PH, GB, and I left Mexico City yesterday and drove a few hours northwest to Guanajuato, a mountain city where the final day of the two-week-long Cervantino festival was taking place.  Guanajuato is gorgeous, and its gorgeousness compensates for an evil, evil feature, the presence of approximately one thousand poorly marked, inexplicably placed speed bumps.  If you're the one who's driving, you might use these speed bumps to do expensive harm to your friend's Mercedes station wagon.  I, personally, didn't use them for that, but I came damn close.

Here's the festival during the day (with, bottom left, the guy wearing silver clothing and painted in silver body paint who does a little robot-dance thing if you give him some money -- he seems to make it to every festival-type event held anywhere in the world, doesn't he?):

Night:

The city was built on top of several subterranean rivers (or, it was built on top of some rivers which became subterranean on account of a city being built on top of them; I'm unclear on this).  The underground rivers caused severe flooding, though, so the city built a dam to divert them, and converted the river-tunnels into automobile tunnels.  There are now almost two miles of these mostly interconnected tunnels which carry traffic to and from various sections of the city.

I'm guessing that the idea of these tunnels probably gets me more excited than it does most people, perhaps on account of my small-town upbringing.  There are no tunnels in Blue Hill, Maine, which may be why I thought that the Boston subway was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen when I was a kid, and why the idea of a mountain city under which run a few miles of ancient-looking tunnels is maybe a little more fascinating to me than it ought to be:

Anyway, we left Guanajuato around 8:30 last night and drove an hour or so to San Miguel de Allende, which is where GB has lived for the past few years.  Has it ever happened you that you visit a friend's place for the first time and it doesn't meet your expectations (expectations which may have been set by you or by your friend or by other people who have already visited your friend's place)?  The opposite was true for me when we climbed the three sets of stairs to GB's apartment, which is on the roof of a beautiful old building (the camera-shy PH may be seen, slightly blurred, on the right):

The apartment itself is quite nice: lots of character (and "lots of character" isn't a euphemism; by "lots of character," I mean, the apartment has lots of character).  What is truly stunning, though, are the views from the roof (which, note, GB reaches by walking through the front door of his apartment).  I took the following four photos from the roof last night: this one...

...and this one...

...and this one (the view from GB's bedroom is of the dome on the left)...

...and this one:

The view from the courtyard this morning wasn't too shabby either: