Morning in Guanajuato

This morning we walked with Bill up the hill by our apartment - to shed 47 hours of driving and to get our bearings.

A jumble of colorful blocks chuckles down the hillsides and into the little valley, forming the town of Guanajuato. In the morning sun, it looked so cheerful, and a few dogs and chickens shouted greetings across the valley. We ran across a couple of donkeys and horses roaming the hillsides, and two hummingbirds.

Saturday is a market day, so we walked into town and through the many vendors selling their wares, heaped in pretty piles along the road. We purchased aguacates (avocados), tomates (tomatoes), zanahorias (carrots), fresh tortillas, and those fresas (strawberries) we'd been hankering for since we passed all those roadside stands yesterday. I asked the vendor if it was the season for strawberries right now, and he said it's always strawberry season here. We had a gringo moment when one vendor, an elderly woman, told us our items son veinte (they are twenty pesos), but we heard cien veinte (120), so we handed her five times the cost of the vegetables. She kindly returned the excess pesos to us immediately, but not before we spurred some giggling in the little crowd. But we are OK with providing a little comic relief. We have no illusions about how often we are going to have to feel a little foolish as we figure things out and improve our language skills, and we already are grateful for how generally patient and generous people are.

(Note: Total cost of 5 avocados + 5 tomatoes = 20 pesos = $1.60. We couldn't buy one avocado for that price in Hailey in January!)