I Moved To Oaxaca

2009-06-26T06:16:00.000-07:00

We had a teacher from Spain during one of our fitful attempts to learn Spanish. We remember two things from that class: the woeful ineptitude of the high school students taking the class in order to graduate (good luck), and the teacher's constant pooh-poohing of Spanglish and Mexicanismos.

I'm sure it's different in the Old World, but on the West Coast I have yet to hear someone actually use almuerzo to indicate a meal taken. But lunche? All the time!

Which I find makes total sense. If you're not eating dinner (the big meal of the day, taken mid-day, just like comida), you're eating lunche.

2009-06-19T06:32:00.001-07:00

Can you imagine our excitement on learning of a Oaxacan restaurant in San Francisco, just down the street from my brother-in-law's house?

How about now, if I say that we have no plans to go back to that restaurant anytime soon?

Yeah, I know. Breaks my heart!

2008-02-25T05:23:00.000-08:00

Life in Oaxaca: often exciting, sometimes infuriating, but never a dull moment. Great cuisine, history, culture, shopping, scenery, sports–all on the peso and in lovely, warm temperatures.

Finding a place to stay is a cinch–47 weeks out of the year. During the week of semana santa in spring, July's Guelaguetza, Day of the Dead celebrations during late October/early November, and the last two weeks of December, everybody and their mother comes to town so accommodations are tight. Not impossible, just expect to pay a little more.

Oaxaca has two English-language newspapers with good tourist and resident information, the free Oaxaca Times and the bilingual Go-Oaxaca. And you can't beat the local, all-Spanish Noticias for sheer balls, what with the paper being the target of a siege/vendetta by Gov. Ruiz of the PRI Machine.

Plenty of schools have Spanish classes, but I'm partial to Oaxaca International, Los Libres 207. Their rates are very reasonable, and they include fieldtrips; homestay options available, even if you aren't studying there.

Oax-town has plenty of internet cafes around town, ranging in price from 5-10 pesos an hour. Inter@ctive, Alcalá 503 (across from Santo Domingo), has DSL with all new equipment with USB ports, supplies like cds and diskettes, a scanner, color and b/w printers, and direct connections for your laptop. 5 pesos per half hour.

Oax-town is also a good walking town, though take care on the sometimes sketchy sidewalks. If you get tired, the city has plenty of cabs; negotiate and agree on a fare before getting in. Also take note of the cab's sitio in case you leave something in the cab. For destinations in and around Centro, figure no more than 30 pesos. City buses are usually 3.50, 3 pesos for the older ones; almost all have the fare marked on the outside of the bus. Drivers give change, too. No transfers. Destinations and major landmarks are written on the windshield or on signs hanging from the windshield. Signal for a stop by pushing the buzzer at the back door.

Hey, sports. Head out to Gringolandia for a pick-up game of basquetbol or futbol, or over to the Llano for early morning jogging. I hear there's a bowling alley somewhere, too, though I never did find it. Co-ed Zinacantli Rugby, Alcalá 902-BIS, www.planeta.com. Open practice every Saturday from 11a-2p at the sports field near Gringolandia. Beginners welcome!

We're also lucky to have several bookstores with good selections of English-language books. Amate Books, on Alcala, carries cookbooks, history, art, and handicraft books, magazines, and a choice selection of art. Provedora Escolar, on the corner of Independencia and Reforma, has tons of books on Oaxaca and Mexican history, including many obscure titles. The gift shop in Santo Domingo also has a good selection of books, and the full range of the excellent (Spanish-language) Archeologia magazine.

Oax-town has a number of movie theatres. Cinepolis shows first-run movies in both Spanish and English; their schedule is online. Same with Multimax, though their website is infuriating. Both are in Gringolandia. Take any bus marked Plaza del Valle. Admission is normally $37 pesos, with 2x1 Wednesdays. Both have stadium seating and cupholder armrests.

Over at Garcia Vigil 817, Cine El Pochote plays movies from around the world, poorly projected via LCD projector onto a wall in a small theatre with hard wooden seats. But it's free if you're cheap, or you could toss a 5-pesos coin in the collection box. Movies usually play nightly at 6pm and 8pm, though this being Mexico times do change. The Oaxaca Times carries their schedule.

Don't bother with Sala Versalles, on Av. Juarez, which plays first-run movies. It's crap. (Is it even open still?)

Tourist Office, Murguía 206, tel. 516-0123. Very friendly, and fairly knowledgeable if you stick to the usual tourist stuff.

The American consulate, Alcalá 407-20, tel. 514-3054. Yes, it's in a mall. Surprise.

Post Office, Independencia across from the cathedral. It's open Mon-Fri 9a-7p, and on Saturday from 9a-1p. It costs Mex$8.50 to send a letter to the U.S.

Airport vans, Alameda de Leon 1-G, across from the cathedral. It's the Transportes Aeropuerto Oaxaca, and they're open Mon-Sat 9a-2p, 5p-8p.

Finally, if you don't know a tlayuda from a tostada, here's a little glossary of Oaxacan words and terms. Did you know that iguana means "full of gristle" in any language?

