Queretaro was so exciting this past weekend--with a major arts festival featuring international and local performers on stage and buskers everywhere else--that I ended up staying the whole weekend.
As a city of about 200,000 it seems that all of Queretaro's citizens plus a large number of Mexican tourists were out in force on Saturday and Sunday. The street life is so vibrant that you almost can't go wrong with a camera. Just point, keep on clicking, and something good is bound to turn up.
The street food in town was also cheap, filling, and delicious. And to top things off, I found a great value hotel room in the refurbished Hotel Hidalgo: just a little over $30 for an excellent room with a big cable TV in an old colonial courtyard building.
I don't remember much about my last visit here (circa 1998), but it seems to me that Queretaro has gone through a major sprucing up of its plazas and parks since then. This year it has impressed me as a lot more "happening" than back then.
Today I write from San Miguel de Allende, another fine old colonial town but much smaller than Queretaro.
San Miguel has become something of an American colony with boomer retirees buying real estate and living here full or part time. In the central square it's strange but true to see yankees come close to outnumbering the locals in the afternoon.
Tony Cohan, an author from California, first visited San Miguel with his wife in the mid-1980s. They fell in love with the place, bought a fixer-upper house in the old town for $60,000, and proceeded to make a life here for the next 25 years.
Cohan's books (On Mexican Time and Mexican Days) about their experiences in Mexico make for some very warm reading. It must be interesting to have witnessed all that has changed in this lovely little town since Cohan moved here. It reminds me of the changes I saw from 1989 to 2001 in Chiangmai, Thailand.
Another author I've been checking out of late is a Generation Y Mexican-American, Daniel Hernandez from Los Angeles.
He first visited Mexico City in 2002 in a quest to fine his roots, and he has since made a semi-permanent home there as a writer and journalist.
His book Down and Delirious in Mexico City is just as captivating as David Lida's book but focuses more on the youth subcultures of the DF and the wider Mexican scene. He points out that more than half the population of the DF is between 14 and 34 years old.
Sometime in the mid '00s the youth scene in Mexico City exploded internationally as it drew many expatriates from Europe, the U.S., and other parts of Latin America, and Hernandez was there--participating and documenting it through his blog and as a contributer to Mexican and American publications.
Tomorrow I'm off to Guanajuato, and I hope to be back in the capital on Friday night.
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