Playing Tourist in Guanajuato

As described in one of my prior blog entries, even though we live in a city visited by tourists, we don’t typically do things that tourists do.  We rarely eat out, and we haven’t visited any of the attractions that tourists typically visit, except to walk by them on day-to-day errands.  This isn’t for any particular reason other than our day-to-day lives are filled with typical non-tourist activities.  I think this is fairly common regardless of where someone lives.

We recently decided to do a few things that might be considered more “touristy” because we didn’t have any travel planned for February.

One of our neighbors is a drummer, and we recently learned that he has a new “gig” at a jazz night every Tuesday and Thursday at a local restaurant.  We looked up the restaurant, Pali, and it seemed to be the type of place we might like, so we decided to check it out.

The food was good, there was interesting art on the walls (reportedly by the owner) and the music was also enjoyable.  We met our neighbor’s Dad who started out on keyboard, and it turned into a jazz jam session after that.  We will probably be back in the future.

For some daytime entertainment, we visited the Museo Casa Diego Rivera, in the house where Diego Rivera was born and lived until he was six years old.  The first floor includes furniture arranged to show how people would have lived during that time.  There are permanent exhibits of several of Rivera’s works demonstrating how his work changed over time.  There are rotating exhibits by other artists; when we visited there were exhibits by Leo Matiz, a Columbian photographer whose photographs captured Rivera at work, Rivera and Frida Kahlo (his wife), and also other subjects in Mexico City.  There was also another smaller exhibit of work by Gerardo Cantú, a contemporary Mexican painter from the state of Coahuila who passed away last year.

After visiting the museum, we ate lunch at a place we had wanted to try, Báhn Mi, a Vietnamese/Thai restaurant.  The food was good and inexpensive; we will return!