out and about

Last week I was able to get out of town a couple of times as well as explore a bit more of Guanajuato.  The first excursion was to Dolores Hidalgo, which is significant in Mexican history.   I visited two museums and the church, looked at a lot of ceramics, and tried a few different kinds of nieve (ice cream or frozen flavored ice).  The city is known for it's unique flavors of nieve, and I tried the avocado (creamy) and alfalfa (icy).  The alfalfa tasted pretty good and reminded me of the farm, the avocado was not anything special.  If I get back to Dolores Hidalgo, I will have to try some more of the unique flavors.

Thursday, I went with a Mexican friend who was in search of some flower pots.  We walked through one of  Guanajuato's underground tunnels, saw where my friend lived over thirty years ago, walked up to a mine where we could see some old walls and out over the city, ate tacos at the home of one of her friends and had ice cream.  A note on Mexican tacos, your food is called tacos if you put it in a corn tortilla, so it could be meat, vegetables, beans, or a combination of  those ingredients, but it rarely, if ever, includes cheese.

At end the week, I took a bus to see the Cristo Rey monument.   It looks big in pictures...it is enormous when you see it in person.  It was good to get out of the city, and the hours I spent on the bus (one hour each way for Dolores Hidalgo and Cristo Rey) allowed me to see the countryside...something I miss a lot here.  

The countryside reminds me some of what a person sees in parts of the Central Valley of California.


It was good to see a few new things, but I am glad that vacation is over and school is back in session.  Two weeks does not seem like a long time for a break in Minnesota, but it seemed long here.