Morelia

There is so much to tell that I shall take more than one post. Morelia is a great city. They have really preserved the central area with its early Spanish colonial architecture. As in most Mexican cities, the center is a large Plaza de Armas with the huge cathedral on one side (the photo was at night with the lights on) and what were government buildings along the others. All around the plaza, the buildings have large porticos--15 - 20 feet wide. Many of the ground floors have restaurants and use part of the area under the porticos as sidewalk cafes. Many other buildings in the surrounding blocks were originally large private residences of the wealthy. Today, many of the buildings have been converted to hotels. There seem to be fairly strict laws which do not allow large or garish signage. Most of the buildings were built with a pinkish stone, called canterra and the facades are clear and uncluttered.

Our hotel was just half a block from the plaza. As is typical of much colonial architecture, the two-story building is a square surrounding a large courtyard with trees, flowers and fountains; the photo shows the courtyard at night. You can see a large number of candles around the central fountain, both on the ledge and around the base. The ceilings are very high; on the 2nd story where the bedrooms are, the ceiling is at least 13 feet high. Our room looked out on the front and had a small, narrow balcony. Kate and Jack’s room had a king size bed. Ours had 2 ‘camas matrimoniales’ (double beds); it was comfortable and we slept well. Our bathroom had both a tub and shower, although the wash basin was in the bedroom. Most of the streets in the center are very narrow except for the north-south avenue which bisects the city. Thus, traffic often flows at a snail’s pace.

I’ll talk about our day on Friday in another post. On Saturday, we were free all day to explore Morelia. We had breakfast in a cafe facing the plaza and then went looking for a city tour with an English-speaking guide. Most of the bus tours were in Spanish. However, we found a delightful young woman, Maria, who spoke quite good English and drove a van for a tour of about 2 hours. We ended up with 10 of our Ajijic group. Maria was very enthusiastic and had done lots of research with dates and other background. One thing that was very interesting was that many of the churches (there are a lot of them in Morelia) are very heavily booked on Saturdays with one wedding after another. One church we were in (it was incredibly ornamented) had just finished one wedding. We had only about 5 minutes or so before we had to leave via a side exit as another wedding procession was starting up the aisle.


There were things going on in the plaza all day. At one point, some bagpipers and drummers were doing Scottish music. Later a band with huge amplifiers was performing. Other street performers were active. There was one group involving 5 dancers and 4 musicians. As you can see in the photo, the dancers had colourful embroidered costumes and ponchos; they wore masks that made them look like old men. They had sandals with hinged wooden soles. When they danced, the sandals made a loud clacking sound like tap dancing, but louder. The dancing was very vigorous; after they had finished their set, the dancers went over and flopped down with their masks and head pieces off. They were all young--teenagers.

One more little story for this post. Around the plaza were a number of men with stalls shining shoes. I had my old walking shoes which had not been polished or oiled for at least 2 years and were pretty grungy. I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to let one of the men see what he could do with them. He washed them first, and then used a clear wax (the shoes are natural coloured leather). By the end (he worked for about 15 minutes), they were looking better than they have for years. I went back in the afternoon with my dress-up shoes and had him do them too. His price for a shine was 15 pesos, or about Can.$1.30.