speak English with us!

We spent Saturday in a neighboring town called San Miguel de Allende (more on that later, maybe?), and as of today, our class is officially over! It was sad to say goodbye to my wonderful classmates (although we just go word that their plane was delayed out of Guanajuato, causing them to miss their connection and stranding them in Houston foe the night!) Jenny and I are spending the next few days here, so I will update you all on our adventures.

CEDESA

First of all, let me apologize for the lack of photos. We have wifi at our hotel, but it's too slow to handle photo uploads very efficiently. I'm looking for another Internet connection, but in the meantime, you'll have to make do with my prose. :)

On Tuesday, we visited CEDESA (don't ask me to spell out the acronym), which is a nonprofit organization that supports campesinos (people who live in the countryside) in the state of Guanajuato. Instead of trying to move these people into the city, CEDESA helps them develop more efficient and sustainable practices to enrich the lifestyle they already live and keep them from poverty or government dependence. The organization is mostly run by campesinos as well, and the employees have developed some amazing processes and technologies to help the community. We took a tour of the site and saw very simple backyard organic gardens where families can grow enough produce to consume themselves, dry to consume themselves, indoor/outdoor stoves that are energy efficient because they use wood instead of fuel, dry toilets that eliminate odors and contamination risks in rural areas where there is no sewage system, and solAr water purification systems that use evaporation to remove harmful levels of fluoride and arsenic from drinking water. The CEDESA employees told us that the entire project is community-driven; when these technologies are installed in homes, several families collaborate to install each component, kind of like a barn raising. It was so interesting to see that, unlike in the US, where organic and sustainable products are luxuries for people with expendable incomes, these practices are actually the most cost-efficient and practical for the campesino community. After the tour, the employees made us a fantastic lunch using the foods they cultivated on site.

We have spent the last couple of days meeting with representatives of the university and the city's education department. Not quite as interesting as drinking wine with minstrels, but I'll write more about it later!

Meeting the mayor

Hello!

Sorry for the lack of updates--it has been a looong couple of days, punctuated by sickness (I'm better now, though!) and lack of Internet access (I'm typing this on my iPod touch while sitting in my hotel window trying to catch a very weak wifi signal).

Yesterday was unexpected but fun. We got to meet with Guanajuato's city council members and hear about how they run the city, the education system, social services, and so on. Then we met the mayor! He was accompanied by several photographers and a video camera, and our group's picture was suposedly in the newspaper today. The mayor was very gracious and took us to lunch at a beautiful restaurant on the town's main plaza.

That evening, we took part in the most unique musical event I think I've ever witness. I can't remember the name for the type of act--I think it's estudiantivo or something--but it's basically an all-male band of minstrels in old-timey dress playing traditional mexican folk songs. Instead of playing in a theater or plaza, they walk all around the city and the crowd follows them. It's a pretty great experience to hear wonderful music while watching the evening sun light up the hills. On top of all that, the musicians are pretty boisterous and there is a lot of wine involved--at one point, the lead singer went around squirting wine into peoples' mouths from a wine skin! At that point, I was still sick, so I was nursing a bottle of water, but it was still pretty entertaining.

I've spent about as much time as I can stand typing on my iPod, so I'll write more later!

Fotos!

Hello all!  No time to write today, but here's a picture update.

Jenny and me in front of the Universidad de Guanajuato

Panoramic view of the city from up on the hilltop

Obligatory artsy flower/city shot.

Me in front of the pyramids in Las Pazuleas--archeologists aren't sure which indigenous group built them, but they date to 600 AD

And finally--the females of the group atop a castle wall.  And by castle, I mean a castle-turned-hotel in the hills of the city.

More later!  Hasta pronto!

Waking up in another country

¡Hola a todos!

After 19 hours, three flight changes, a run-in with the world´s meanest airline employee, and an ATM that charged for money that it did not produce (not mine, thankfully), we arrived in Guanajuato last night around 11 pm our time.  Getting to a foreign city so late is one of the most disorienting experiences I´ve ever had, but somehow Jenny and I managed to unpack and organize our ENTIRE room--complete with an area for our shoes--before going to bed. International travel is no excuse for being disorganized!  The hotel where we´re staying is absolutely gorgeous.  The rooms are organized around an open-air central courtyard, and we could see the clear night sky above us from our window.

This morning, we were awakened bright and early by the ¨bells¨of the church across the street, and by bells, I mean it sounded like someone was banging on a gong right outside our door.  Every fifteen minutes.  We spent the morning exploring the city, which is absolutely incredible.  There are tons of winding streets and hidden plazas, kind of like Sevilla.  The whole city is built into a gorgeous green hillside, and everywhere you look, there are brightly painted buildings nestled way up on the hill.  I have a ton of amazing pictures, but there´s no way to upload pictures at this internet cafe--I´ll work on that! 

We spent some time exploring the streets, then went to the Universidad de Guanajuato to learn a little about the university system here.  After that, we got a tour of the university´s library, which is filled to the brim with original books from the 15th to 19th centuries.  We met with one of the guys who works on restoring these books, and we got to see some of the collection up close, including an original book of Isaac Newton´s findings and a record of Napoleon´s exploration of Egypt, complete with incredibly intricate prints of the pyramids and hyroglyphics (I´m 99% sure I spelled that wrong ...)  It was amazing to see this kind of history up close!

After spending some more time on the university campus, we had lunch at our hotel with some faculty and employees of the university, followed by lots of shopping and perhaps a little chocolate-purchasing--I can´t quite remember :)  The weather has been incredible today--80 degrees with clear blue skies--so some classmates and I had a drink in one of the city´s main plazas, and now we´re getting ready to go out to dinner and see some live music.

More to come, hopefully accompanied by some pictures!