2008-02-16T05:47:00.000-08:00

[This originally appeared on my now-defunct site www.cour.to and was originally posted in 2004 so please, wash it down with a bit of sal de gusano.—Suzanne]

A bit about Mexican hotels: If you're tall—say, 5'10" (1.78m) or taller—just be ready to smack your head on doorjambs and light fixtures. On the flip side, you'll have no problem seeing over the tops of crowds.

Hot water ... well, if you're a person who requires hot water for showering, you're gonna want to stick to downtown Oaxaca and the fancier hotels around the state. I find that in most towns, while many hotels advertise hot water, sometimes it takes a long time for the water to get warm. Or the hot/cold taps are reversed (and unlabeled, so's who's to know?). You could just shower in the afternoon, when the cold water will be a relief from the heat outside.

You'll also need to bring your own washcloth. We never encountered one in our hotel room during any of our travels. (If you forgot to pack one you can pick one up at Gigante or other supermercado.)

And then there are Mexican beds. I don't know what the deal is. When I still lived in San Francisco and thought I might go visit my friend in Belize, he begged me to bring down a couple of sets of cotton sheets, which I thought a strange request. I don't any more. You can get good cotton sheets here if you look, but the standard cotton sheet in Oaxaca looks (and feels) like it has a threadcount of about 60—I'm not joking!—and is often a cotton/poly blend or entirely polyester. Eugh, just what you want on a sultry night. It's also possible to buy good mattresses, but the usual mattress is futon-thin and spring-loaded. Do you recall what it's like sleeping on springs? Pillows are generally of two types: either stuffed with polyester or cotton batting. As much as I prefer cotton, the pillows filled with cotton batting feel like bricks; I find them extremely uncomfortable. When a hotel has cotton pillows I usually end up using my clothes for my pillow. All in all, it's still better than sleeping on a piece of cardboard on the floor.

So without further ado, here're a couple of places around the state I've stayed in and recommend:

I continue to hear only good things about Youth Hostel Paulina, but I myself have never stayed there. Take a look at their website. They're close to the zocalo and mercados, too, perfect for when you want to see and hear all the action.

If you don't like hostels, Posada Chencho has nice rooms and an attractive courtyard. They also serve a full breakfast, too - a nice way to start off a day of touristy activity. They're a little out of the way, so if you don't like or feel comfortable walking around, or want a quieter neighborhood, this might not be for you. They also have a website, and you can easily reserve with them via e-mail.

Still a bit of a walk from the zocalo but the Hotel Las Mariposas seems quieter than Chenchos. It's near the Llano, on Pino Suarez. Very friendly. They serve a coffee and pan dulce breakfast, or you can cook your own in the in-room kitchenette. You can also reserve with them via e-mail.

For longer-term stays rent a small furnished apartment with kitchenette from Luis and Rosa at Casa de los Abuelos on Reforma near the corner of Constitucion, just two short blocks from Santo Domingo and Alcala, the main pedestrian and tourist walkway. [Update! Luis and Rosa now have a website that accepts reservations.] The building has an inviting patio for reading or hanging out, and a little orphan book and magazine rack in case you didn't bring a book of your own. Luis and Rosa don't speak English, but they're patient and muy amable, and they provide weekly maid service, and all your gas and drinking water are included in the price of the rental, about USD$500-$700 a month

Wanna splurge? I've been inside, but not stayed at, the Ex-convento Camino Real on 5 de Mayo, half a block from Santo Domingo. Very pretty grounds, and the rooms look way nice. But it'll cost you, though if you're used to big-city hotel prices you'll be pleasantly surprised.

If you want to experience the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca, also called the Sierra Norte or Sierra Juarez, you can hike, bus, or drive to the small town of Benito Juarez and stay in the community yu'u. The last time I was in Benito Juarez, the yu'u was full so they community center found us lodging in someone's extra house, which seemed pretty yu'u-like. It was cold, cold, cold at night in October at about 9,500 feet, so dress accordingly. We went to bed fully clothed, and I swear the pillows were stuffed with earth they were so heavy. But it's a really beautiful town, so I urge you to check it out.

Way up in the Papaloapan, in the north of Oaxaca, the teeny town of San Pedro Ixcatlan has a posada, the Villa del Lago. To get there you drive down the main street most of the way through town; my receipt gives its address as "s/n frente a la escuela primaria," or "in front of the primary school." It was $140 a night for a big room with two queen beds, a ceiling fan, and tv. The wasps were no extra charge. And cotton-batting pillows, alas. But they have a swell rooftop patio where you can take in the view of the reservoir and town, very nice with a couple of beers, I must say.

If you head south on Hwy 175 to Puerto Angel, there's precious little in the way of services between Miahuatlan and Pochutla. Like, no gas. There are numerous roadside comedors, but San Jose del Pacifico has the only lodging, way up in the mountains. We stopped to get lunch at their restaurant (and got sick); their posted prices for the cabanas were $300-500 pesos, which seems expensive. Which is expensive, considering you could have your ass parked in a hammock on the beach for $200. If you want bracing mountain air, try Benito Juarez.

