This weekend we had Monday off work so me and my housemate Sam, decided to go on a trip to Aguascalientes – a city about 3 hours away. We’d heard mixed reports about it so weren’t quite sure what to expect.
We left on Saturday afternoon after work and got there for about 3:30pm. We dumped our bags at the hotel and headed straight for the thermal baths of ojocaliente – just outside the city. It was great, really relaxing. We had a “tank” for 2 – it was indoors and it filled up with steaming, naturally hot water. We splashed about and relaxed in the hot water for an hour and it was the cleanest I’ve felt in ages! We walked back to the hotel and lay back and watched american TV, which felt like a luxury after hours of Mexican telenovelas on our home tv!
We headed into town for dinner and found a small but very pretty restaurant on one of the main streets – being very healthy, we had a huge salad and some vegetable and cheese sandwich roll things which were delicious. I was too full for dessert, and instead we went for a walk through Jardin San Marcos, past the church, down a very busy and lively street called Pani and down to Expoplaza and the bullring. Aguascalientes hosts the national fair of mexico (the san marcos fair) in March and April, so we’re hoping to have another trip to witness the madness of that when Expoplaza will truly be packed with visitors and exhibitions and stalls. The bullring is huge – styled like a mini coliseum.
On Sunday we got up bright and early and had breakfast at a restaurant on the same street where we’d had dinner the night before and I had a huge fruit platter with muesli and cottage cheese – a very filling start to our busy day. We started off at the Cultura Centre where we saw about thirty tiny kids playing chess, then on to the impressive Government Palace – filled with murals on almost every wall. After that we walked on to a contemporary art gallery which was quite small but interesting and had some nice exhibitions. Then the really Mexican bit – the museum of the dead – filled with trinkets, paintings, statues and engraving of skeletons and death! It was fascinating and quite weird how far the Mexican obsession with death extends – you can’t even imagine the range of things associated with death we saw there!
We trekked on to the Aguascalientes museum which is home to lots of paintings by Mexican artist Saturnino Hernan – his stuff was interesting and apparently inspired other Mexican artists like Diego Riviera.
Sam was getting weary by this point (anyone who’s walked around a city with me knows how long I can go on for and can appreciate that not everyone has the energy I do…) We grabbed some bread and nasty cheese on the walk down to Jardin Encino where we ate and I went to the Jose Guadalupe Posada museum (he was a famous Mexican print-maker specialising in skulls and death and stuff) and Sam had a rest in the garden. I wandered round the garden for a bit and we sat and relaxed for a while before heading back into the centre, down towards San Marcos and the Expoplaza where we sat in the sun until we decided the American tv was calling our names and we went back for a rest before dinner. Dinner was on the lively street: Pani, where we ate in a noisy little mexican place and had some of the spiciest salsa ever! Sam was feeling tired so we headed back to the hotel for an early night.
We only had half a day on Monday and we had a nice bit of coffee and cake for breakfast, got a picnic lunch together and headed out of town to Rodolfo Landeros Gallegos park, which has a lake and lots of green(ish) space. It was busy, being a day off work but we enjoyed relaxing by the lake and wandering about aimlessly and eating icecream. Monday was very hot and i think i got slightly burnt. It was a lovely park though which was really popular wiith families and a lovely place to spend a relaxing day off. We left Aguascalientes at 4pm for our journey back to San Luis. needless to say, we were quite exhausted!
