Diego Rivera's Hometown

We have taken two day trips outside of San Miguel, one to Guanajuato and one to Atotlnilco. Guanajuato is a city about the size of San Miguel but with a totally different character and Atotlnilco is a religious shrine built in the early 18th century. We found Guanajuato to be a lively university town, built into a valley surrounded by hills with lots of students and lots of traffic. Some of the traffic goes underground in old river beds beneath the city center but not enough of it for me. The city is a World Heritage site because of it's pristine colonial buildings. Guanajuato is the birthplace of Diego Rivera, the famous muralist who became a Marxist in the early 20th century and thus is not well revered in his home town. The house where he was born is now a museum. We were not all that impressed with him either. I never have been a great fan of his, believing his wife, Frida Kallo, was the one in the family with the real talent. My theory has been he divorced Frida because he couldn't take the fact that his wife was more talented than he was. Diego was a big guy, as can be seen by the photo of Harry (the little guy) standing next to him outside the museum. In the museum gift shop there were more Frieda Kallo prints for sale than Diego's. I guess people agree with me here. We were glad to get back to the peacefulness of San Miguel after a day in the Guanajuato.

We happened by a house for rent on our many by foot travels around the city and decided to call the owner and take a look just for the heck of it. We had low expectations being that it is just two blocks from our condo in the "really nice" area close to the town center. It was even in our price range. We were very surprised at the size of the place and I liked the view even better than the one we have here, if that is possible. The house has three bedrooms, three baths and two roof top gardens and I mean gardens. ( a perfect size house for guests) It is a bit shabby but would be just fine after a little spruce up. Rents here have taken a nose dive like in Cabo, so there are nice places to rent for well under $1000 a month. For fun we also toured a beautiful condo complex in an area of SM that reminded me a little of Greenwich Village. These condo homes were in the one half million dollar range and up. They were nearly 3500 square feet, 4 floors and you could have an elevator built in if you wished. Ah yes.....I would most certainly go for the elevator.

I unexpectedly got an email back from a gentleman I had written to about teaching jobs here in San Miguel. I say unexpected because I have learned never to have high expectations attempting to communicate in cyberspace. We met with him today. It turned out he is the American Consul here so he was very knowledgeable. He gave us some good advice and counsel that would have taken many days to learn for ourselves. We got really lucky. We could have used someone like him in Madrid last summer as we tried in vain to find the right jobs.

Both of us agree this could be a very interesting place to live for a time, especially for the person in this marriage who likes nothing better than to yell "taxi". Different cultural events go on constantly in San Miguel and for me the charm factor of this city is a ten on a ten point scale. It would also be much cheaper to live here than in Cabo or the states. Example: we bought a beautiful roasted chicken, that came with a bag of roasted vegetables, salsa gravy, and two baguettes for $3.50/500 pesos in the Mexican Greenwich Village part of town today.

This week starts the 31st annual Chamber Music Festival as groups from all over the world come to perform. We bought tickets for a Haydn and Beethoven concert. Tomorrow night some of the groups will be performing free concerts in the town square. I just hope they plan to stop ringing those darn bells while this is going on.