'Cross the Breeze

Guanajuato: almost too beautiful for words, but man, it takes it out of you. Because of its historic architecture (even the roads are still cobble-stone), none of the main city has been changed significantly for literally centuries, which means there are almost no driveable roads and you have to walk *everywhere*. It's not exactly a huge city, but doing this all day is not my idea of a vacation. Speaking of which, not only did our teachers give us a list of places we apparently had to go, but there were 17 of them. Yeah, that wasn't going to happen.

We did make it to some of them, though (four, to be exact), with no small effort, either. You would think Diego River's house would be well-marked and easy to find, but instead it was nestled behind a dump truck on one of the few streets being renovated in the entire city. We passed it three times before finding it, only to discover that Rivera only lived there until he was *six*. Something tells me his best work came later.

Others didn't disappoint, though: above you can see Zander, myself, John and Ross (left to right) facing the Pipila, which is a giant statue of a revolutionary hero of the same name on top of a huge mountain overlooking Guanajuato (below is what the town center looked like from up there). There we met a random, friendly dude from Montana who directed us towards many a bar, all of which ended up being completely lame.



Speaking of which, turns out that Guanajuato has absolutely nothing for a nightlife when the city's university is on vacation, which happened... exactly a week before we showed up. So instead of sacking Rome it was more like sacking Palo Alto...in the summertime. No joke: despite plenty of people walking the streets, we spent what felt like four hours scouring the city for a decent bar on Friday night, only to find every single one empty. Thoroughly discouraged, Zander, Ross and I headed back to our hostel, where we thought our night would end uneventfully. If only, if only.

A word about sharing hostels in Mexico: make sure your roommates aren't creepy old dudes pushing 50 with no plausible explanation for hanging around a hostel. Case in point: Zander wakes up to this Creepy Old Dude leaning over his bed, asks him what he's doing, and feels the guy's hand grope his bare thy beneath his blanket before telling him to go the Hell away. Creepy Old Guy retires to the bathroom for an ungodly amount of time (let's just pray he had eaten a bad torta or something) and decides to spend the rest of the night sleeping naked, mooning the entire room. Zander didn't sleep for the rest of the night, and since I had to sleep on the bunk bed above Creepy Old Guy, neither did I. The Irish girl we met at our hostel said she's heard similar complaints about him, which made us wonder why this pervert was still allowed to stay in any non-jail setting, but no matter. On the plus side, our hostel did have some nice hammocks:



We fared (relatively) better the next day after changing hostels and getting a fresh start. We rendezvoused with those girls we had met in Ixtapa, who were as confusingly flirtatious and aloof as always. As you can see from the picture below, they met us in Guanajuato (a forty-minute drive from their native Leon) looking quite lovely and spent several hours with us drinking Sangria in a cafe. They promised us they would get *more* dressed up for us in Leon before returning to Guanajuato for a night on the town, but never showed. Experiences like this are making me wonder: are all Mexican girls this flaky, or did one of us do something to piss these particular ones off?



Luckily, our new hostel roomates were a) not pedophiles b) really funny German characters. We tried introducing them to some of the more beautiful girls in our program (that ship has sailed for us anyway by now) but they didn't have quite the touch American girls tend to appreciate - one of them grabbed my friend Eliza's ass, and things went south from there. However, they redeemed themselves by showing us to a bar with actual people inside, and most of our class (including legally-blind Justin, who *never* goes out) had a grand old time dancing together to all the techno-electro-rave staples that, by now, we all know by heart. It wasn't a memorable night exactly, but after our experience with Creepy Old Guy I was actually thankful for that.

Actually, the best cap-off to the weekend I could have possibly hoped for came in the form of Batman: Cabellero de la Noche, which is the coolest movie I have seen in...God, has it really been that long? Anyway, I won't spoil too much, but Heath Ledger not only upstages everyone else in the movie (that includes Christian Bale, by the way) but he makes even Jack F'n Nicholson look like a chump. But the real treat was just how magnificently Christopher Nolan managed to hold the intricate plot together for nearly three hours while maintaining that edge-of-your-seat, action movie adrenaline. I'm already dying from anticipation for the third installment. It's a good thing, too: after a thoroughly underwhelming Guanajuato experience I couldn't take another disappointment.