Here, there, and everywhere

I forgot to mention that I´m in Uruapan.


(winner of the 'dude with the pimpest hat' competition in Uruapan)

My friends and I went up to the observatory at the university to watch the lunar eclipse. Here´s what we saw.



(Guanajuato at night)




(unidentified flying object)

Leaving Guanajuato was hard, as I´d met really great people and learned a lot. But it was time to move on.

I took a bus to Léon where I stopped for the day to buy shoes. You really wouldn´t believe how many shoe shops there are in this city. There were at least 5 gigantic malls dedicated solely to shoes. And then about 1000 independent little stores on top of it. It was completely overwhelming. Yet somehow, with all of the selection, I managed to buy shoes that are the wrong size, which is the reason I went to buy shoes in the first place (as my last pair of incorrectly sized shoes gave me crazy blisters). My heart goes out to all people with short, wide feet. Too many shoes are bad for the sole.


(ummmm... a gillion shoes, and THIS is the only picture I take?)

Without spending a night in Léon (it´s really not set up for economy tourists -- I went and checked the one hotel with a price that looked reasonable, only to find out that it was for 4 or 5 hour for sex) I got a bus to Uruapan, where I am now. There´s not much happening in this city, and the only reason that I came here was to spend a few nights and buy a guitar in nearby Paracho, which is apparently world-renown for it's guitars.

Instead, I got really sick, and have spent almost a week here, in bed (see previous post). I have managed to get out and see a few things. The first was the national park that they have here. It was quite beautiful, but packed with Mexican tourists (it was the weekend). I was a little disappointed, because although it was really beautiful, it was incredibly concrete & touristy.




Another day trip I took was to the cascades just outside Uruapan. This was far more tranquil and enjoyable. The cascades themselves were nothing spectacular, but the 557 steps that you had to climb down (and subsequently back up) to see them sure were. The cascades had their own beauty, a more subtle beauty than the raw power of, say, Niagara. If you looked close, you could see all of the life that these falls sustained in their mosses and grasses, etc.





The final day trip, and reason that I came to Uruapan in the first place, was to Paracho. Paracho has guitar shops lining up and down the entire main drag.




The whole town is dedicated to guitars and stringed instruments. Even their sidewalks.


(sidewalk guitar & incorrectly fit shoes)


There were thousands of beautiful handcrafted guitars.





Store after store each with their own unique guitars, that all looked the same as the guitars in the last store.



But I wanted an acoustic guitar. And of the 10,000 guitars I looked at, maybe 10 of them were acoustics, the rest were all classical/flamenco/spanish guitars. And the acoustics weren't that nice. So I still have no guitar. I have a new strategy though. I'm going to buy a cheap guitar, just to have something to strum on while I'm at the beach. This way, if it gets lots/stolen/wrecked, I won't be too upset about it, and I'll still have something to play around with.