el crispito

Street Scene, Zacatecas

We traveled by bus (ETN, "la línea más cómoda") between Guadalajara and Zacatecas, going through Aguascalientes (again, both the city and the state. We like ETN because they have only 24 seats on the bus, which translates to more room per seat. This is generally referred to in Mexico as 'executive class.' They also give you a bag with a ham and cheese sandwich and the soda of your choice (as long as it's made by Coca-Cola®) as you board the bus. Luckily it's not so hard to peel the ham off the sandwich, because they don't offer vegetarian or kosher alternatives. Like most first class (and the higher, executive class) bus lines, they showed movies during the trip. All but one was dubbed into Spanish, and it was subtitled.

We only stopped in Aguascalientes for about 20 minutes, so information on that capital will have to come from another trip. It's interesting to note that it is known for wine and brandy production, although it's not like there's a lot produced there nowadays. It seemed to have a much bigger bus station than Zacatecas, though.

We arrived at the central camionera at sunset, and hopped in a cab to wind our way through the pink and gold maze of city streets to get to the Hotel Argento Inn where we were staying (pictured on the right in the photo above). We had a friend call to make reservations for us, because it was a complicated call. All the rooms in hotels around the city seemed to be booked up for some reason we couldn't figure out, and whether or not we would take a room in a hotel depended on the combined answers to a series of questions: Did they have rooms available? Did they have rooms with windows facing outside (compared to having windows that only face an inside courtyard, which usually results in the room being very dark and gloomy),? Were they located in or near the historic center? Did they cost less than $1500 MXN per night? Did they have one bed? Double beds? Private bathrooms? An iron an ironing board? The task of calling around to several hotels and struggling to get answers to these questions (and understanding those answers) was daunting to me, so I asked for help. I'm not proud of that, but I did. Unexpected surprises with hotels in Mexico can be quite disturbing, and I didn't feel like suffering (and making Shawn suffer) them gladly just to guard my pride.

Street Scene, Zacatecas

Zacatecas is known for having a lot of its colonial architecture still intact. It is, along with places like Cuernavaca, Puebla and San Miguel de Allende, one of the "colonial jewels" of Mexico. Like most of Mexico, you will find some crumbling about the edges in Zacatecas, but there was less than I expected. It isn't that all the old colonial stuff has been restored to its original beauty, but it seems to have been kept clean and the ravages one notices are of time, not the hand of man.

Guadalajara is considered one of the "jewels" as well, and it certainly does have lots of colonial gems that are still in good shape and worth visiting. However, Guadalajara, being a bigger city and having developed to serve the business economy, doesn't rely on the colonial and historic elements about town as much as Zacatecas does. In fact, much of the old colonial stuff here was torn down long ago to make way for more modern facilities. In turn, many of those have been torn down even more recently to make way for even more modern facilities.

The net effect of this is that in Guadalajara, the colonial and historic sites seem to pop up here and there within the city (granted, the centro histórico has a large concentration of colonial stuff), and one does not get a sense of being back in colonial Mexico as much as one does in the smaller cities such as Zacatecas. No modern buildings exist beside the old posadas, government buildings and cathedrals in Zacatecas. Those are all located outside the city center (which is the centro histórico), and even then, they are not of the steel-and-glass type, but rather just one or two story cement blocks common to more rural Mexico.

Street Scene, Zacatecas

That being said, the colonial stuff in Zacatecas is fantastic. There's the cathedral:

Cathedral, Zacatecas

As you can see, it is very ornate, and the detail is breathtaking. Across the street from the cathedral is a little plaque that identifies the various saints perched about the front.

Cathedral, Zacatecas

The town is buit among a set of large hills, so if you go there, be prepared to do some incline walking.

Uphill/Downhill Stroll, Zacatecas

There is a large mountain known as La Bufa hemming the city in to one side, and at the summit, they have a few shops, telescopes, a temple where a statue of the everpresent Virgin is housed and some statues commemorating the revolutionary battles that took place in and around Zacatecas. If you are strong of nerve and stomach, you can take the teleférico to the top, a cable car that runs every 15 minutes.

Teleférico to La Bufa, Zacatecas

Some of the very old buildings in town have collapsed in spots, but they have had their usable bits turned into useful spaces. That is the case with the Museo Rafael Colonel, which houses a lot of contemporary art and an enormous collection of masks.

Grounds of the Rafael Coronel Museum, Zacatecas

The most impressive thing to me about Zacatecas is its wealth of art museums. You can read all about the silver mine and the significance of the town during the revolutionary war all over the Internet, but those things do not interest me so much. I may have mentioned on these pages that I'm less of an antiquities guy and more of a fine arts guy when it comes to museums, and that came into play during our visit to Zacatecas. We elected to go to various art museums instead of the traditional historic hotspots, and we were not disappointed.

