Rinconada de La Aldea: Magical alley, doors? and barrio San Antonio

We are about out of time in San Miguel de Allende. I am sure there is a lot worth seeing that we have not seen. Today we went for a walk in barrio (neighborhoods are called barrios here) San Antonio. I had a good feeling about San Antonio even though we had not explored it extensively. Today we started at Rinconada de La Aldea, a public walkway that is an alley. It is as nice an alley as you will find, narrow, thus shady most off the time. It curves past a Thai restaurant then curves around for several blocks with no intersecting alleys or streets. Many benches sit along the way and artists have creatively filled empty walls with some great murals.

I have already written about our fascination with doors. That was expanded today, but with a major difference – today the doors were murals. They do not open or lead to anything. I think you will have to look carefully to tell they are fakes.

One more.

And now more murals and a monolith declaring “That peace prevails”.

The alley ended up at a couple of very cool looking hotels that I would love to check out.  The hotels are the only stretch where a car can drive, there is no exit where we entered. They must be among the quietest hotels in the entire city. One quirk exists in the alley. There are long stretches of wall that are unadorned, except by graffiti artists. I do not mean artful graffiti, but gang type graffiti like we see in Spokane. This is striking because we had seen so little graffiti in San Miguel. The graffiti we saw in the alley almost exclusively left the artistic paintings alone.

The alley exited into typical residential streets, which are always interspersed with small businesses. Small businesses are another of the things we like about San Miguel. Unlike most of the U.S, Mexican communities tend to be littered with independent small business people. After 44 days here we have been to one large U.S. style store. We found that the small shops and markets fulfill our needs. We wandered into a small shop, Martez, owned by a middle aged gringa. She is an herbalist and an artist, very enthusiastic. She greeted us with a small cup of one of her tea blends, delicious and refreshing. There was already a group of four twenty somethings in the shop. We had a lively discussion about the intersection of art and science, and the reality of learning not having an end. Buckminster Fuller came up in the discussion, providing a link to my cousin Bob who in the 197o’s, inspired by Fuller , developed a geodesic home model that could be sold and built remarkably cheaply. He marketed it to the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and the future of the reservation was nearly changed when they agreed to replace run-down homes with domes. Unfortunately, funding disappeared and decades later many families still lived in shacks.

As we walked out of the San Antonio barrio we found our selves near the Rosewood Hotel which I wrote about in an earlier blog. Knowing it would be expensive to the degree of overpriced I decide to ask the obviously slowing down Sheila if she would like to have an afternoon glass of wine on the fourth floor rooftop terrazzo of the hotel. She gladly accepted and even took the elevator up. Rosewood is the accepted queen of San Miguel rooftops, of which there are a plethora.

As noted, it is expensive, but part of that is the quality. Wait staff are impeccably clean and polite. The rooftop follows suit and the service made us feel we were at a five star establishment. Even the little napkins often set under drinks are cloth at the Rosewood. The wine was brought to our table on a tray that held the bottle. An inch of wine was poured for tasting, then the waiter stood patiently as I tasted a couple of slow discerning sips. I liked the wine and okayed it, but the waiter stated I was welcome to taste something else. I declined. We had ordered a glass of Sauvignon Blanc for Sheila. The same procedure followed, only this time, Sheila made a face and asked me to taste the wine. When I tasted I told the waiter that the wine was sweeter than we were used to. He immediately suggested that it was the sweetest of their three choices and agreed to have her try a drier wine. Total graciousness as he brought the next bottle, which was quite agreeable.

I have seen too many passive aggressive wait staff who were obviously not happy to be doing their job. It is one of the reasons we do not go out frequently. It was a treat to be served by someone who made us feel important. We then proceeded to sip our wines for close to an hour without feeling rushed. A bowl of watermelon pieces with cayenne and salt (you should try it and we have also been treated to jicama prepared the same way and loved it) and a bowl of the best peanuts we have ever had was brought, no charge, to our table.  I do not know what makes one peanut better than another and I don’t generally even like peanuts, but we found these to be irresistible. A final touch was the music. It took me back to the nineties when I would dance for hours at electronic dance music clubs in Denver. One of the great things about that time clubs would have dance floors, but also a chill room where the electronic music lost the the pounding beat was replaced by “chill music”, dreamy and calm. That was the music experience on the Rosewood rooftop. We left with no regrets about the money spent.

The music experience smacked me with the realization of how long ago that was, about 30 years ago. Then I started thinking about how much Mexico has changed since I first came south – that was about 50 years ago. Those are the kind of realizations that cement the reality I am getting old, just another reason to travel. Today was the kind of afternoon that leaves me enthused about travel. Our senses deserve to be treated to new input. We all deserve to meet strangers and engage. I know this can happen at home. I also believe that it is too easy to become complacently redundant in activities when we are home. Taken out of our comfort zones we are more prone to explore and engage. In two more days our explorations will move to Oaxaca.