« hola, i just got into | Main | Guanajuato this city is filling »
October 21, 2002
quite a good day last
quite a good day
last night after checking my email at 7 or so in the evening, i left the internet cafe and walked across the street to the jardin de la independencia in downtown zacatecas. i noticed another white guy with a lonely planet guidebook in hand walking the other direction. he turned out to be a french canadian named pascual, and a pretty good guy. we got a few beers last night, and ended up getting a twin hotel room for this evening cause it s a bit cheaper. his english is so so and his spanish damn bad, i am helping him out, it makes me realize that i wouldnt mind teaching spanish or english. i think i like spanish more cause its not weird like english but i would not like to teach spanish to highschool brats for nothing. it was a good meeting though, both of us were looking for someone to travel with, at least for a while.
anyways, today we rode the telesferico to the top of the bufa, which means wine jug in spanish, its a hill that a bunch of mexican civil war type stuff took place on. they had a cool museum on top, about the taking of zacatecas by pancho villa, the custodian got excited and told me tons of stuff in stacatto spanish that i understood most of. the spanish is coming easier and easier. we walked down and had do it yourself bean tacos for lunch, super cheap. then we decided that since we are gonna leave tomorrow for guanajuato or some other small city in that state, we had better go see la quemada today. we caught a bus out there, it dumped us off on the side of the road. we walked down this 2 kilometer pavement strip to the ruins, i found myself smiling as i looked across the valley over the cactus plants, the same dopy smile i got while hitching and walking along highways waiting for rides. we got there and payed our entrance fee, then walked up to the ruins. la quemada was controlled by various cultures, the toltec, the chalchihuites, maybe even the aztecs. it had the largest roofed room in meso america, one corner of which they found filled with human bones. there is a pyramid that they sacrificed people on top of, and on the top of the stone strucure they used to build little shrines out of the skulls of sacrificed people. i am not sure why but its morbid and i always find stuff like that pretty cool. anyways, i sat there staring at the stone work, all of it cut and packed with mud, and thought about what it would be like to have had a life or death pelota (a kind of handball) match for life or death there, 1400 years ago. those ancient places have this weird feeling, eerie, to think that tons of people were killed there and their blood spilled down the walls. anyways, pascual and i started back down, and passed a couple sitting looking at one of the alters, smoking weird smelling tobacco. we met them again at the bus stop, they are from a town 1 hour south of d.f.(mexico city). juan and magdelena are their names, they are up here for some indigenous fiesta. they were smoking pipe tobacco, by the way. we ended up talking the whole bus ride back and went and got chinese food after words, spendy but we were hungry. juan is a cook and magdelena is a masseuse, i have been meeting un chingo de massueses on this trip. she just moved here to mexico a year ago from switzerland, she likes mexico better. we talked about all sorts of things, they told me my guatemeso culture birthsign i guess you would call it, the part i remember said that i am slow to anger but when i do i stay angry. true enough. it felt good to speak to some spanish. they just showed up at this cafe, we are gonna go drink beer and play pool. tomorrow i leave this town, but its the right time, there is a huge festival in guanajuato, something about cervantes, if we can find a room for cheap there we might go there first, otherwise we wait out then festival and then go to that town, everyone says its rad, plus it has 2 vegetarian restaurants. its funny, i realized today that part of my decision making process for going to town is whether it has a restaurant where i can eat or not. weird.
i saw a car today that had a sticker that said el rock nunca se muera, the rock never dies. right one.
Posted by bendan at October 21, 2002 07:01 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://drewish.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/50