Trip to Zacatecas

For our second and final “road trip” with the program, we traveled to Zacatecas. Instead of the 6-hour trip to D.F. in chartered buses, we rode in 3 vans for about 3.5 hours. The day we arrived we enjoyed an authentic Mexican lunch in a restaurant called Los Cazadores (“The Hunters”), which was, not surprisingly, but alarmingly-if you know what I mean-filled with many dead animals. We walked to a now-government building which was originally housing and offices for the miners. (Zacatecas, like Gto, was originally a mining town.) Now, though, 90% of the silver in Zacatecas is exported to Europe and the US, so only a small amount of the variety of silver we saw was actually mined there.

Later we drove up a mountain to look down on the city of Zacatecas (population 120,000, I think). And we also saw a smaller town, which was originally where the city was located (in the photo with the big landscape). We saw the first Zacatecan mine, and we saw the famous statue of Pancho Villa. Sarita (a girl in my group) and I joked about bringing Pancho Villa back as a souvenir, so here he is—in picture form. Unfortunately, the week before we left, Sarita adventure—a tour of a mine called "El Eden." got appendicitis, had surgery, and was unable to join us. She’s quite the “conquistadora!” We took a cable car (teleferico o funícular) down the mountain (80 meters?). The picture here was taken from the cable car, overlooking the city. The cable car was constructed around 1979, carries up to 12 people 85 meters over 650 meters of distance We landed in front of our next We had a good time with the hair nets and listening to all our tour guide for the weekend had to say.

That night, with the beautiful sunset, my girlfriends and I went out for coffee and tried to put a dent in al our homework.