Hard Hats Optional

We started today by taking a taxi into the next town, Valenciana, which is renowned for its silver mines. The operational mine is closed to visitors on Mondays, but we visited San Ramon which was one of the original points of descent and now serves as a museum. There were three main points of descent in the area: Valenciana, Nopal and San Ramon and the main tunnel in the operational mine is more than 1700 feet deep. The indigenous people were used to carve the shafts and later mestizos worked the mines. We took a tour which included looking at a vertical map of the mine shafts, going to an alcove which appeared to be a prayer spot for prisoners and pregnant women, visiting a bar where people drank because of the danger of their jobs, descending a short way into the mine shaft (hard hats optional but stuff may fall on your head) and learning something about breathing bad minerals and coughing blood and dying. The tour was in Spanish, but presos, mujeres embarazadas, peligroso, vino, trabajo, sangre, muerte were all words that came cross loud and clear. Piecing them together to make meaning may be a different story. While we were down in the shaft, the lights went out and even though we were only about two feet below the surface of the earth it was startling and absolutely pitch. It's hard to imagine how they dug so deep with the rudimentary tools of the time period (1550) and how deadly the whole endeavor must have been. Our book suggests that the average life span of a miner was no more than 10 years. After we left the mine, we ran into our Mexican historian neighbor, Dan, on the street and he told us that the mines in Valenciana fueled the European Industrial Revolution; at the time, 60% of the silver pulled out of the mines here went to the Spanish crown. He was wandering around looking for some archive for which he had no address because upon his arrival this morning, he discovered the archive at which he planned to do his research was closed for a week's vacation. We ended up riding the same bus back to town with him, because the keepers of archive number two were also on holiday. His research is in adolescents who applied for emancipation from their parents so that they would be allowed to marry between 1830 to 1870. He may be the only person on earth studying that extremely general topic.

We also went to Museo de las Momias today. From the late 19th century to the 1950s, relatives of deceased persons were required to pay a grave tax for anyone buried in Mexico. If the family was unable to pay the tax, the bodies were exhumed so that the graves could be reused. Apparently, because of the mineral rich soil here and the dry climate, the corpses were remarkably preserved when they were exhumed. The "Mummy Museum" isn't a collection of mummies at all but of over one hundred of these corpses, some of which have no tears in the skin to be found. It is grotesque and sad and interesting at once.

We hadn't been into the market after Mike told us about its made-in-China nature, but today we walked through and concur with his opinion of the tchotckes on the second floor. On the first floor, however, there is booth after booth of culinary delights and disgusts. We had lunch at a place specializing in mariscos; Chris ordered a mixed fish soup and sangria. The soup was chock-full: shrimp, white fish, muscles, squid, probably other stuff. The sangria came in a glass bottle with a straw and was the same price as my bottle of water. He has mentioned several times today that that soup was good.

After lunch, we sat in a plaza and had coffee before heading back to the supermarket to get supplies for dinner. We finished the daylight hours on the terrace because there was terrific thunder and we thought we might be able to watch a grand storm, but it never came or at least it hasn't come yet and now it's too late for me to partake. Now, it's too late for me to do much of anything except think on tomorrow.