AROUND TOWN
Meetings & Lectures
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship meeting
Hospice San Miguel President Lee Carter reports on progress and the spirit of volunteerism at this Sunday’s meeting. Hospice opened in November 2007, and has served 11 Mexican patients and six foreigners and their families to date. Patients receive medical, nursing and social work services; volunteer visitors and respite workers; spiritual and bereavement support; and equipment like hospital beds and wheelchairs. Hospice does not charge for its services, although it accepts donations from those able to contribute. It is the first Latin American hospice to operate under international consensus guidelines.
Carter has an MBA from the University of Virginia and has lived in Mexico for 21 years, designing and exporting Mexican handicrafts. He took an extended leave of absence from his company in February 2007, to establish Hospice San Miguel.
The UU Fellowship meets every Sunday at 10:30am at La Posada de la Aldea, Ancha de San Antonio 15 and welcomes people of all ages, races, religions, sexual orientation and gender identity. Visitors are invited to attend the service and then join the UUs in the hotel restaurant for brunch.
Midday Rotary Club
On Tuesday, August 12, Gabriela Zepeda Garcia Moreno addresses the Rotary Club on the Cañada de la Virgen archeological site southeast of San Miguel. The “Gorge of the Virgin” site consists of five monumental buildings. Gabriela Zepeda directs the excavation and the consolidation of the site. She has 25 years of experience in her field and has worked in Náyarit, Michoacán, the State of Mexico and Guanajuato. She has written two books, scripts for museums and more than 200 educational articles.
The Rotary Club of San Miguel de Allende-Midday meets every Tuesday at Hotel Real de Minas at the intersection of calles Ancha de San Antonio and Stirling Dickinson. Check-in time is 12–12:25pm and the meeting starts promptly at 12:30. For more information, visit www.rotarysma.org.
Up, Up, and Away: Hot Air Ballooning in San Miguel
“What good is it?” asked a spectator of Benjamin Franklin at the launching of an unmanned balloon in 1783, at the site now occupied by the Eiffel Tower. “What good is a newborn baby?” replied the 77-year old scientist-philosopher.
Pilatre de Rozier and Francois Laurent became the first to fly that same year. Their 25-minute flight took them a little over five miles. Spectator Marie Antoinette pronounced, “It’s the sport of kings!”
More than 200 years later, ballooning is the sport of thousands. At the famous annual Albuquerque Balloon Festival in October, nearly 1,000 balloons take to the sky.
Benito Leon Acosta’s flight from Guanajuato to Dolores Hidalgo in a hydrogen-filled balloon on February 26, 1843, was the first in Mexico. Balloon rides have been available in San Miguel for more than a decade and sanmiguelenses often see multicolored globos in the early morning.
On Tuesday, August 12, at 5pm, photographer and balloon pilot Robert de Gast presents a slide show and talk about the history of ballooning, the process of getting up into the air and what it’s like to fly above and around San Miguel. Long-time resident De Gast is a popular lecturer and the author, most recently, of Behind the Doors of San Miguel.
The one-hour presentation is in the Biblioteca’s Teatro Santa Ana, Insurgentes 25. Admission is 60 pesos (50 pesos for library members), a portion of which benefits the library’s many programs.
Classes & Workshops
Chess: Five days, three locations
Free chess workshops for adults meet Mondays 5–6:30pm in the central patio of the Biblioteca Pública. A dozen players occupy the north portal of the patio each week. The library closes at 7pm, but Café Santa Ana lets players continue to slug it out for another hour or two.
Players also gather at Mama Mia, Umarán 8, on Thursdays, 5–7pm.
Chess players meet three times a week at Casa de la Cultura on Chorro: Saturdays, 10am–2pm, Wednesdays and Fridays, 5–8pm.
Shambhala Meditaion Center’s new season
To supplement regular meditation (Wednesdays, 7pm and Sundays, 11am), Shambhala now offers Meditation in Action (Mondays, 6:30pm) to explore Chogyam Trungpa’s book and The Heart of Recovery (beginning August 14 at noon), a combination of meditation and a new perspective on the 12 steps. For more information, call 152 6336.
Tours & Excursions
Saturday Adventure Tours
August 9 is an exciting tour of the seldom-visited glass-blowing factory Guajuye. Here we will see how old glass bottles are recycled, first broken up and then washed before becoming molten glass. The large area is a beehive of activity. Workers rush from the kiln with a lump of fiery molten glass quivering on their long glass-blowing tubes. Others run with long strings of glass to be made into drink stirrers. Their showroom displays useful products from glasses to candlesticks, salad bowls to vases.
Then it’s off to La Casa Encantada on Paseo del Parque, a beautiful street near Centro. You will be charmed upon entering when you see the arches leading back to a grassy area. We detour to the living room with its equestrian painting and huge cantera fireplace. Next is the dining room with some unusual wall hangings. Down the hall is the first of many all-marble bathrooms. Next is the to-die-for kitchen. We stroll on to a studio-office and bedroom, until we come to the Jacuzzi room with its wall mural of life-size lovely maidens in various stages of undress. The gentelmen on the tour like to have their pictures taken with the nymphs. Upstairs are more bedrooms, marble baths and a close-up view of the Parroquia. Cameras will be wanted on this tour.
This tour leaves from inside the Jardín, across from the Parroquia, at 10:30am.
