MI FUENTE HA REGRESADO -- MEJOR QUE ANTES

My fountain in front of Santa Rosa has returned, and it's better than ever!!! This is the fountain in the little plaza a block from my house where I went almost every afternoon at about 6:00 when I first got here to listen to the music and watch the fountain dance. This is the one where I took Marty and Bill when they visited in October, and we waited for the music but it never came. It started again before Christmas, but when I got back from the beach in February not only was the music not working, but also the fountain wasn't working.

The whole month of February when Kay was here studying it didn't work. And when Lynne and David came, it still wasn't working. When Carolina (aka Carolyn in the US) was here last week, still no fountain, no music. A couple of days ago, I happened to walk through the plaza on my way somewhere (having given up on the fountain ever working again), and noticed that the two end parts of the fountain were fountaining. Wow -- hope. Then today I went to the Queretaro Language School to hear Jaymie and Mike do a presentation at the end of their course here, and they told me that they had been to the plaza last night and there was music and fountains and everything!!

So tonight after a lovely 2 hour siesta (which is why I'm still awake at 10:15 writing) I took myself over to Santa Rosa just in time to hear my favorite piece: Con te Partiro (Time to Say Goodbye) by Andrea Bocelli. This was just the beginning of a program of different music with dancing fountains and a light show that lasted about 20 minutes. There were several more programs of music during the evening ranging from opera (Nessun Dorme) to classical guitar to mariache to modern pop.

So I stuck around for the evening, visited a couple of puestos and ate a tamal and a huarache. Usually there aren't these little puestos at the plaza, but this is Semana Santa and there are food puestos all over town -- little temporary stands selling all kinds of great street food. I assume everyone knows what a tamal is (singular for tamales). A huarache is actually a kind of Mexican shoe made of woven leather. But a edible huarache is like a thick tortilla shaped like a shoe and grilled on a comal with frijoles, cheese and chorizo and salsa verde on it. Mmmm.

After that I needed a couple of cold ones, so I found a table at a little cafe on the plaza and enjoyed the show while sipping Negro Modelo. My waiter was a 13 year old boy named Benjamin who preferred to speak English with me probably because my espanol is so awful. Turns out he lived with his family in Indiana for 9 years from the time he was about 4. He said his father worked for a company that made systems for painting new cars, or something like that. Then I realized that it was his mother and father who were also working in the cafe. My guess is they worked in the US for a while, saved some money and started this very nice little business in Queretaro. It's also my guess that they were in the US legally because I can't imagine a family risking an illegal border crossing with a 4 year old. But these are just wild guesses and assumptions. Maybe I will visit their cafe more often and ask them their story.

For me this was a quintessential Queretaro evening: beautiful music playing, fountains dancing, a Spanish colonial church in the background, families strolling around the plaza, children running and laughing and playing with balloons, and venders selling great Mexican antojitos. Before I left to wander home, I treated myself to some cotton candy (no one here to roll their eyes at me).

I made a little video of the fountains with my Canon Elf which I will try to download to iMovie and post tomorrow. I say tomorrow because tonight I don't want to deal with the frustration I know will accompany my trying to do something on the computer I have never done before.