I want my mummy!

Emily and I had a quiet day yesterday. After class, we took a short walk with our upstairs neighbor and her small dog, Jim, around the Presa de la Olla, a small reservoir up the hill from our school. Then in the evening we went down to the centro for dinner (inluding the best chocolate malteadas we've had in Mexico) and a brief visit to an internet cafe (Emily had a Skype call with her friend Jess during which Emily's mike didn't work, so Emily typed while presumably listening to Jess speak, and Emily periodically attracted the attention of everyone in the place when she burst into laughter and banged the table in her hilarity--very amusing to watch). Mostly, we stayed out of the weather, which has suddenly turned grey, cold, windy, and even a bit rainy since the end of the Cervantes Festival. It's as though the gods were waiting to let Guanajuato get everything it could out of the 3-week festival before letting loose the bad weather.

The weather is not much better today, but that didn't stop the two of us from taking the long walk across to the other side of town to see the much-vaunted Mummy Museum. Yes, you heard me right: Guanajuato is spectacularly proud of the museum, which is located underneath the city cemetery. For some reason, the combination of soil properties and environmental factors is just right for turning dead people here into mummies, rather than allowing them to decompose in the normal manner. What's more, the cemetery here is not big, and what happens is that people who have no family or who couldn't afford the spot get buried in the cemetery, and they are then exhumed after 5 years, by which time the afore-mentioned soil/atmosphere combo have turned the bodies into mummies. If no one comes to claim the body at that time, the mummy by process of who knows what law reverts to the property of the museum. The museum then displays the best mummies for the amusement of paying visitors.

There were actually not as many mummies as we expected in the museum: I'd guess a total of about 40. But there is some variety. Some of the mummies have clothes, many have at the most shoes and socks but nothing else. There are baby mummies in the mix, and there is even one mummy who was pregnant when she died and is displayed along side her mummified unborn child. There are three mummies laid side by side who each died in terrible ways, including one poor soul who they think, based primarily on her pose, was buried alive while in a cataleptic state from which she must have awoken to find herself in the most horrible situation I can imagine. It was, needless to say, a unique and wholly strange collection.

The museum also includes a small, separate wing that is called the Museum of the Cult of the Dead, which we were told had something to do with displaying instruments of torture from the Inquisition. In that cheesy stretch of museum, though, it was hard to tell what was real from what was a load of hooey, and there was very little that even conceivably had anything to do with the Inquisition. The first display, to give you a taste of the silliness, was a finger bone on display on a pillow. The description told the story of a man who had been tortured by having his fingers cut off and then killed. Some time later, a single finger bone appeared on his grave, pointing in the direction of his murderer. Right. They also had a coffin filled with spikes perforating one poor mummy (which I assume they just pulled from the collection and unceremoniously impaled on the coffin's spikes), and a hokey display of a wax figure being guillotined. Oh, and they had an old chastity belt, which looked absolutely brutal for everyone involved.

Ultimately, we were a bit disappointed by the visit. The museum gets a lot of hype, and we didn't walk away feeling that it was worth the money. I mean, the Casa de las Leyendas was also incredibly cheesy, but at least it was an amusing way to pass an hour. The Museo de las Momias was a little amusing but mostly kind of sad. Well, I can at least say it was a unique experience, and we would have been disappointed if we had left town without seeing it.