Guanajuato.

I'm in our usual Internet access point right now, but they've replaced their usual decent music with complete shit. Let's see if anyone notices!

There we go. I guess going from Backstreet Boys to Blink 182 is an improvement, of sorts. I do like this song ("Small Things"), although I have a space in my heart for shallow catchy pop songs, at least for a little while.

So we're planning our exit from Mexico: a couple of our most blessed friends are actually driving down to pick us up in Tijuana next Tuesday. We initially thought we'd have a rough, many-day journey with a lot of uncertainty, possibly having to stay the night somewhere, taking a bus from here to Mazatlan, then a ferry to La Paz, then a bus to Tijuana. But that plan was predicated on the fact that on the road maps I could find, there aren't any major highways to Tijuana from the east, and since that's rough-like desert country, I imagined that any bus service would be slow and painful.

However, a trip to the bus station today revealed that the Futura line runs a bus, every day at 1800, from here straight to Tijuana, 38 hours. Not only that, but it stops in Mazatlan, where we wanted to be for just a few hours anyway, to buy a few things. Not only that, but buses leave from Mazatlan to Tijuana every 30-60 minutes. So our new plan, much shorter and more reliable, is to take the bus to Mazatlan, hang out for some number of hours (the bus arrives at 0600, so we have to wait for stores to open), get our stuff, and get on another bus out. Bang.

Don't get me wrong. Guanajuato is beautiful, I think everyone should come here, and I want to come back. I guarantee that the architecture resembles nothing you've ever seen, and it's this that creates some of the fun of the whole thing. The decidedly non-Euclidean layout simultaneously provides unexpected surprises, and stimulates and challenges your sense of direction and spatial manipulation. And by US standards (especially Northern California), it's supremely cheap: we stayed in a nice, more expensive hostel for US$20 a night, and we're now moved into a rather less-nice guesthouse for about US$4.50 a night. It's a good time.

But...there's always a time to leave a place, move on to something else. So here we go.

So much to write, so little time. Go have some cookies and come back later.