We visited the Museo Rafael Coronel, the Museo Pedro Coronel (they are brothers) and the Museo Manuel Felguérez. All of these are modern artists from Zacatecas, and their works are included along with those of other famous modern artists in their museums.

I liked the works of Rafael Coronel at his museum. The number of Miró pieces at the Pedro Coronel museum was astounding (just one set of pieces numbered 36), and they also have a Dali and a few Picassos. The best part of the Felguérez museum was the entire collection of the 12 murals painted for the Mexico pavillion at the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka.

The parks in Zacatecas are very lush and they keep them in great shape, like their old buildings.

Park, Zacatecas

Of course, those of you who know me well know that when I travel I'm most interested in funky and fine foodstuffs, restaurants and general lifestyle things that are not so much on the tourist's "Must See" list. In Zacatecas, I found plenty of things that I thought you all would find interesting, disgusting, or both.

Cow Stomach Tacos, Zacatecas

Yes, tripe tacos. Seeing this made Shawn remark about Carlos Mecía's bit about why they don't have Latinos on shows where people have to eat wacky stuff, like "Survivor": because they eat disturbing things on a daily basis. It would be no challenge whatsoever for them.

(I'd like to point out here, although I don't have a lot of photos showing it, whoever paints the signage in Zacatecas for all these businesses is a master. There are various styles of lettering all over the place and they're all machine perfect.)

Jicamoy, Zacatecas

This isn't so gross as just strange. It's a stand that sells jicama, that big root vegetable that is kind of like a bigger, sweeter water chestnut. They're popular all over Mexico, peeled, stuck on a stick, and dusted with chile. This place, Jicamoy, offers something like 15 flavor variations of the jicama-on-a-stick concept.

Jicamoy, Zacatecas

Then you have these places that have a simple menu and simple atmosphere.

Restaurant, Zacatecas [View Enlargement of Wall Photos]

Here you see the famous Mexican actor and singer, Pedro Infante pictured on one of the motorcycles. At the top in the center of this photo, you can see the hole in the wall that opens to the outside, covered with a tarp.

Restaurant, Zacatecas

My favorite spot to eat in Zacatecas turned out to be a Greek cafeteria. Here "cafeteria" is used in the Mexican sense of the word, which translates into the American lexicon as something more like a diner with a very extensive selection. It is the Café y Nevería Acrópolis, located right next to the cathedral.

Shawn at the Café y Nevería Acrópolis, Zacatecas

Don't let the name and the ownership fool you. This place is 100% Mexican, and pretty old school Mexican at that. They have all kinds of platos you can enjoy alongside shakes, raspados (kind of like a real fruit slushy at the Acrópolis - like a snow cone in some other places) and ice cream floats. It's the first time I've seen an ice cream float on a menu in Mexico, and the first time I've seen something I've heard about elsewhere: the excessive torta barrio.

We enjoyed ours in the ahogada ('drowned') style, so the whole thing consisted of a chile relleno made the right way with chile poblano, diced tomato, onion and crema, all on a bolillo (and not the birote common to Jalisco), then smothered in a spicy tomato sauce. DELICIOUS!

Also cool about the place is the fact that they display artwork drawn by famous local artist/customers on their walls, and they have a display of plates embellished with artwork made out of leftover Turkish coffee grounds.

The Café y Nevería Acrópolis also sells their coffee by the kilo, as well as some other, um, things.

Muchas Nalgas at Café y Nevería Acrópolis, Zacatecas

Some other visual things caught our eye in Zacatecas, like these school girls on their way to an event being held in front of the Palacio del Gobierno.

School Girls in Transit, Zacatecas

Run little girl, RUN!

School Girls in Transit, Zacatecas

This house was built with unusual bricks. I bet when they built it, the neighbors were shocked and appalled.

Bricks, Zacatecas

In Mexico, people still send telegrams, although with the growing popularity of email, business is falling off.

Telegrams, Zacatecas

'Street of the Sad Indian.' Given what white folks did to the natives in the Americas, there are a lot more than one, I'm sure. Which one qualifies as 'THE' sad one, I don't know. Iron Eyes Cody perhaps?

Esquina Indio Triste y Hidalgo, Zacatecas

One parting glance of Zacatecas that Shawn took from the bus station before we left, thus ending our Zacatecan odyssey.

View of Zacatecas from the Central Camionera, Zacatecas