Guanajuato, Guanajuato

Guanajuato is one of those names that just rolls through one's mouth - it's fun to say out loud.  Stop for a minute and try it:  "Guan" (pronounced like the bird droppings, "guano", but with a little softer "g" and a little more fricative), "a" (short "a", not long "a"), "juato" (pronounced like "water", but with an "o" not an "er" at the end).  Guanajuato!  It's Guanajuato, Guanajuato, because it's both the name of a city and the name of a state in Mexico.

At one point, I had to learn the capitals of all the states in Mexico.  Guanajuato, Guanajuato was one of the easier ones to remember.

These postcards were sent to me by a boyfriend in college who was studying Spanish in Mexico for a few weeks one summer.  They show the accidental mummies of Guanajuato.  The message on the back of the postcard on the left is pretty funny: 

"I thought you would like to see the woman I've been dating down here in Mexico.  As you can tell, she is on a rather drastic crash diet; this is the reason why her mouth is open, she is terribly hungry."

In any case, the mummies are called "accidental" because they were not deliberately mummified - it was simply a combination of the altitude and the lack of humidity that transformed these bodies. 

The mummies are in a museum called (not surprisingly) "Museo de las Momias de Guanajuato".  There is traveling exhibition of 100 of these mummies on tour in the US right now.

Besides the mummies, Guanajuato is the home state of Diego Rivera (artist) and Vicente Fox (former president of Mexico).  Guanajuato, the city, is a UNESCO World Heritage site.