What San Miguel is….
San Miguel de Allende is about color and exposed rebar and the art of saying “No,” frequently and politely. It’s about the vegetable stands with onions that glisten so much they look almost like ceramic sculptures. It’s a small bird packed into a mesh shopping bag for sale on the street. It’s a strange combination of wealth and poverty, dust and greenery, Internet and travel by donkey…
I ventured into town with Lena for the first time yesterday, after six days of serious recuperation at a friend’s hacienda. “House” isn’t really an accurate description for something with four bedrooms and an Olympic-size pool fed by a hot spring. The water comes out of the ground at about 95 degrees. In my room, the bathroom is the size of my bedroom in the States, with a ceiling twice as high…anyway, you can see it for yourself in the photo album.
San Miguel’s tourist center is a garden plaza known as El Jardin, which at the moment is ripped up for massive amounts of construction. The tourists still flock there, though–it’s easy enough to tell from the number of t-shirt and tequila glass sellers. Egad. Welcome to Gringolandia. Your best bet for avoiding it is to head away from the Jardin…
The streets are narrow one-lane affairs where trucks, SUVs, ATVs, cars and motorcycles all vie for the same right of way. Joy tells me that somebody in San Miguel must be doing landmark business in repairing side-view mirrors. The streets themselves are lined with massive ornate wooden doors, behind which you’re like to find anything from an expensive fashion shop, a “farmaceria”, a cambio, a computer store, or even a sushi bar. Sushi in inland Mexico? I preferred to take my chances down in the Mercado de San Juan, where ladies in amazingly ugly aprons sell vegetables and serve up tortas. My breakfast was a “huarache”, a slim baked-and-fried tortilla in the shape of a sandal bottom, topped with stewed chicharron (pigskin to you gringos), picadillo (a ground beef mixture) and plenty of ‘roja picante’.
When in doubt, get food with plenty of chile and lime. They’re both natural antiseptics…