My guidebook recommended three hotels in Tehuantepec, but the day I was there the two inexpensive ones were full up. On my way out to the moderate hotel Guienxhoba on the highway I passed the Posada Colonial San Fernando and decided to give it a try. For $150 pesos a night I got a completely spic 'n' span room, ceiling fan, a tepid-water shower (which was fine; it's hot in Tehuantepec), and a queen-size bed with real pillows and sheets! Amazing. No off-street parking, but there's somebody on the desk 24/7 who can keep an eye on your car if you park out front. And they sell cold sodas and beers at the front desk. The only drawback is that it's on Av. 5 de Mayo, right off the highway, so it's noisy as all get-out. Suck it up and use earplugs, because it's a really nice place. Reserve by calling their cell phone, 044-971-719-2578.

(I have since gone back to Tehuantepec and tried the Hotel Oasis, slightly more expensive at 180 pesos, but clean, nice, and quiet. Plus, the windows were covered with a metal grill so we could leave the windows open without the cat getting out. Parking lot, restaurant, house toucan and parrots. For a kick-ass meal, go across the street to Comedor Perla. We had a top-notch comida for two for 54 pesos. For an early breakfast you're pretty much stuck with Restaurant Scaru, which is okay but pricey for what you get.)

Ah, Zipolite, with your nekkid pot-smokers and fine Italian cuisine! When I'm in Zipolite I stay at the Posada Marina Brisa, right on the beach, as practically everything in Zipolite is. No website as far as I know, but you can reserve a room with Dan via e-mail, brisamarinaca@yahoo.com, or by phone at 958-584-3193. If at all possible, don't stay in any of the ground-floor rooms, which are basically reinforced cement cells, but get one of the rooms on the upper floors facing the ocean. They're quite pleasant and have balconies strung with hamacas. Expect to pay around $200 pesos a night. Pets - well, cats - are okay, but children are usually not welcome. Note: Zipolite has quite a reputation in Oaxaca. If you don't want to give your Mexican coworkers or social circle the wrong idea about you (even if it's true), tell them you're going to Puerto Angel instead. They may suspect otherwise, but it helps maintain the illusion of respectability.

Since we drove back and forth between Oaxaca and the States a few times, we also like and recommend:

My husband swears he saw a comedor sign advertising dog tacos, but despite that Montemorelos is an okay little town with good places to stay and eat. We used the Hotel Mavira - watch for the signs 'cause I forgot to write down the address - and ate comida at Milton's, a taco and burger joint on the zocalo.

I usually avoid Mexico City traffic by taking secondary roads around the capitol. About dead center between D.F., Puebla, and Pachuca is a little town called Ciudad Sahagun. And just outside town to the north is the Hotel Plaza Motel and Restaurante Santa Lucia. I really like the hotel, which has big rooms and bathrooms, and lots of off-street parking, but I most especially like the Santa Lucia, which serves a terrific dinner, really first-rate. Their specialities are seafood and venison (venado). The was good, but their steaks are really good - everything we've had there has been really good, and the folks running it are super nice. Well worth a stop for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It's also a convenient jumping-off point for a day or two of exploring Teotihuacan.

If you find yourself up in the Huasteca, Tamazunchale is worth checking out. The eponymous hotel is nice, if expensive at $650 a night, but it's got functioning A/C, plentiful hot water, and off-street parking. There are other hotels in town, but they appear very budget - though it might be funny to stay at the Hotel OK on the zocalo. As for restaurants, the only one we found was the hotel restaurant in the Hotel Tamazunchale, and it made the best chilaquiles I have ever had, bar none.

Maybe it's all the well-stocked pet stores and aquariums, but I really like Tehuacan, in Puebla state, which seems to have a bunch of nice hotels for such an un-touristy town. The Hotel Monroy is on Reforma, across the street from the regional archeological museum. Rooms are around $260, but are large, spotlessly clean, and come with fluffy white cotton towels and cable tv. The Monroy doesn't have parking, but its sister hotel around the corner, the Hotel Moniett, does, and is also a very nice place to stay for about the same price as the Monroy. Both are a short walk to the zocalo. (Hotel Monroy, 211 Reforma Norte, phone 238-382-0491; Hotel Moniett, around the corner at 129 2 Poniente, phone 238-382-8462.)

2008-02-15T05:38:00.000-08:00

Spanish words, Zapotec or Mixtec words, Spanglish, slang...sometimes it's hard to know what the heck people are talking about. Because even half a dozen dictionaries don't always help. For instance:

All my books give ¿que? as what?, but here that's considered informal and possibly rude. People use ¿mande? instead. Or this example—my perennial favorite—all my dictionaries list torta (a sandwich), flan (a custard), and/or postre (dessert) for pie. Pie. What are they thinking? Spanish for pie is pay, pronounced "pie." As in "pay de queso," cheese pie, which is actually cheese cake...

My latest puzzler is gravy. My half-dozen dictionaries say the Spanish word is salsa, but I just don't buy that. I suspect the Spanish word for gravy is likely gravy. Aha! It's jugito, little juice. At least it is in Oaxaca.

