Luddites in Heaven (Guanajuato)

Waited in line at Blockbuster, yes, Blockbuster in Guanajuato for 10 minutes. The signage, the staff, even the candy and bad-popcorn display on the way to the counter were just like ye olde Blokkebuster on Delmar in St. Louis. No shortage of customers here either. I felt like when I left the store that G.W. Bush would be President again, Osama Bin Laden would be hangin’ out in Pakistan, and Britney Spears would still be in hiding. Anyone know where to find the nearest Borders?

Guanajuato is a journey back to many pasts at once.  People still shop mainly at small family-run stores. Tortillas here, bread and pastries there, veggies around the corner, chicken across the street. Cellphones exist, but are not ubiquitous. I hardly saw anyone texting and certainly not while driving or standing at the cashier. People walk everywhere. Most of the town is inaccessible to cars. Lawyers, doctors, and professors in tidy well-maintained houses live next to marginally-employed workers  in crumbling wrecks with scary-looking dogs and scarier-looking relatives selling something you don’t wanna know about. There’s the super rich, of course, but they’re mostly out of town somewhere. The middle class is never very far from the under class – literally and figuratively.

People here are remarkably courteous  On the streets that allow car traffic, the sidewalks are more symbolic than anything else: a couple feet wide at their most generous, narrowing to one foot or less (usually at the moment an enormous bus is coming to fill  the width of the street and an especially “solid” citizen of Mexico is walking toward you from the other direction). Yet I never experienced or witnessed even a momentary conflict. The young defer to the old; everyone defers to people with kids. The pedestrians make room, the drivers slow down.

For all of the private kindness, however, what’s obviously missing is a sense of civic responsibility. The one playground we were able to find was crumbling from neglect. Stray dogs were everywhere. Dog poop too. On our first day, we saw a boulder in the road leading up to our house. It was small enough for one strong guy to lift, but big enough to cause serious damage to a car. It was in exactly the same place for three days, with cars presumably driving around it. On day-four someone finally got around to moving it – closer to the curb. It was still there when we drove out of town on day 8.