Week one in Guanajuato

Guanajuato is a pretty crazy town. It started out as a mining town, and is built into a narrow valley with steep sides. After the whole city flooded out a couple of hundred years ago they dug tunnels under the city to divert floodwater. After they built a dam to control runoff, they didn’t need the tunnels anymore and converted them to roads. So a lot of the traffic is underground. Hop in a cab, ask the driver to take you somewhere, and you’ll disappear into a tunnel and pop out on the other side of town. The surface streets are few, and the best way to get around is by walking the convoluted alley ways that wind up and down the hillsides. We’ve definitely been getting our exercise! You can read more about it on Wikipedia.

There are a lot of very old churches in Guanajuato

… And the same one by night.

The streets have a very European feel to them.

Looking over the city.

We stayed with the Hortensia family during our first week here. We had our own room with a bathroom in a separate building that the family built to make extra money from housing students. Señora Hortensia made us breakfast each morning, and “La Comida,” which is the traditional large meal in Mexico, eaten with the family at around 2-4pm. It was great to sample Mexican home cooking and we all really enjoyed the food, especially the sometimes picky Quinn!

Anni, Señora Hortensia’s daughter, brought her 7 year old son to lunch at the house most days, and he and Quinn had a great time playing together.

Quinn and Victor playing on the patio at our host family’s house

The downside was the 20 minute walk up and down some steep hills to get from the house to our Spanish school each day. The walk was good exercise, but after we got home in the afternoon, we really didn’t want to go out exploring. So for our second week here we rented an apartment closer to the school and downtown.

Spanish classes have been very good (especially after we changed from four to three hours per day of classes) and we are all learning a lot. The school coordinates activities, and we got to make traditional Mexican kites one evening.

Making Papalotes

We also met with Katie, the volunteer coordinator who works with Do Good As You Go, the volunteer organization we’re working with. She has connections with a girls’ school here in town, and we’re planning to install KA-Lite there.

On Saturday we made the big move, hauling all of our stuff to our new digs, and moving the van to a less expensive parking place. Katie invited us to a mural-making party that afternoon that she had arranged to decorate a wall along one of the alley ways. Quinn had a great time painting!

Mural painting

We slept in Sunday morning and took advantage of our real, full-size kitchen to make pancakes. In the afternoon we went to a local park and paddled a boat around the small lake feeding bread to the ducks. We sampled some local street food, then went back to the center of town to hang out at a bar and watch the superbowl. No need to say any more about that.