SECOND DAY IN SAN MIGUEL
This is my second day in San Miguel and already it seems as if I have been here a week. That is one of the effects of travel. Because there is so much that is new and stimulating time seems to slow down, a day here is as full of stimulation as a week back home. It is almost as if time here enters a giant loop with a week at home routinely clicking quickly by, weekend to weekend, while the time here slows down in large loop with a week ago seeming like a month ago. Asheville seems like long ago.
Today from 11 to 2 I first was guided by Martha to the right ATM where I loaded up on pesos. That is another odd thing about travel. You pay what you are asked without having a sense of whether you might be paying too much or too little. Money in another culture at first feels like funny money. This is because at home we know precisely the price of everything while in another culture the prices are often very different from the prices at home with some things much more expensive and other things much less. But more than that the effort to even calculate the price in dollars, even when you know this won’t be much help, is too laborious to calculate every time. 17 pesos to the dollar, with the exchange rate changing daily, is baffling to figure out. So as a result you feel as if you are in Alice’s Wonderland, with everything upside down, and just pay what you are asked.
After leaving Martha I walked through the Artisan Market, a below street level narrow winding market of small brightly colored shops. Everything is handmade and hand painted in brilliant colors. Everything is priced but you have no idea how to calculate what anything is worth. But since most of the shoppers browsing along the lanes are Mexican, you can trust that they know what things are worth, and pay with confidence.
I took hundreds of photographs of the market and will take hundreds more. So I’ll try to show as many as I can in the days ahead.
The day heated up, I was over dressed for the cool of the morning, the stimulation was bewildering, I was walking a couple of miles over rounded cobblestone and I hadn’t brought water with me. On the way back to our rental house, luckily downhill all the way, I became lightheaded, my hips hurt, I was tuckered out and extremely glad to nap when I returned.
In the evening our group sat on the rooftop of the Raindog Restaurant just around the corner from our house. The sun was setting and the spires of churches gleamed at dusk. The food was delicious and not expensive by Asheville standards but probably quite expensive my Mexican. When we came downstairs a band was playing in a room filled with color. The women in our group all danced and I made videos of the band and the room and marveled how far I had come from Marshall in two days.
RAINDOG VIDEO
https://share.icloud.com/photos/08f96gsNjyCnGMYddZHdXxEIQ
RAINDOG SPATIAL VIDEO
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0c37J0S-BRPytp7ao0Tp1l5eg
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 