Here, in any case, are some of the unusual words you're likely to hear in Oaxaca that I do know about:

Abastos Sometimes called "Central" on city buses, the Abastos is both the second-class bus terminal, the site of Oax-town's big Friday/Saturday tianguis, and a big slice-of-life look at Oaxaca.
Abarrotes The corner grocery. You can buy a cup of dog/cat food at a time, or a single bottle of beer, too--and when you bring the bottle back you'll get your 3-peso (or so) deposit back. Great neighborhood resource.
aciento Pig oil, often with bits of pork rind floating around; not to be confused with pig lard, which is manteca. I suspect aciento is in a lot of Oaxacan cuisine; I know for sure tlayudas and memelas have it unless you ask for them "sin aciento."
ADO Pronounced ah-day-oh. It's the first-class bus station on Chapultepec, aka Hwy 190 on the divide between Col. Centro and Col. Reforma. See TAPA.
afuera A popular name for dogs.
aguacate An avocado. These used to be called alligator pears in the States before someone got smart and changed the name. Kinda like what they're trying to do with prunes nowadays.
aguardiente White lightning made from sugarcane juice.
ahuehuete That might be the Nahuatl name; in Spanish it's a sabino, a cypress. The Tule tree is supposed to be the biggest example of an ahuehuete in Latin America.
amarilla A yellow sauce, even though sometimes it's red; I see it a lot in empanadas and in stewed chicken dishes.
antojitos It took me awhile to figure this one out: antojitos and botanas are both snacks, but antojitos are more like finger-foods - your tacos, tlayudas, and empanadas.
Arbol del Pirol The pepper tree; they're all over Oaxaca. Weavers use the tree's cambrium to dye wool pink.
avocado Everybody in Oaxaca calls 'em aguacates, not avocados.
Bimbo Bimbo is Snuggle the Fabric Softener bear's cousin, and he's an ad whore for a brand of fluffy white bread and these nasty hot dogs that smell a lot like Oscar Mayer wieners. His hot dog carts are all over Oax-town.
botana, botanas Yes, it means "snack," but botanas are more like bar snacks - chips and peanuts and cheetos - while antojitos are more your finger-foods category of snack.
buñuelo It looks like fry-bread that got fried too long, and it's coated with cinnamon and sugar. Like an ovoid churro.
caguama What we at home would call a forty, or a 40-oz bottle of beer. Since Mexico is metric, they're actually nine-forties, which doesn't have as nice a ring, so everybody calls 'em caguamas.
camion, camiones A pick-up truck; down here, they're usually used to haul loads and/or people up and down roads too narrow for buses. If you catch a ride in a camion, get the price before you get in.
carnitas Slow-cooked pork, and a speciality of Michoacan. Widely available in Oaxaca. If you're outside Oax-town be mindful that the carnitas can come with (sometimes a lot) of pork skin mixed in.
Casahuate The white-flowered tree found all over Oaxaca; I'll try to get a picture.
cempasuchil Marigolds; you'll see lots in the countryside starting in late September. They're the main decoration flower used for Day of the Dead.
Chalma Town of miracle cures; they say that if you can't get it fixed in Chalma, you're screwed.
chamoy a popular flavoring in candy, nieves, and as a sauce on macro paletas. It's red, it's tart, and I have no idea what it's made from.
chicharron, chicharrones Pork rinds, and a hugely popular snack in Oaxaca. You can even buy extruded corn starch facsimiles instead of the real thing–but why? Always served with salsa.
chilaquiles They look like eggless migas to me; if that doesn't help, chilaquiles are yesterday's tortillas cut into pieces and cooked in salsa, sometimes red, sometimes green, sometimes negro. Some places garnish them with sliced raw onions, queso fresco, crema, and/or shredded chicken. A big plate of these and you will be good to go all day.
churro I'd call it a Mexican donut, except they have donuts here, so ... it's like a donut, except it's long and fluted and coated with cinnamon and sugar. Only buy them fresh, 'cause when they're old they're awful.
clayuda A variant spelling of tlayuda.
comal A round, slightly concave red clay griddle, a basic kitchen item along with a brazier, over which many Oaxaqueñas cook. The white stuff is cal, or lime, used as the original non-stick surface.
dulces regionales Strange Oaxacan candies, and a great gift idea for the folks back home. Lots of nut brittles, and candied pumpkin rind, and tamarind balls or little clay pots with tamarind and chili powder, and other things that taste like Tootsie Rolls. And so on. Too much fun not to try. Just be aware that the little pots are likely a source of lead contamination. Enjoy!
elote Corn on the cob, either boiled or roasted, and stuck on a stick. Eaten either with lime juice and chili powder, or "con todo," with lime juice, mayonnaise, queso fresco, and chili powder. Better tasting than it sounds. Oh, and no one refrigerates mayo here, so don't worry when you see it sitting out.
empanada Looks a lot like a quesadilla to me, but with salsa inside.
eskitas See esquitas.
esquitas Everything you'd get if you bought an elote except the cob and wood stick, all served up in a little styrofoam cup with a plastic spoon and a napkin. Less messy than an elote, too. Yum!
