Morgan and I took the one and a half hour bus ride to Guanajuato via the Primera Plus–$8. The bus was smooth, new, clean, and showed a Korean art movie with Spanish subtitles on the six or so screens distributed throughout the bus. I’d love to know what that movie was, having missed both the beginning and the end of it. A young boy lives with his mute grandmother in a rural wasteland that looks like Mexico (but isn’t), but the 7 year old boy is using a play station (a hint that this is not Mexico, but Korean) in his hut while the grandmother, bent double, hauls a load of sticks. (Ah, so! They’re not speaking Spanish–another hint that this isn’t Mexico :-). [The movie is: The Way Home, I discovered.] So you have the old and the new in Korean culture on the screen, as the super-bus rolls along the road and out the window we see the hilly beshrubbed arid countryside where a man drives a one bottom plow pulled by a horse, a burro is grazing over there, a cow and calf over there. A mix of new and old. Both inside and outside.

We meet two wonderful daring young women, traveling through Mexico and they’re delighted to hear that I hitchhiked through Mexico in the late seventies with a girlfriend. (I wouldn’t do that now). One of these pretty girls is in graduate school doing a poetry degree, and the other just graduated with a double major in Spanish and international relations. A research trip. Yes!

Once in Guanajuato, we find that the bus station is way outside of town so we get a taxi. I ask the driver where there’s a hotel for $50 (500 pesos) or less. He takes it upon himself to not just show us, but takes us inside a dark cave of a hotel, but we say, no, no windows. No problema, he says and takes us to another. This one costs less money–$30. But the taxi driver charges us 100 pesos and wants a tip, of course, for helping us. He wants another 100 pesos, but I give him 50. To get to this second hotel room we pass ladies, at the unmarked entry, selling the bric a brac of cheap jewelry, beads, cosmetic junk and continue through a dark corridor up two flights of not-very-clean stairways and to a room which has a window. It’s a little scary and I wonder if they’re going to harvest our organs just as Lisa Lund would think, but, hey, I used to sleep on floors, on beaches, in cars, I’m not a wimp. So I say yes. (Morgan leaves it up to me, of course). (Do I appreciate that? Not altogether. It’s fine with him. Okay, it’s fine with me.)

Hmmm, no toilet paper. I go downstairs and ask, Hay el papel para el bano? (I have no idea if this is the correct term, but you have to be creative when your grasp of the language is as limited as mine). Then I look under the stained blanket at the sheets. Agh. Wet spots and dark hairs. I return downstairs and complain. Ah, he’ll have the sheets changed, he says.

We leave our backpack there at the hotel, which is in el centro, or so we’re told. We find theMercado Hidalgo, which is a huge medieval covered structure, two stories, which isn’t as Morgan remembers it, but that was 40 years ago. Inside they sell cheap Mexican ceramics and chickens and pigs feet and a load of plastic wrapped Chinese-made Guanajuato souvenirs. The market in SMA is so much more…Mexican. Or Mexican as we think of Mexico. We continue up the street and now it’s getting more attractive, and there’s the Plaza del Paz. And we check out about a half dozen beautiful hotels which cost $150 or so a night. Looking for the Diego Rivera Casa Museum, on  Calle Positos, we find a hostel for $20 for 2 and are thinking this would be better for us. And then we find Meson de los Poetas. It’s a hotel built up a hillside (as is all of Guanajuato), and the lovely man who speaks Spanish slowly (bless him) takes us up winding, spiraling, red-earth tile staircases, past rooms named for Spanish poets—Octavia Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Ramon Jimenez–the maize of corridors and little stairways occasionally open to the air and water drips down the rock walls and into hidden courtyards. And after much climbing and winding abou, the man shows us the garret apartment which has views of the city on three sides. We HAVE to have Antonio Muchados, (the name of the room and a poet who I don’t know, but I’ll find out.(http://www.greeninteger.com/pipbios_detail.cfm?PIPAuthorID=1089) The room costs $90. Fine. It’s my birthday tomorrow. Morgan suggests we just lose the other and stay here two nights.

But I want our money back. So we go back to fetch our back pack and I politely say to the proprietor, “Quisieras nuestra dinero– 300 pesos. Salimos.” And an argument ensues, but in the end, we get 200 pesos back because he says we were already here for 2 hours and the taxi driver got his cut. Fine. 200 pesos. From here on out Guanajuato is heavenly.