I'm back

So I thought I would write more from Mexico but apparently I didn't. Partially it's a function of not world-class internet in the hotels, and by the time I was done wrestling with Google Maps planning dinner and the next day, I was pretty much done. Plus I was reading a good book (Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow). I even watched a little TV to broaden and refresh my vocabulary.

Where to start. Driving in Mexico was not as bad as I thought as it was going to be. Even the web sites that were very pro driving in Mexico were more negative than they actually needed to be. Though I saw a little rule-bending in town in Mexico City when we were in cabs and Ubers, it wasn't really bad, and I drove straight out of town after we picked up our car at the airport. If anything, Mexican drivers are more norm-bound than are Americans. They really wanted to pass on the left, not on the right. If I was in the left hand lane and somebody didn't think I was going fast enough, they were much more likely to come up behind me and let me know their thoughts than they were to go by on the right.

The places we went outside of Mexico City: Queretaro and Guanajuato, were lovely. Being hilly, Guanajuato was a little more picturesque, but then it was also more intensely geared towards tourists and therefore more precious. Querataro was also flat out gorgeous, but a real place. It has a huge historic center, a UNESCO world heritage site (as is Guanajuato), but so much of it that most of it is used by residents as a place to work and live normal lives. So we'd be walking down little streets and have no idea what might be in the next door. Could be a language institute. Or a chess club. Or a ramen place. Or the "Union for the Transparency of Executive Power." Or a shoe repair shop. Or a store selling quinceanera dresses. Actually, there was a whole street of those.

It was really cheap. I don't think we ever spent more than $90 on dinner, and for lunch we got by for as low as $3 for the two of us. Of course, it helped that mom didn't eat much when we were in places that cheap. So we didn't eat quite as close to the street as I might have liked, but what do you expect when your 81-year old mom with a bit of a delicate tummy is along.

I ate a lot of Mexican food.