We are in San Miguel de Allende. It is a colonial town, which means it has a Zocalo. All the colonial towns have them,
these squares in the center that the whole town, now city, is organized around. Often the zocalos have musicians playing and people wondering around selling
things. There is almost always a church, more a cathedral, or two, just off the square. If the towns have a zocalo, then they are old—dating to Spanish colonial times. The streets are cobbled (who needs speed bumps!) and the walls of the houses lean in, giving us the feeling of being a in a canyon. The streets are narrow but the sidewalks are narrower. Barely one person can walk on them without doing a balancing act. When a car comes roaring past you want to disappear into the wall. The sides of adjacent houses touch, in fact, it would be impossible to tell where one house ends and the other begins if not for their different colors. One house is yellow, the other blue and the next one gray. It is almost as if there is a contest going on for the most colorful building.
The city is older than the cars that drive on it’s streets. The streets are narrow and bend at weird angles. There are almost no street signs. The main streets are two way, but the rest are only one way, for the main reason that they aren’t wide enough. With cars parked along one side of the street our little car could barely squeeze through. A big SUV wouldn’t have been able to make it. To get from one place to another two blocks away, sometimes you have to drive 4 bocks up, three blocks down, two blocks past
where you want to end up and then you have to circle back. The streets are a bewildering maze of twists and turns where the map shows a straight line. I love the convoluted maze of this town’s streets. Where we were the last couple of days, in Zakatecas, it was impossible to drive up two blocks without getting lost. It makes me long to see
This morning we went to the Mercado here, in San Miguel. It was huge. There was a food section and a craft section. The food section was stuffed with fresh fruit and vegetables and others that were dried. There were two full isles of fresh flowers, each flower stall managed by a separate person. Another person sold dog food in bulk. And the rows of dried chilies!—ones of every size, shape and texture
were present. That was only the food half ( almost a square kilometer).
The second half was filled with beautiful crafts that we, unfortunately, didn’t need. I wish I had more presents to buy! The mercados are a bargainers dream. Everything is of a superb quality and extremely cheap by our standards. There was amazing beaded work, and woven goods, and carved bits and, and, and…
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Zacatecas doesn’t have a zocalo, but it has many plazas. There was always music playing in the plazas. Our last day there was the first day of the Festival de Calle (street), so the plaza outside our hotel had an Italian group practicing what seemed like a street opera. It looked kind of like Romeo and Juliet (with the stairs on plaza), except that there were three people singing. Maybe it was their version. After they left the plaza Daddy and I took it up and played some fiddle tunes. It was fun, even if no one noticed.
The hotel where we were staying is a beautiful, old, domed, tiled mansion. It used to be a seminary, where monks got trained. I think the seminary must have changed quite a bit to make it the elegant, lovely hotel it is today. There were two courtyards, one of which had a well. I looked down to see if it was fake, but it wasn’t. There was the glint of water in it, a long way down, and when it rained we could hear the water draining into the well.
The night of the 17th was the opening night of the Festival de Calle. The Festival de Calle is an international festival of street theater. Groups come from all over the world to perform and watch it. To name a few countries,
It started out much the same way Circus Soleil starts, with the “stage” (in this case a large cobbled square by the biggest cathedral) dark. Then the first performers apparently stumble upon the set and look confused at what they find. The apparatus for the set was huge. It was like an enormous, inverted, metal flower hung from a construction crane. The top-most part was a net, like the rigging of a ship. Right at the start, one of the performers climbed the tall metal structure. He sat in the point made by the net and just rang the large bell that hung there. The big bass bell signified the end of a “scene” in the performance.
Out in the crowd were structures like mini circus tents without the cloth, just a metal
birdcage like frame. In the beginning of the show, people in a white costume ran around lighting torches in brackets on the birdcages. People in medieval jester garb got up on the birdcages and started performing. Every time the bell sounded the performers would rotate stages. The people in jester’s clothing each performed separately for their section of the crowd—by this time several thousand people. While the jesters were making jokes (which we couldn’t understand because they were in Spanish) the women in white climbed to the top of the central large metal apparatus and waited in the ropes hanging there. When the bell rang again all the jesters left their birdcages and climbed into small metal cages hanging from the main inverted flower and started playing the bells and drums that hung there. Each “cage” was just metal strips for feet, a bit that clipped onto their costume and a thin backrest which then curled around in front of them to support the bells. There was a rope that attached the top of the “cage” to the larger structure in general.
[A pigeon just pooped on my computer. Gross!]
Anyway, then the whole structure was lifted into the air by the crane (everyone still playing the bells). The thing had looked dumpy and useless on the ground, but in the air it was quite graceful. It looked like a giant flower. At the tip of each petal was a musician. In the middle hung guy with the bell and the three women in white were up there too—as acrobats. They hung suspended on their trapezes spaced evenly around the flower. Then the flower started spinning around—the musicians were still playing their song, which got more complicated by the minute. Then the petals opened up, pulled open by some complicated machinery at the base of the flower. And it closed, and opened again and again. The petals did this several times and when they stopped, the musicians were above the center of the flower. The bells kept on playing through all of it. The job requirement must have said “never gets motion sick and loves heights”. They were all very high up—probably 60 metres—level with the top of the cathedral’s spire. And they were spinning briskly too. It is amazing that they never faltered in their playing or made a discernable mistake. The acrobats were good too, performing so high above the plaza. They did summersaults and tricks I don’t know the name of, all without falling off their rope. The whole aerial performance was lit from below, giving it a very surreal feeling. Fantastico!
During the day before that evening performance, we went to a world class museum. Zacetacas is a very rich town; its fortunes were made in nearby silver mines during colonial times. Many of the town’s inhabitants are either artists or art collectors. Since the people were so rich, they were able to buy some very big deal art. When a collector dies, usually his house turns into a museum for the art. We saw a collection that belonged to one individual: it was amazing. There was a wall full of Picasso, mostly his saner pieces. Two walls were covered in Miro originals (when he was just getting into Ubu) and several of Chagall’s pieces. There were many other artists there too, but I didn’t know them beforehand. Even the restaurants had original art! In a café that we ate in there were several pieces by Miro and one beautiful Chagall—along with lots of others I didn’t recognize. Anywhere else they would be reproductions, but there they were the original prints! It was amazing to see so many fabulous art works in one place!
