Thanks to Gilles, a Breton artisan selling leather products in San Miguel de Allende (SMA) whom I met at the SMA bus station, I learned I could take a public bus to the center of Guanajuato City instead of a taxi. When I got off the bus at Guanajuato, I asked a young woman who looked to be American if she knew which bus went to the city center. It turned out she had lived in Guanajuato for a year studying at the university. She told me I needed a brown bus and she was going there too.
When we boarded the bus, I asked her if she’d
mind if I sat with her. She replied, “Of course not.” Her name was Chantelle
and she was originally from Bend, OR and currently lived in Medford because she
was completing her final year at Southern Oregon University in Spanish language
and literature.
We ended up hanging out together for three hours
during which time we walked all over the city center. A couple times we duplicated our steps
because the GPS was wrong about my hotel where I wanted to drop off my bag.
Chantelle was a wonderful tour guide and I was impressed with how vibrant and
non-touristic the city appeared, compared to SMA. Almost all the people we
passed looked like students or locals and moved with a sense of purpose. I
liked that several times as we walked, Chantelle greeted people she knew,
sometimes kissing their cheeks the way the French do.
Among many things, we talked about our siblings. Chantelle had five half-siblings and she was in the middle. She had home-schooled herself in eighth grade and I admired her doing so. She had recently celebrated her golden birthday.
Chantelle mentioned that when she announced in her late teens that she was going to leave her family’s ancestral religion because she had stopped believing its tenets and because it denigrated homosexuality, many of her family members joined her. She thought one motivating factor for all of them was that a couple family members were gay and the family supported them.
Chantelle aspired to have “an awkward farm” at some point in her life because she had grown up on one. I hadn’t a clue as to what she was talking about so she defined such a farm as growing vegetables and raising animals not as an economic enterprise but as a way to teach children and adults how to do such things and to experience the pleasure and discipline of doing so.
Much later during our walk, I learned that Chantelle had a Mexican boyfriend in Leon a half hour away. That partially explained why she planned to move back to Guanajuato or Leon after graduation at which time she hoped to get a job teaching English. She would probably get a Teaching of English as a Foreign Language certificate to be more employable.
