San Miguel – Day 6: Moving Day Tomorrow

We have found a nice place to stay over in a neighborhood called San Rafael-Insurgentes which is just west of the river (currently dry) and up a hill (like a lot of things in SMA).  The light and view are amazing.  Photos to come once we move in which will be tomorrow.  We are going to shuffle our stuff (actually going to use our backpacks finally) tomorrow morning, settle in, reconnect with the internet and get on with our studying. 

We are going to stay in SMA through Christmas and then head off to Oaxaca.  While there aren’t language classes at the Warren Hardy school in December we are hiring a tutor to help us get through Warren Hardy’s second book of verb-conjugations.  Our Spanish is halting but we seem to be able to get by for the most part which is not bad considering our short tie in Mexico so far.  There are times of course when we meet someone who rattles of a sentence or two that goes completely over our heads which is to be expected but people are very patient with us.

We have been having fun trying the various chorizos available and have experimented with some brick of what I thought looked like bacon but actually is meat and skin and some (not much) fat:

I have asked the ladies at the language school what the brick is meant to be used for but didn’t get a satisfactory answer.  Possibly because I didn’t describe the brick correctly. I used it in the bean pot after having fried it till crispy.  Very tasty this way not so much otherwise.  The long, darker brown sausage is longaniza, a chorizo made by the butcher, and the redder sausage is factory-made chorizo or so the butcher was telling us.  Both very tasty.  Yesterday we had chorizo tacos with all the trimmings for lunch.

We have been doing a lot of walking, SMA is a very walkable town as long as you don’t mind hills, uneven surfaces, and the roughly 6400ft elevation above sea level.  It is a very pretty town, at least the older parts, cobblestone streets, amazingly narrow sidewalks, big curbs some places, almost non-existent in others, there is always something happening (last two nights there have been concerts belting out from the Jardin (main town square in front of the church).  Our new landlords tell us that there are fireworks on the weekends most of the time to be viewed from our porch.

A lot of homes have really amazing doorways: either the doors themselves are interesting or the stone frame is and sometimes both.  I have been trying to photograph them when I remember to but I can’t do them justice.  Here are a few:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The roofs of the house are drained directly into the street using in many case stone troughs that extend out a few feet (at most) from the face of the building.  Many of the older ones are carved into creatures:

At some intersections there are small chapels built into the corners of a building, most of them are catholic but in some cases you can see both catholic and Aztec influences:

ttfn, Nick