Our guide today — Paul — told me that scorpions were to be killed, so that's what I just did. I smashed a scorpion in the staircase outside our room. He was big and black and it took me a couple of tries but I finally scraped the poor beast off the bottom of my shoe.

Paul took us to Guanajuato today. It's a compact city in the mountains about an hour's drive away from here. It is in the middle of fucking nowhere. A city built around a silver mine in a 6000-foot-high canyon surrounded by 10,000-foot mountains. It is not as rigidly preserved as San Miguel, but it still is an astounding 17^th century maze of thick-walled buildings and narrow cobble-stone streets — some of them so narrow now that they are for pedestrians only.

We strolled around, visited the boyhood home of Diego Rivera, checked out a few churches. Paul has a wealth of detail about everything from the significance of the various saints, to reasons why the Jesuits were kicked out of Mexico, to Mexican revolutionary history to all the characters in Rivera's famous mural Sunday Afternoon in the Almeda Park.

[Note to myself to read Graham Greene's Power and the Glory — about the era in the twenties and thirties in which the Church conducted bloody battle with the State over control of the institutions. Neither J nor I were familiar with this era or with the term cristeros.]