frijoles refritos Like guacamole, Oaxacans like their refried beans soupy. And they're always black beans. And often flavored with epazote, an herb. If you mix your frijoles in with your sopa de arroz it's easier to eat with a fork.
Fud Remember the Gary Larson cartoon? The one where the dog is trying to lure the cat into the clothes dryer with a trail of kibble and a hand-lettered sign reading "cat fud"? Here it is! Fud is a brand of bright-pink snack sausages, like Slim Jims only somehow worse. I didn't think that was possible.
garnacha, garnachas An Istmo speciality; little corn tortillas topped with ground meat, onions, a parmesan-like cheese, salsa and pickled cabbage, carrot, and jalapeno, heated by frying on a griddle. Very, very, tasty.
guacamole What, you've never had guacamole at a Super Bowl party?! It's smashed-up avocado, with diced onion and tomato and a splash of lime juice if you're lucky. Served soupy here, and without the tomato and onion, much to my dismay. Guaca means "icky" so it's my guess that this is "that icky mole," though folks here deny it.
guajolote A turkey or, in Spanish, a pavo. Yeah, the Spanish thought turkeys looked like peacocks.
guanabana A fruit I'd call a cherimoya back home in California, though they're super-big here in Oaxaca. Popular as a juice and in nieves.
gusano, sal de Very popular with mezcal, or sprinkled on sliced fruit. It's, ah, worm salt: ground up worms - grubs, really - mixed with chili powder. It makes a good gift, as you can't really taste the worms but it will surely freak out your friends and relatives.
helado American-style ice cream, but check out the insane flavors!
limon It looks like a lime but tastes like a sweetish lemon. And I never see lemons for sale in the markets. And they put it on everything here.
Llano, the Officially, it's the Parque Benito Juarez, next to the Church of the Virgin of Guadalupe and between Avs. Benito Juarez and Pino Suarez. A nice little park, with several fountains that the city sometimes turns on, families and kids out enjoying the days and evenings, elote and Bimbo vendors, and usually a vendor selling dulces regionales. It's also across from some government building, so it sees a lot of use as the staging area for protests, too.
macro paleta A Oaxacan Big Stick, that speciality popsicle beloved of kids. Here I usually only see it during fairs, which is a shame, because like other treats, the Oaxacans really know how to do this one right: it comes in a bazillion fruit and savory flavors and is served on a styrofoam tray in order to hold the chamoy sauce and a liberal coating of chili powder. Mmm, mouth-watering.
maguey The local name for agave, the wonder plant of Oaxaca. Magueys provide alcoholic beverages (tequila, mezcal, pulque), food, tools (sisal fibers and spines), and ask for hardly anything in return. What a deal!
mamey It's a fruit and a popular flavoring for nieves; it's also a color, similar to our salmon.
mapache That garbage-can party animal, the raccoon.
mercado A market, sometimes open-air, sometimes in a big warehouse-like building. The city's mercados are just south of the zocalo: the Juarez Mercado and the 20th de Noviembre Mercado. Which incidentially is where the tianguis used to be held until it got too big and the city too crowded with auto traffic.
mezcal An appellation-controlled alcoholic beverage made from the roasted, ground, and distilled hearts of magueys. It's readily available in anything from fancy bottles to home brew sold on the street out of plastic gas cans.
mole, moles A set of regional sauces (they make moles in Puebla, too: mole poblano), the most famous of which is mole negro, which has chocolate in it, among a host of other ingredients. Like any good sauce, every family has its own recipe. You can buy it in the stores and mercados and speciality shops around town. Turkey in mole is a traditional favorite, and mighty damn good.
nieve, nieves Oaxacan ice cream. It's like gelato. And it's made from drinking water, not the crap from the taps, so go ahead, try some.
nopal The prickly pear cactus; it's the cactus the eagle is sitting on as depicted on the Mexican flag. Folks here eat the paddles and the fruits. The fruits, called tunas, are great eating; the paddles are pretty bland but are good if cooked right, which mostly means not overcooked.
papalotl Nahuatl for butterfly, locally spelled papalote.
"Por el dios del osito Bimbo!"
pulque An alcoholic beverage made, like tequila and mezcal, from agaves; I've never seen it sold out of anything other than plastic gas cans and rickety-looking shacks. Bring your own bottle.
quesadilla Where I come from, a quesadilla is a tortilla with cheese and vegetables and maybe meat, heated over a griddle or open flame and served either open-face or folded in half. Kinda like a tlayuda, except it's not. Kinda like an empanada, too, except not. If you don't know you're just going to have to have one of each and decide for yourself how to describe it.
rajas As far as I can tell, it's sliced pickled jalapenos and onions and maybe carrots. A popular filling for tamales.
raspado A Oaxacan snow cone, with fruit in syrup ladled over the shaved ice and served in a plastic cup. Really, really yummy treat, especially when it's hot out.
reganada A crispy flatbread coated with sugar and cinnamon.
ride A ride, as in, hey I'm heading out: quiere un ride?