Botanical Garden tour
For the next few months, El Charco del Ingenio (Jardin Botanico) offers tours Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays (rather than one tour a week on Tuesdays). The start time is 10am sharp (instead of 9am) and tours last two hours. A hat, water and good walking shoes are recommended. Fees are 50 pesos for members and 80 pesos for nonmembers. Private tours are available for 150 pesos per person (minimum five).
The easiest way to Jardin Botanico is by taxi. Staff will call for a taxi for the return trip to town.
Reservations are not necessary. If you have any questions, email nzerriffi@yahoo.com.
Instituto Allende trip to Guanajuato
Instituto Allende Tours heads toward Guanajuato, the state capital, on Saturday, August 16, at 9am. Guanajuato is about an hour west of San Miguel.
Guanajuato is an astonishing eye-opener, with narrow streets winding between flower-bedecked plazas, giving way to unexpected balconies, bridges and red-tiled roofs that lie level with the street above. It’s a somewhat flamboyant city, a maze of plazas, byways, dramatic tunnels and picturesque streets. Few places appear more exotic.
Guanajuato both eludes and inspires description. Travelers are reminded of the hill towns of Italy and jewel-like places in southern Spain. The town boasts a peculiar combination of unrivaled Mexican and European qualities. UNESCO inscribed the city on the World Heritage list in 1988.
Guanajuato was once Mexico’s second-largest city and its silver mines made it one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Opulent structures have become left behind as art relics. This outing pays special attention to preserved colonial architecture in residential areas.
An underground tunnel system relieves congestion and riding beneath the busy streets is a unique experience. Time will be allotted for strolling and shopping in the city’s center.
We visit the university and stately governmental buildings, the Iconographic Museum of El Quixote and the museum-home of native son and famous painter Diego Rivera.
Cost for this trip is US$65. Trips are all-inclusive; reservations are a must. Native-speaking, bilingual guides lead all tours and offer further insight within a secure environment. A free lecture previews upcoming weekend field trips each Wednesday at 4pm at the Instituto. Call 152-0226, or visit Instituto Allende, Ancha de San Antonio 20.
Films & Videos
Shalomsma/Forum
Cautiva is based on the modern history of Argentina, when up to 30,000 dissidents “disappeared” between 1976-1983. Cristina is a teenager whose life turns upside down when a judge summons her to reveal that her real parents “disappeared” when she was an infant. She is ordered to leave the couple who raised her and to move in with a grandmother she’s never known. As she struggles to understand the truth in her life, she confronts her “parents,” who were connected to the repressive Argentine regime.
This award-winning drama from Gaston Biraben screens Monday, August 11, at 5pm in the lounge at Hotel Quinta Loreto. Stay afterwards, enjoy refreshments and share your impressions. A 50-peso donation helps continue Shalom Outreach programs.
Bioneers Summer Film Series
The last two films of the Bioneers Summer Series showcase what can happen when just one person puts on an activist hat and charges out the door.
When mother of five and shrimp-boat captain Diane Wilson put on her activist hat, Seadrift, Texas, was unaware of what was coming. Wilson, alarmed by toxic chemical waste in Port Lavaca bay, started a lonesome crusade to stop the dumping. Wilson educated herself about the EPA, the minutiae of regulations and media coverage necessary to persuade a large corporation they were doing the wrong thing. It took 10 years, but she won the lawsuit. Wilson is a down-home raconteur of stories from her first book, An Unreasonable Woman.
The second film features Van Jones, a rising star in the environmental movement and a much-desired speaker. After obtaining a law degreee from Yale, Jones co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California.
After Katrina, Jones started ColorOfChange online, which is now the nation’s biggest e-advocacy organization tackling Black issues. Jones has served on many boards, including Bioneers’, has won human rights fellowships and is making his battlecry of “Green Jobs, not Jails” heard around the country. Oakland is becoming an example of urban green under his guidance.
The films are Tuesday, August 12, 3–4pm in Teatro Santa Ana. Admission is 50 pesos.
Coming Home
The Center for Global Justice Summer Film Series presents Coming Home, Hal Ashby’s melodrama examining the impact of the Vietnam War on the men who fought it and the women in their lives. Left alone in Los Angeles when her gung-ho Marine husband Bob (Bruce Dern) heads to Vietnam in 1968, proper wife Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda) volunteers at the VA hospital, where she meets Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a former high school classmate who has returned from ‘Nam a bitter paraplegic.
After a Hong Kong visit with her increasingly withdrawn husband, Sally finds a love and companionship with Luke that she had never known with her husband. Once Bob comes home with his own injury, however, the three must find a way to deal with a changing world and with a system that betrayed the men fighting for it.
Coming Home garnered eight Oscar nominations and three wins (Best Actress, Fonda; Best Actor, Voight; and Best Screenplay). The film shows Thursday, August 14, at 3pm in Teatro Santa Ana. Admission is 50 pesos.
Tenth Eckhart Tolle video
The Meditation Center of San Miguel, callejón Blanco 4, presents the tenth installment of a 13-week series of Eckhart Tolle videos, Touching the Eternal, from a 2002 retreat in India. Each video is about an hour and a half long; they show at 5:30pm on consecutive Thursdays continuing August 14. The presentation is free, although contributions are accepted.
.
 |