Guanajuato is a small town compared to Cuenca, Ecuador, where I spent my first three months of my nomad adventure. If you look over the maps I am posting with each post, you will notice that I tend to stay in the same limited area with my walks. This is defined by the topography of the town. When I am not walking to buy groceries, there really isn’t much to see. Now if I were doing the tourist sort of thing, there is plenty to do in Guanajuato. Museums, churches, grand vistas, and nightlife. The problem for me is that all these things are within a mile and a half of my apartment. My main point in going out everyday is to have a nice long walk.
Using Google maps to get around is great, but I have to make sure that I do a street view walkthrough, on my laptop, before heading out. Google doesn’t understand, and doesn’t make clear when some of the routes go through tunnels. There is a lot of guessing about some of the areas that their cars can’t get through. There are quite a few areas where a car can’t get through, which do have street view. I guess they must have done those with hand held cameras, like a Gopro.
I have learned that if I want to make sure that I don’t find myself at the end of a dead end street looking at someone’s front door, I had better never take a route that includes areas without street view. I had not learned these lessons on December 20th, when I just punched in the location of the Don Quijote y Sancho Panza. I just lucked out that it was clear walking the whole way.
The walk was interesting, though much of it covered streets I had walked before. It is funny how when you walk a street over and over again, you see things you hadn’t noticed before. Some of the photos I took during my walk on this day, I had seen before, but had my hands full of shopping bags, so I had told myself to take photos when my hands were free.
On Google maps there are little icons of cameras, which note where there is a particularly good place to take a photo. These spots tend to be smothered with tourist, even though there are many many spots around the city that are just as memorable.
Just as a side: I am listening to the audio of book; My Life in France, by Julia Child. I am reassured that she too, was not in a city (in her case Paris) before she started feeling very different from a tourist. She too used the concentration of tourist to guide her way from places and toward better places.
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