rustica Remember Busvan For Bargains? Or plank-and-block bookshelves? Oaxaca does, too, only down here they call that style of decoration rustica, not dorm-room chic (or worse).
salsa In Calfornia, salsa is a chunky, tomato-based condiment; the fresh stuff is often called pico de gallo, although I don't know why. And well-blended, chile-based sauces are called hot sauce. In Oaxaca, I never see pico de gallo unless I make it, and hot sauces are called salsas. So there you go.
sanitario A public, for-pay bathroom, usually 2 or 3 pesos. They'll hand you a wad of paper when you pay, too. Cleanliness levels vary tremendously.
sitio A taxi stand.
sopa Soup, but if you see "sopa de arroz" or "sopa de pasta" on a menu or sandwich board, it doesn't mean what you'd think. It's just regular cooked rice and pasta. I don't know why they call it sopa.
taco Forget Taco Bell, my friend. A real Mexican taco is a little drop of heaven served with a wedge of lime. Small, hand-sized corn tortillas filled with chopped meat-n-onions. Maybe a little salso or guacamole. Maybe a radish or grilled onion on the side. Pig-head tacos are popular in Oaxaca, so scrutinize the stand carefully before ordering or you'll be sorry.
taquito Aka the roll taco for those inSane Diegans in the house, a taquito is usually a corn tortilla filled with meat - beef or chicken, most often - rolled up and fried, then topped with guacamole, beans, cheese, and cabbage or lettuce. Yum-yum-yummy. But sometimes people here call tacos taquitos, little tacos. Well, tacos are always little, so I don't know what the deal is.
tamal, tamales A tamal—not a tamale as we Americans like to say— is a blob of corn meal with a chunk of meat in the middle, all wrapped up in a corn husk and steamed. There's some pig grease in there somewhere, too, which just adds to the tastiness. Unless you're a vegetarian, in which case it just adds to the list of off-limits Oaxacan delicacies.
tamarindo It's a pod that grows on trees, and a flavor they just love down here. I've had tamarind agua frescas in California, and you can get 'em here, too. But they also use tamarind as a flavoring for nieves and raspados, as well as a candy. Only the candy is more like tamarind chutney, seeds and all, and usually topped with a liberal coating of chili powder. Whoa!
TAPA The first-class bus station in Mexico City with buses that go to Oaxaca's ADO station. Mexico City has several first-class bus stations, so ask your cabbie specifically for TAPA.
tejate It looks like a Oaxacan Yoo-hoo. Maybe it tastes like a Yoo-hoo, too; I've never had a Yoo-hoo. Tejate is good, a drink that tastes faintly of chocolate and earthy flavors (but not like dirt), with a fun, chocolate whipped cream foam on top. I like tejate, but I just can't drink it if I see the ladies preparing it in their gigantic green-glazed bowls: those little ladies have their whole arms in there, mixing up the ingredients and somehow getting the stuff to foam up like whipped cream even though there's no milk or other dairy products in it. Ugh, yet yum. A conundrum.
temescal The local take on the sauna or sweat lodge. Wonderful.
tianguis It means awnings, but refers to the big, once-a-week (usually) market where all the country folks come in to buy and sell. It's a lot like a swap meet, with people selling everything from Made in Taiwan plastic housewares and toys to locally-produced pottery, wooden utensils, tin braziers, clay griddles, dinnerware, clothes both traditional and Western, tools, animals, lots and lots of produce, and hot lunches: tacos, empanadas, and tlayudas, mostly. And on and on and on. All being sold in crates and on tables but mostly in piles on the ground, with tarps of ever color haphazardly stung overhead, their multi-colored and low-strung guy lines going every which way. Tall people really need to watch their heads and feet.
tlacuache Local name for the possum.
tlayudas A Oaxacan speciality: a plate-sized corn tortilla cooked either open-face or folded in half on either a comal or on coals, and filled with Oaxaca-style beans, quesillo (usually), onion, tomato, and avocado, and usually topped with chorizo, tasajo, or cecina enchilada, but of course you can get it plain if you want. And if you don't want it with pig grease, ask for it "sin aciento."
tope A speed bump; they come in many interesting shapes and sizes, but all are designed to ruin your car's undercarriage if you speed through town. They are usually marked, but not always, or clearly. Watch for braking cars in front of you, and when you drive through any little pueblocito just expect to find a couple of topes on the highway.
tuna Not Chicken of the Sea; it's the scrumptious fruit of the nopal, or prickly pear cactus. Eaten fresh - peeled! the fruit has spines - or in nieves.
yu'u Some of the communities around the state have built guest houses specifically for tourists. They're cheap, and basic, and right in the middle of some really neat pueblitos. Well worth checking out.
vibrador A kind of tope, but instead of ripping the bottom off your car should you choose not to slow down, a vibrador will shake the teeth out of your head. A super rumble strip, that's it!
ximantecoso ó retama The Palo Verde tree. There's lots of it in the Cañada and Tehuacan Valley.
xopilote Mixteco for vulture.
zócalo The local name for a town square.

