Visiting Plaza Garibaldi is different when you're with a friend.
As a solo traveler, the musicians gave me barely a second glance, but with a friend in tow they are hoping we are ready to pay cash for some live music.
Sitting at a very reasonably priced restaurant terrace (60 pesos, or $5, for top shelf tequila), we were intermittantly approached by musicians offering a song--for what amounts to a song.
After bargaining a young fellow down to 50 pesos from 70, he said "One moment please" and disappeared to round up his partners--who turned out to be another guitarist and a trumpet-wielding hipster with dark glasses and a smartphone.
It was immediately clear that 50 pesos gets you a trio, at most, which includes a horn player busy texting his buddies between riffs! This was great fun for me to "give back" after many years of playing similar gigs in Thailand and elsewhere. The trumpet player reminded me of several ex-colleagues of mine, lol. . .
Later an older, more decrepit pair of singing guitarists attempted to entice us with the old, worn out cliches "La Cucaracha" and "Besame Mucho".
"No! but no, no Besame Mucho, no. . ." we protested.
But if we wanted something better, it was going to cost us. . .50 pesos! "De accuerdo" we agreed, and the duo gave us fairly decent rendition of we don't what, but it was a beautiful song, and everyone was satisfied with the transaction.
Showing posts with label mariachi groups. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mariachi groups. Show all posts
Friday, February 24, 2012
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Guanajuato Continues to Charm
Okay, I admit it: I love Guanajuato! It has just about everything I like in a travel destination.
I think of it as sort of like the Venice of Mexico, though it's not near the sea and it doesn't have canals and singing gondola men. But it's built in rough hill country, and there is a whole network of road tunnels connecting parts of the town.
What it does have in droves is charming old world ambience and many pedestrian-only streets and lanes, so it's perfect for street performances, strolling, people watching, al fresco dining, and all the other things car-free areas are good for.
Some of the pedestrian lanes, known here as callejones, are so narrow it's a bit of a squeeze for two people to pass each other. One famous lane is called Callejone de Beso because two people can be in buildings across from each other, but still be close enough to kiss.
In colonial times, Guanajuato was an important center of silver mining, and you can still tour the old mines today.
But these days the town is a vibrant arts center with several beautiful theaters including the Teatro Juarez, an imposing old opera palace.
Guanajuato is also a major student center with an important university in town, so naturally there are lots of young people. Some of these youngsters join traditional choral societies, known as callejoneadas or estudiantinas, who dress up in elaborate old world costumes and serenade the public in those same narrow walkways on Friday and Saturday evenings.
And there are plenty of mariachi groups here, as well, so if you like the old world street life as much as I do, you can see why I've made Guanajuato a must-see destination on all three of my trips to Mexico.
Guanajuato is also the home town of Frida Kahlo's husband, muralist Diego Rivera. His childhood home is now a museum which I visited on a previous trip.
In one of the little plazuelas here there is a Frida y Diego Restaurant & Bar, and I can confirm they make a mean espresso. Their menu also features a desayunos (breakfast) "Frida", but none for poor Diego. . .
Just as I discovered in Queretaro last week, Guanajuato is in the midst of a free arts festival featuring theater performers, jazz musicians, clowns, performance artists, and others. Something is happening here, somewhere sometime, everyday this month.
That reminds me that I met one of the groups booked at the Queretaro festival last weekend, an international trio of stage performers based in Berlin called The Garden Project. This features two men, an Australian and a Greek, plus a woman from Poland.
I caught some of their show onstage outdoors on Sunday night. It was a very strange collage of dance, video, music, and light, but what was most interesting was The Garden Project's collaboration with a local group of like-minded artists.
I met two of The Garden Project at breakfast one morning, and mentioned that Guanajuato might be a good place for them to check out for future bookings.
Regrettably, they said they were headed straight back to Berlin on Monday morning so didn't have a chance to explore any more of beautiful old Mexico.
I think of it as sort of like the Venice of Mexico, though it's not near the sea and it doesn't have canals and singing gondola men. But it's built in rough hill country, and there is a whole network of road tunnels connecting parts of the town.
What it does have in droves is charming old world ambience and many pedestrian-only streets and lanes, so it's perfect for street performances, strolling, people watching, al fresco dining, and all the other things car-free areas are good for.
Some of the pedestrian lanes, known here as callejones, are so narrow it's a bit of a squeeze for two people to pass each other. One famous lane is called Callejone de Beso because two people can be in buildings across from each other, but still be close enough to kiss.
In colonial times, Guanajuato was an important center of silver mining, and you can still tour the old mines today.
But these days the town is a vibrant arts center with several beautiful theaters including the Teatro Juarez, an imposing old opera palace.
Guanajuato is also a major student center with an important university in town, so naturally there are lots of young people. Some of these youngsters join traditional choral societies, known as callejoneadas or estudiantinas, who dress up in elaborate old world costumes and serenade the public in those same narrow walkways on Friday and Saturday evenings.
And there are plenty of mariachi groups here, as well, so if you like the old world street life as much as I do, you can see why I've made Guanajuato a must-see destination on all three of my trips to Mexico.
Guanajuato is also the home town of Frida Kahlo's husband, muralist Diego Rivera. His childhood home is now a museum which I visited on a previous trip.
In one of the little plazuelas here there is a Frida y Diego Restaurant & Bar, and I can confirm they make a mean espresso. Their menu also features a desayunos (breakfast) "Frida", but none for poor Diego. . .
Just as I discovered in Queretaro last week, Guanajuato is in the midst of a free arts festival featuring theater performers, jazz musicians, clowns, performance artists, and others. Something is happening here, somewhere sometime, everyday this month.
