Thursday, March 19, 2009

Monica in the Silver City


As we had a loooong weekend in Mexico (it's the Benito Juarez day on the 21st of march and for some years every monday before is a day off, as many other Mondays, in fact)we got out of the city. As you go out of this big tortilla city for other reasons but sightseing: one of them, and an important one,  BREATHING (pollution and high altitude!).
Compasses, friends' suggestion, what we read in books, guides and magazines made us say Taxco and Taxco it was!The silver city.
It's up in the mountains, near the silver mines, and it has no more than 150 thousand inhabitants. And it's really cute!
We were lucky enough to be able to go there on the highway (still horrified with the roads we saw in our way to the monarch butterfly mountains)
So, what's going on in Taxco and who is there to testify?
Thousand of tourists who come to buy silver jewellery or oth
er souvenirs (it's not a cheaper one, but at least it's 925 or even 950 type silver), or  to linger in the main square (Zocalo, as in all Mexican villages or cities), or to eat in the few places that the guides recommend, to listen to some music, on Sunday, or to swallow what the buses', taxis' and dozens of cars' exhaustion pipes produce  as there are people who seemd to have been born in the car, if they cannot climb the city hill by themselves.
There are also museums in Taxco.
I was really sad when I realised the Humboldt House was closed, there was a witch stuff exhibition there that I missed (after the Cuernavaca one featuring torture instruments used by the Inquisition). But I visited the Silvery Museum and I found out that indigens used to work metals way before the Conquista, as precolumbians used silver for religious purposes and not only. 

And yes, I came back with a wonderful pair of earrings.
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PS> 10X for the Spanish to English translation down here!