I decided to take a trip through Mexico for Independence Day. I ended up travelling for 5 days through 5 different towns - San Miguel de Allende, Tequisquiapan, Mexico City, Pachuca and Real del Monte. This is the first day of my journey.
I woke up around 4, got on a bus and arrived in San Miguel. It's a beautiful city - reputedly the most beautiful in Mexico, and because of that, you can now see that every third business is a real estate agency, with advertisements in English, as gringos wander into cafés and stumble over their words, trying to order in Spanish.
I wandered around, looking for a cocina económica, a cheap restaurant where they would serve me Mexican food. I found an all-you-can-eat buffet for about 80 pesos, ate some pozole and some mole with chicken.
I thought, I could have slept in at least till 5am, as I was sitting in a café. I received a message, and my travelling companions finally arrived - my friend Rubi, and her old classmates from university, Iveth and Diana.
I met Rubi in a bar in Los Angeles in 2011, while returning to Australia on a trip to Colombia, and I was struck by this elegant, flirtatious Mexican beauty. I gave her my Facebook details, but after a few days she still hadn't added me, and I figured I would probably never hear from her again. Then, of course, she did add me, and we're still friends five years later. Curious to think about how we can meet people by chance, and they can continue having an effect on our lives. Delicately, gently, the threads are woven into cloth.
We checked in at the hotel - a huge villa with about 50 rooms, a big-ass atrium with a pool, and even bidets in the bathrooms.
We had a few beers in the hotel, dined, and had a few more beers in the street. At one point we wandered into a sweet shop, with cajeta - a kind of caramel made from cow's milk or goat's milk, honey and honeycomb, many kinds of sweets with chile, coconut, guava and tamarind, and an expensive brand of ganache chocolates known as "Nun's Farts".
We gave "The Yell" in the plaza. "El Grito" is a tradition all over Mexico, where people gather in the centre of the city, and listen to the governor of the town say a few patriotic words, praise Miguel Hidalgo - who you might call Mexico's version of Benjamin Franklin - and yell "¡Viva México!" - or, depending where you're from, "¡Viva México cabrones!"
As I stood there and watched the fireworks, I thought about the symbolism of what was happening. I don't normally buy in to patriotic nonsense, but I have to think about what people are really celebrating - their independence from Spain, freedom from Spanish oppression, freedom from the whims of a monarch who might never even visit their country. That is definitely something I can get behind. So I went ahead and gave the yell with thousands of Mexicans and foreigners.
Here is the footage of the fireworks that I took:
About me
My name is Kurt Robinson. I grew up in Australia, but now I live in Guadalajara, Jalisco. I write interesting things about voluntaryism, futurism, science fiction, travelling Latin America, and psychedelics. Remember to press follow so you can stay up to date with all the cool shit I post, and follow our podcast where we talk about crazy ideas for open-minded people, here: @paradise-paradox, and like us on Facebook here - The Paradise Paradox
Some other cool posts
Here are some other posts of mine (or ours) to check out:
Mexico is not a hellhole (with video)
There's no such thing as rights - only what you negotiate: Anam Paiseanta (video)