Finding the Shops and Museums in Dolores Hidalgo

I wanted to find some shopping venues that would not have necessitated walking down to "Ceramic Avenue" or "Pottery Lane", as I am wont to call the radically long street in this town with pottery after pottery shop. Don't get me wrong. The stuff they sell is fine and interesting, but the shop's location is a long, dusty, and at this time of the year very hot street that is better suited to someone with a car. The traffic, something I abhor on a good day, is dense and noisy and I wanted to find something I could tell tourists they could see without having to brave "Crockery Drive."

I didn't have to look far. Down the block from our hotel were two shops that fit the bill. I wanted to be able to recommend some places within short walking distance from the center of town so that the tourist didn't have to walk the six blocks to where all the huge pottery stores are located. One-half block from our hotel, at the corner of Puebla and Hidalgo, was a nice little shop with a sampling of the different style pottery and ceramic you would find in all the big shops on Jose Alfredo Jimenez Avenue, which is the street that I've dubbed Pottery Lane and other such euphemisms. Two doors down from this corner shop, on Hidalgo, is another shop of similar ceramics.

We were heading to breakfast when we found these stores. Since I felt a little victorious of accomplishing something on my list right off the bat, I decided we should have a Mexican breakfast right away. And, we did. We found this cute and tastefully decorated little café right off the main plaza. Restaurante Plaza, I so love their originality, that was a super clean and impeccably managed place. The food was good, reasonably priced, with wonderfully friendly service. I did wonder what if you were monolingual and had to resort to grunts and hand gestures to order something from the menu how the service would be? Anyway, we would end up eating all of our breakfasts there since we loved it so much.

After a gut-busting breakfast that required a long and languorous rest in the plaza across the street, we raised our sluggish ham and cheese omelet filled butts off the bench and headed for one of Dolores Hidalgo's fine museums. In the town where the birth of this nation began, where the fight for freedom from the Spanish oppression all started, we headed for the Museo de la Independencia Nacional. I could not think of a better place to begin.

Everything in Mexico, at least it seems to me, of noteworthy discussion, always seems to have some dramatic event in its history. The building housing the museum was no exception. What the building was originally was la cárcel or jail. It was here that Miguel Hidalgo, freed the prisoners who ultimately joined Hidalgo's quest for rebellion against the Spaniards. Built as a jail in the 1800's it is now a museum dedicated to the life of Miguel Hidalgo.

In all its many paintings, charts, documents, books, murals, you will see just how Miguel Hidalgo is revered in this country and especially in this town. He is seen as the father of Mexican Independence and is deified as such in this museum. There is a very clever charting of Mexico's beginnings, with the invasion of Cortez, to the uprising for independence from the Spanish. The well lit and prominently displayed exhibits gave me the chilling impression (which is the purpose, really) of how cruel the Spanish oppression was on the indigenous people of Mexico.