Durango

When we came to Durango, we rode all the way into the center of town to the Plaza de Armas and found ourselves a hotel in a side street. Seb being his charming self convinced the lady at the front desk to let us put our bikes in the hotel lobby, so off we went after we fist took off our side panniers because otherwise we wouldn’t fit in the doorway.

This is the view from our room onto the inner courtyard/ hotel lobby from where we can inspect the safety of the bikes. The hotel had a nice Mexican feeling about it and the rooms were spacious and clean. All this for again 20$ a night! Life can be good…

Even though Durango is listed as one of the more unsafe cities in Mexico according to foreign affairs, we still wanted to go and see it by night. The city was buzzing with people and the ambiance was warm and friendly and even the temperatures where a lot warmer than what we had been used to so far.

The Cathedral was all lit up and all the Christmas decorations were still present. Since they had a mass going on inside the Cathedral, we only took pictures of the outside.

On the Plaza de Armas we were approached by a guy who was selling some candy, but after kindly declining, he asked us where we were from. I told him we were from Belgium, a small country very far from here, but apparently I said this in a very nice Spanish accent, because he began telling us his whole life story in very fast Spanish. Ok, my Spanish has improved a bit since I arrived here, but not enough to follow this guys story, but I tried picking up a word here and there and guessed what the rest of the sentence would be and nodded from time to time to give him the impression that I had understood everything he was saying. I must admit that by the end, I was really understanding him and I even got to wish him a nice evening and a nice life.

Watching out for the thieves and robbers and all the drug gang members in the streets, oh no wait, I was just daydreaming and enjoying the nice night in the city.

The city is very well organized and all over the place you have signs pointing you in the right direction.

This must be one of the most amazing buildings we have ever seen a McDonald’s in .

Street vendors all trying to sell their stuff and if one place doesn’t bring them enough money, they pack up and go to a different spot.

These buildings in Durango were the first older nice looking buildings we had seen since we arrived in Mexico, so we were both always looking at them in amazement.

Durango street life.

Waiting for a customer. They have so many street vendors around the main square that we wonder if they can make enough money in one night to eat themselves, but it makes the square very lively and buzzing with ambiance when they all yell and try to feel their food and drinks.

It seems as if all the Mexicans have traded in their sombrero for cowboy hats, but it suits them well! We haven’t seen one single Mexican guy with a sombrero so far, so we are starting to think that this must be some kind of tourist thing. We will let you know if we see sombreros in the tourist areas.

Feliz Navidad or Merry Christmas.

The Cathedral was a bit strange, well the bells of the Cathedral were. In the morning we heard the bells chime and counted the time, it was 7 in the morning according to the bells, but when we heard the bells chime again not even a half hour later, it was 9 o’clock according to the count. The bells kept doing this all day long, just chiming a certain amount of times at no particular time of day, so we never actually knew what time it was unless we could see the big clock on one of the towers.

“Aaarrggghh, run!!!” this is what the people in the streets must feel like when they see a gigantic bull coming towards them.

Watching Mexican life pass us by and no this doesn’t count as our first sombrero sighting!

Proving my point of the cowboy hat again. It seems all older Mexican guys just have a face to wear a hat like that.

He almost feels like an American cowboy with his hat and jeans jacket.

Something that has long disappeared in our throw away society, shoe repair men in the streets, mending your still decent shoes instead of throwing them away.

For lunch we went to a local street vendor and had some enchiladas. Here we saw our second newspaper saying that they had a shooting with some casualties in the city, but when we asked him about it, he just said that this could happen in the daytime as well as at night and that you just had to be careful when walking in the streets. There is a problem with violence in a lot of Mexican places, but what can you do about it?

Police are everywhere in the streets, but according to the locals it is like this every day, so they haven’t put more police out there because of the shooting. Most of them cover up their faces when they patrol the streets and either this is to avoid retaliation or it is because of the smog in the city.

All Mexicans are liars…

Not because they say we have to be careful but because after we got our food the vendor said that the green sauce wasn’t spicy at all, yeah right!