A Town With Sugar in It's Veins

A piñata split open and spilled candy down the hill. Or so appeared the vibrant town of Guanajuato, in Guanajuato Mexico. An M.C. Escher drawing with winding and impossibly shaped streets, winding roads and dizzying heights. Yet Escher drawings, if one thinks of the hand that sketches itself, or the staircases leading up and down and up again, one will remember them to be in black and white, and Guanajuato is anything but that.

The night the architect spilled his paint of pastel blues, reds and yellows and let them blanket the geometric houses, Guanajuato was born. We, another 'intercambio' and I, took a taxi into the heart thriving biology of the town, and found ourselves climbing a baroque style stone staircase, fifty feet into the air. Breathless at the top, we stared in awe at our first true vista; haciendas, tiendas and iglesias popped from the verdantly wooded peaks. Moments later, we were stumbling down back into the labyrinth of streets searching for a university office.

Rights, lefts, ups, overs and arounds. A spinning assortment of directions that would eventually lead us to the place where we might attain student visas. Yet distraction came in every open aired entrance that concealed a view of rigid lines zig zagging up the hills. I clicked my camera madly trying to capture it in pixels. People hurried dazedly under the trance the city superimposed on its residents. To look down was to look across, to stare upwards was to feel a sweet vertigo. I digested the candy colored houses until my stomach ached with the sticky sweetness of the town. Guanajuato has sugar running in its veins. Pixie sticks sprawled over the hills, a Wonka factory spitting out square shaped villas, high fructose corn syrup bubbling up through the cobble stones. I know I will go back and digest this town until I am sick.

A man stands on the rooftop against the rare absence of color of a white wall in Guanajuato, top to bottom.