That reminds me that I met one of the groups booked at the Queretaro festival last weekend, an international trio of stage performers based in Berlin called The Garden Project. This features two men, an Australian and a Greek, plus a woman from Poland.
I caught some of their show onstage outdoors on Sunday night. It was a very strange collage of dance, video, music, and light, but what was most interesting was The Garden Project's collaboration with a local group of like-minded artists.
I met two of The Garden Project at breakfast one morning, and mentioned that Guanajuato might be a good place for them to check out for future bookings.
Regrettably, they said they were headed straight back to Berlin on Monday morning so didn't have a chance to explore any more of beautiful old Mexico.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
La Antigua: Busker Central in Central America
I haven't written much about buskers or musicians in Central America mainly because there hasn't been anything to write about. Unlike in Mexico where there is a whole mariachi troubador culture on the streets of its colonial cities, in El Salvador or Honduras you can go many days without seeing someone with a guitar or violin. When you do encounter street musicians, as you do in Granada, Nicaragua, it's somewhat of a pleasant surprise. And when I do bump into the occasional street band, as I did in Gracias, Honduras, I always donate something to the cause.
But in Antigua we are in a whole different league. It helps if you can picture the massive crowds here--not only of weekend trippers from Guatemala City and other parts of the country, but also foreign tourists from Europe and North America, high school and college kids from America, and denizens of the large expatriate Western community who now make Antigua their home. With crowds like these on a typical Saturday, it can pay very well to play on the street.
This city just reeks of cosmopolitan prosperity with its restaurants, bars, coffee shops, hotels, travel agencies, boutique stores, and regular markets. In a region where bookstores are oases and second hand English language books sell for $10 or more, there are so many books in English available, and for almost nothing, that I'm close to hyperventilating as I type this dispatch. La Antigua definitely has anything you could possibly want, especially for someone like me who has come from a markedly much poorer place such as western Honduras. If you want McDonald's or Burger King or Subway or almost any kind of pizza you desire, it's all here.
With crowds the way they are and with the sort of conveniences you can find here, maybe that's partly why the local buskers can do so well in this town. And it seems even foreign travelers can hang their hats for awhile and make a living with a song and a guitar, or--as in the case of "Takeshi"--by painting Japanese calligraphy.
Check out the following website from a young Japanese guy I just saw on Antigua's streets who had a huge crowd around him:
http://takeshi.henjin.com/
Takeshi sings original songs, plays guitar, and sells his CDs, but his main attraction is he paints your name in katakana/hiragana (Chinese/Japanese script) on a strip of white paper for five quetzales (60 cents). He has a big sign written in Spanish telling of his voyage around the world which encourages donations, and he wears a baseball cap and t-shirt promoting his website. Flyers ("take one!") are available so you can look him up on the web. . .and link him to your blog!
I can report that the kids loved this guy, and their (mostly) affluent local parents were fascinated by him. Of course I was pretty fascinated too.
When I think back now to my experiences in France and Switzerland of the 1980s, I regret that the CD was barely invented then, that there was no such thing as a "world wide web", and that it didn't seem economically feasible to busk one's way around Central America, Eastern Europe, Africa, or any other so-called "third world" area.
Now it looks as if maybe "third world areas" are among the only interesting--and lucrative--places left to go as an itinerant troubador in this increasingly homogenized, globalized world.
But in Antigua we are in a whole different league. It helps if you can picture the massive crowds here--not only of weekend trippers from Guatemala City and other parts of the country, but also foreign tourists from Europe and North America, high school and college kids from America, and denizens of the large expatriate Western community who now make Antigua their home. With crowds like these on a typical Saturday, it can pay very well to play on the street.
This city just reeks of cosmopolitan prosperity with its restaurants, bars, coffee shops, hotels, travel agencies, boutique stores, and regular markets. In a region where bookstores are oases and second hand English language books sell for $10 or more, there are so many books in English available, and for almost nothing, that I'm close to hyperventilating as I type this dispatch. La Antigua definitely has anything you could possibly want, especially for someone like me who has come from a markedly much poorer place such as western Honduras. If you want McDonald's or Burger King or Subway or almost any kind of pizza you desire, it's all here.
With crowds the way they are and with the sort of conveniences you can find here, maybe that's partly why the local buskers can do so well in this town. And it seems even foreign travelers can hang their hats for awhile and make a living with a song and a guitar, or--as in the case of "Takeshi"--by painting Japanese calligraphy.
Check out the following website from a young Japanese guy I just saw on Antigua's streets who had a huge crowd around him:
http://takeshi.henjin.com/
Takeshi sings original songs, plays guitar, and sells his CDs, but his main attraction is he paints your name in katakana/hiragana (Chinese/Japanese script) on a strip of white paper for five quetzales (60 cents). He has a big sign written in Spanish telling of his voyage around the world which encourages donations, and he wears a baseball cap and t-shirt promoting his website. Flyers ("take one!") are available so you can look him up on the web. . .and link him to your blog!
I can report that the kids loved this guy, and their (mostly) affluent local parents were fascinated by him. Of course I was pretty fascinated too.
When I think back now to my experiences in France and Switzerland of the 1980s, I regret that the CD was barely invented then, that there was no such thing as a "world wide web", and that it didn't seem economically feasible to busk one's way around Central America, Eastern Europe, Africa, or any other so-called "third world" area.
Now it looks as if maybe "third world areas" are among the only interesting--and lucrative--places left to go as an itinerant troubador in this increasingly homogenized, globalized world.
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