2006-12-14T15:39:00.000-08:00

Still haven't made it back to Oaxaca. And, no, the jones for some real Oaxacan food never went away so we just flew down to Los Angeles for two and a half days to eat at some of the Oaxaqueno ex-pat restaurants there.

First, we are totally stuffed because they exceeded our wildest expectations—especially after I went online and checked out some restaurant reviews. People were curious and on the whole enthusiastic, but pretty uninformed. Most mentioned only mole, some tlayudas, chilaquiles, and "crickets" so we thought we'd get something familiar, but nothing like we did. At all three restaurants the beans—black, smashed, and runny, just the way they should be—tasted of epazote and asiento. Mmm. On the other hand, the LA Oaxacans have adapted their guacamole to Californian tastes: all the guac we saw was thick and chunky.

Another Oaxacan adaptation to local tastes was the chips. US-based Mexican restaurants always serve a basket of chips before the meal, but never in Oaxaca unless it's a gringo-popular restaurant. But at the restaurants in LA we tried, the waiters and waitresses brought out a basket of chips—covered with a yummy red mole and crumbled queso fresco! Really good, and a very nice touch, we thought.

Guelaguetza
3337 1/2 W. Olympic Blvd at Irolo in Koreatown
Los Angeles
312-427-0608
Parking on the street and in back

Well, we never got any crickets, but we did start out with tlayudas at Guelaguetza. We went to the Olympic Blvd location (the other is on 8th St), which was comfortably full of mostly Latino diners. We each got a tlayuda con cecina enchilada y quesillo. The waitress stopped to clarify, "Both?" which we took to mean, you both want the same thing but what really meant, you both want one of these enormous things yourselves?

We ate here twice more, the next time splitting a tamal Oaxaqueno, wrapped in a banana leaf and hiding a generous chunk of chicken and slathered in black mole, and a large taco de barbacoa de chivo. The third time we split a plate of enmoladas con cecina enchilada and another tamal Oaxaqueno. All three meals were in the $20-$25 range, and included drinks (Jarritos for Greg, really good iced tea with free refills for me). Highly recommended. They also have a little counter up front where you can buy their moles and some other products.

(As a side note, G-man said he got a hard look from one of the other diners at our second outing there, until he bid the man a genial "Buon provecho!" as we left, which changed his outlook entirely.)

Monte Alban
11927 Santa Monica Blvd at Armacost
Los Angeles
310-444-7736
Street parking

The little strip mall that houses Monte Alban also has restaurants featuring Greek, Thai, Persian, Japanese, and generic Mexican. How LA is that? We liked this place, too, but Guelaguetza was closer to our B&B, and I thought the food was a little better at Guelaguetza—I had a couple of cold spots in the masa of my memela which says "microwave!" to me. But G-man rated the taco de barbacoa de chivo at Monte Alban as superior. The meat was better spiced, he said, and I agree with him, though the goat at Guelaguetza tasted more like goat, which I also like. We were still grossly full from our double-tlayuda lunch earlier in the day, so we only got the goat taco (also very large for a taco), a very good sopa azteca, a mediocre sandia agua fresca, a latte mug of atole champurrado, a memela with quesillo, and a tuna nieve which gave me a brain freeze but was yummy. $18.

Juquila is only a couple of blocks east of Monte Alban, and although the storefront is unimpressive we decided to go back the following day and try it.

Juquila
11619 Santa Monica Blvd at Federal
Los Angeles
310-312-1079
A tiny lot in back; we parked on the street

The inside's nicer than you'd expect from the outside. As this was to be our last evening meal on our Oax-Tour LA, I ordered a Corona michelada while G-man got a plain Corona, plus enfrijoladas con cecina, a tlayuda con quesillo, and another atole champurrado, this time in a regular coffee cup. It was all good, though I like the tlayudas at Guelaguetza a bit better: it had the brown marks I associate with cooking on a comal which the tortilla at Juquila did not have. Dinner was a shade over $24, including our beers.

We also picked up the Oaxacan ex-pat paper and scoured it for more restaurants. It'd take us a month to work our way though it all, but I list them here for your benefit, in no particular order:

Guelaguetza Palms
11127 Palms Blvd
LA, 310-837-1153

El Sazon Oaxaueno
12131 Washington Pl
LA, 310-391-4721

El Texate Oaxacan
316 Pico Blvd
Santa Monica, 310-399-1115

Restaurant Antequerade Oaxaca
5200 Melrose at Wilton
LA

El Meson del Taco
"Los Mejores Tacos" "con sabor a Oaxaca"
12326 1/2 Venice Blvd at Centinela
LA, 310-482-3739

Oaxacalifornia Cafe Juice Bar
3655 Grand Ave at 37th
LA, 213-747-8622

El Chapulin
featuring "la torta sexy"
3303 W. Pico Blvd between Wilton and Arlington
LA, 323-766-0757

Manolys Pasteleria y Cafeteria
11771 Santa Monica Blvd
LA, 310-473-0622

El Torito Oaxaqueno
they say they have tejate and
"authentico caldo de costilla estilo Yalalag"
2005 W. 8th St
LA, 213-483-3640

Mieto's Ice Cream y Fruit Bars
1250 S. Vermont - 105
LA, 213-738-7288
and four other locations

La Morenita Oaxaquena
"autentica comida casera"
3550 W. 3rd St at New Hampshire
LA, 213-365-9201

2005-11-03T08:15:00.000-08:00

Got a lot of water under the bridge since my last post to this blog. We're now in Berkeley, California. G-man is still writing -- gainfully! -- and I'm working at a bakery. We're gearing up for a trip back; we seriously need some Oaxacan food, as there is none in the Bay Area*, and G still has some stuff to research for his Oaxaca book.

