Living and Writing in Mexico

When I first arrived in San Miguel de Allende, back in 1961, I was entranced with the old buildings, all in Spanish Colonial style that I’d never seen before. Some in deplorable condition. Windows with thick wooden shutters, some hanging by one hinge, the steel bars over them bent and rusting. The huge doors dry-rotting with patches nailed in place. The streets were nearly empty of traffic. Only four taxis, normal passenger cars with small “Libre,” signs in the window sitting in the jardín, hardly ever occupied even though you could go anywhere in town for the equivalent of 32 cents U.S.. The rest of the cars and trucks were from the 50s or older. They were in good shape though, for their age.
Stores were just counters with barely any sign of what they were trying to sell. You had to ask for what you wanted. I remember being shown more attention with “stolen” looks than with actual sales pitches. The grocery store, “Super Sanchez” too was just a counter inside the door where you asked for what you wanted. As if I knew. There were no chain stores of any kind in town.
In the market you could find food stalls that served freshly cooked meals. The steaming caldrons cooking right in front of you. The fresh hand-made corn tortillas were purvhased from women sitting on the curb outside. You bought the amount of them you wanted for your meal, and they wrapped them in paper. It was a good place to eat for me, I spoke no Spanish, because I could just point at what I wanted. Of course, I never knew what it was that I had eaten.
For other meals the “Beauganvilla,” restaurant in the Portal Allende became the place to go. I could order a sopa y sandwich de hamon y queso. I got pretty tired of soup and ham sandwiches after a while though. But it forced me to look up some other things to eat in my Spanish-English dictionary that I carried around where ever I went. It was kind of like the old joke: A chinese immigrant sits down at a luchcounter in San Francisco and orders a hot dog. The first time everything went well, but the next day he tried ordering a hamburger. The waitress asked him, “Ya want cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, mayonaise on that?” The man looked at her and said, “Hot dog.”