Friday 26 April 2013

In hot water in Aguascalientes

My colleagues were all a bit surprised when I said I was going to Aguascalientes. Not many of them had been, and none had visited the star attraction at this time of year, the Feria Nacional de San Marcos, though they were impressed that I was venturing out to see it. The taxi driver who drove me and A from the bus station to the hotel was equally perplexed. 'All the way from England, just to see our feria?' It all added up to a consensus that Aguascalientes was not a tourist town.

Well, I don't think we saw a single other non-Mexican during our stay, but there's absolutely tons to see and do. We started off by sampling the aguas calientes of Aguascalientes, which our optimistic map told us were just a hop, skip and a jump from the hotel. Of course they were considerably further, but after directions from a kindly woman waiting at the bus stop we made it there. I had been expecting a slightly-more-clothed version of a Japanese 'onsen' hot spring, but what we found were lots of relatively small baths in a range of sizes, all in individual rooms with intricate tiles lining the walls. We soaked contentedly for an hour and then set about challenge #2 of the day: transport into town.

We quickly discovered that this meant either a very long walk or a ride in a 'pesera' minibus. Plumping for the latter option, we had to make a couple of attempts, but eventually we clambered aboard a surprisingly new-looking green bus. We were confident it would just chug along the main road - after all, the driver had grunted in a positive way when A had asked if he was stopping at Calle Zaragoza, our destination - so we were a little perturbed when he immediately veered off into the back streets behind the baseball stadium. Our faith in Mexican public transport was restored, though, when A spotted a street sign that read 'Zaragoza'. I leapt across to ring the bell, nearly kicking the old lady behind's shopping while doing so, and the bus screeched to a halt right next to the museum we had planned to visit.

MEG would have been in her element in the Museo de Aguascalientes - a hodgepodge of curvy modern sculpture around the garden, a temporary exhibition on Javier Guerrero, a Communist painter who had dabbled (pretty competently!) in graphic design and whose work could be described as 'socialism with Mexican characteristics, a room full of engravings by Aguascalientes' favourite local son José Antonio Posada, whose 100th anniversary (of dealt here, rather than birth, confusingly) is this year and is officially a Big Deal all over Mexico, and the centrepiece, portraits by Saturnino Herrán, who was famed for being one of the first people to paint all sorts of Mexicans, including indigenous people, as they really looked, doing realistic things. All in all, pretty good value for the 50p we paid to get in.

Across the road was the Templo de San Antonio de Padua. I was a little sceptical about the guidebook's claims of grandeur, as on a first glance from the street, the church looked quite plain. Inside there was one brightly-coloured chapel, and I initially thought that was it. A murmur of voices behind a door to the right caught my ear, though, and when I went to investigate I was confronted with an explosion of Baroque. The rest of the church was crammed full of miracle-themed frescos, stained glass, a rogue bit of neo-Classicism in the dome, a glitzy crystal chandelier and a grand golden altar. As we walked out the other end of the church, we looked back and saw that the dome was coloured pink and yellow like a Battenburg cake, and the front facade was a frenzy of ornate carving. And that was just a local parish church...

The next day we wandered up to the National Museum of Death, which sounds dreadfully morbid but which Lonely Planet assured us was a must-see. It was sensational - simple but colourful displays of life-size skeleton models from the Día de los Muertos, doing all sorts from dancing to riding an equally skeletal horse. There were masks, artefacts from pre-Hispanic days, a fantastic mural and modern artwork. I left feeling like my preconceptions about how death and society interact had been shaken up - the Mexican view of death just being another phase of the same thing as life made me question British culture's insistence on sadness. Any museum that can make my thoughts go metaphysical gets a big thumbs up from me!

All this talk about cultural things brings me to the real reason why we came to Aguascalientes: the Feria. It's a riot of music, exhibitions, dancing, street food, sombreros, bullfights and drinking - this last is the real focus... A litre of michelada (beer cocktail, much better than it sounds) costs under £2, and it seemed crass not to try some local tequila while in the region (no shots, all in traditional cocktails!).

The peak of celebrations happened yesterday morning, with a long parade through town. It started with groups of 'charros' (cowboys) on horseback and segued into what looked like most of the young people of Aguacalientes, in marching bands, dancing in traditional costume or pushing along enormous mechanised floats. My favourite part was the periodic breakout music, when the parade would stop, the band would pipe up (playing Lady Gaga's magnum opus Poker Face at one point) and the more intrepid among the spectators would go and dance with the people in costume. Everyone was laughing and clapping along - maybe a touch of cowboy dancing would go down a treat amidst all the economic gloom in the UK?

I've purloined A's iPad to write this from Zacatecas - hopefully the subject of my next blogpost - and I think it will be too complicated to include photos now, but I will endeavour to include some later. Consider this the beta version - a blog for the imagination - at least until I get back to my PC...

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