Side Trip: Guadalajara I

Ventures into the historic centre, shops, rain, old man bar

It is a six hour trip by bus from Mexico City to Guadalajara - we make just one scheduled stop, at (I think) Tepotzotlán 30 km from the start point. There are three unscheduled stops on the side of the motorway - to pick up a bloke with a basket of crisps and warm Fanta (he gets dropped at a toll station), to pick up a fellow driver, and for the two drivers to hop off for a smoke. It’s a pretty boring trip on motorway all the way, with scrubby, lumpy land and small patches of agriculture, mostly what I now know are agave plants (we drive past Tequila).

In Guadalajara, there is a modern metro system with a terminus right at the bus station, although I do need to pop in to KFC to buy a drink in order to break a 500 peso note. Then it’s a 20 minute walk to my hotel - the Gallo. It’s refreshingly modest - clean, comfortable and with a desk: all I need and cheap. The largest indoor market in Latin America is in Guadalajara, but that doesn’t stop all the neighbouring shops selling the same things as are in the market, particularly sportswear. My hotel is right on the edge of this neighbourhood, so it’s a very lively place to walk through, and it has convenience stores and places to eat aplenty, including an incredible sweet shop outside the back door of the hotel.

I go in hunt of dinner and decide very quickly that I really like Guadalajara. The other side of the market is the historical centre, which has two intersecting pedestrianised walkways (apparently they form the sign of the cross). The first thing I see is Museo Cabanas - originally a hospital and orphanage complex, now an art history museum.

This is the beginning of the pedestrianised area. I don’t get very far my first night - as you can see, it is getting dark and I’m hungry. I go a little further. Much to explore!

So, while I was in KFC getting change and having a drink, these boxes of chicken meals kept coming out and, I confess, they looked good. When I see another KFC store on my evening walk, I succumb - maybe not quite as good as I imagined, but still pretty good. Plus, I can justify it as checking on my investments (I have shares in Restaurant Brands, which owns many Mexican KFC stores).

In the morning, I just explore my local shops, looking for breakfast (ham and eggs), spotting these (not sure how authentic the claim made by the car is).

I go further afield in the afternoon, looking for a particular café - figuring I’ll see interesting things on the way and if there’s a good café, there’s likely to be other good things around it. Wrong on both counts! I walk up a major thoroughfare lined with car part vendors, one of which is a neighbour to the café (the other neighbour does tattoos). It’s a cute café but not worth the 2 mile walk to get there.

Heading back, I reward myself with an ice cream - and am very surprised to find, in the few minutes it takes to buy it, it has started to rain, and it’s fair belting down. My umbrella is in the hotel. Yikes - there’s no way I’m going out in this. Eventually it eases enough for me to cross the street, to hide out in the metro station. When it is dry and I see food vendors putting their tables out, I figure it is safe to move on, even skip going back to the hotel. So very wrong! Over the course of an hour, I hide under a succession of more or less leaky verandahs. I do think that, what with the sploshing from underneath and the force of the downpour, people here don’t need to wash their cars, so there is an upside.

Going into a bar to sit it out seems like a good idea, but the first few are called things like Girlies and Boobies. Then I find the opposite: an old man bar, complete with cowboy style swing doors (in the middle of a very large city).

The beer here is so cheap, they won’t let me use my card. The rain does ease further and I head up the street to my hotel - here are some of the shops on the way. I have never seen spectacles sold in this fashion

In the evening, I head out for another look around the historical area. Since I am getting a warning about the length of the post, I’ll only share the initial part of the walk, so you can get a sense of how wonderful Guadalajara is.

{These photos bring me to the evening of 24 June.]

Cheers!