I'll keep you posted.

*When we moved back to the Bay Area, we heard that there was a restaurant in the Marina District in The City that had Oaxacan food, so we kept organizing expeditions there to check it out. Oh, they're not open Mondays. Oh, they've closed for the day. Oh, now they're on vacation for the holidays. The menu posted in the window didn't look very Oaxacan -- well, not at all, really -- but then we ran into one of the chefs at Mi Lindo Yucatan in the Mission. He told us that if we came by they'd make us any Oaxacan food we wanted. Tlayudas? Yes. Garnachas? Yes. Okay, we are so there.
But next time we went by, the restaurant had closed...permanently!
Crap.
And that was that. We have toyed with flying to LA and getting tlayudas there...maybe soon.

2004-11-15T11:33:00.000-08:00

The place we call our own
Gone, gone, gone!
Is no longer our own
It's going, going, gone.
Gone, gone, gone!
There is no place where we come from.
We're gone!
We're gone!
We're gone!
There is no place that we call home.

—The Hi-Fives, "Welcome To My Mind"

Goodbye, Oaxaca.

I don't know what else to say.

2004-11-12T08:46:00.000-08:00

Roadtrip Day 6 updated, folks. And of course, a fun little adventure for the day, even though we're back home.

This morning I went across the street to the estacionamiento to get Vivani's heating pad–oh, that's another thing, in a minute–and noticed that the right front tire was pretty flat. Like, flat flat. So I collected G, we put on the spare, and we asked Juan Carlos, our landlord, if he knew of a tire-repair place close by. He said sure, just down the street from ADO (the first-class bus station).

Like most directions down here, "just down the street from ADO" is about as specific as it gets, but doesn't necessarily mean "just down the street from ADO." Juan Carlos didn't have an address for the place, or the name of the shop, either–also SOP.

But what the hell, we drove slowly and carefully (the spare was a little light on air) up to Chapultepec; no tire shop. Keep driving ... nothing ... there! A pile of tires on the sidewalk next to a pile of monos de calenda, the giant puppet people. We parked and walked over. Sure enough, in what looked like a 10-by-10 cubby was a tire repair shop/mono de calenda manufacturing center. They were very friendly, grabbed the tire and took it over to a big drum of filthy water to find the leak. But does the guy dunk the tire? No! He looks at it, takes a handful of water and dribbles it on the tire, and sure enough, dribbled it right on the leak. Damn! While the owner introduced us to his two daughters and showed us his photo album of his son's graduation from military medical school in DF, the repair guy trimmed a plug, popped it in the hole in the tire, then sealed it with some gunk ... then found a second leak and fixed that, too.

How did he know?

So this owner guy and I were getting into the photo album. He was showing me pictures of the state orchestra, the band that plays in the zocalo, the ancient pipe organ in the church in Tlacochahuaya, Special Olympics groups and Teleton outings. G started to get a bit impatient, but I really dig photo albums. We chatted and joked while G paid for the tire repair and while the guy put the patched tire back on Little Jumbo. The repairman gave me the nails that he pulled out of the tire; maybe I'll box 'em up with G's tattered Spanish-English dictionary and our worn-out pants.

Oh, and it was 40 pesos to fix the tire.

Okay, the other (small) adventure for the day: when we woke up we couldn't find Vivani. I was surprised she wasn't on the bed because it was so cold, and she wasn't on our dressers or in her crate, either. (She actually likes sitting in her crate.) So G says, shake the food bag, and I did, and we heard a put-out meowing coming from ... outside the back door. Looks like she followed G out the door on one of his nightime jaunts to the bathroom -- probably heading for her heated nest box, which was in the bathroom along with her litter box and food. Only now they're in the house, and the nest box is without heat. Good thing she has fur now instead of baby fuzz or she'd have frozen.

***

Even with nine days on the road, we had to pass by a lot of stuff. Maybe if we'd had another two weeks, though it seems to me that for every one site I check off my list I add another two. Or three.

2004-11-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Oaxaca Roadtrip: Day 9 Tlaxiaco - Oax-town

As cold as I'd been the previous evening during dinner, it was even colder the next morning! Vivani spent the night under the blankets, and when I put my glasses on I noticed her food bowl was untouched. What's up with that? As soon as my feet touched the linoleum I realized: the floor was too cold for her. Poor cat! I mean, for someone born in July, in Oaxaca, the cold must have been mind-blowing. So I moved her bowl to the nightstand and tried to warm up.

Back at the Rincon el Gon, G ordered the wrong thing, and ended up getting toast with cinnamon and sugar instead of French Toast. I took a risk and ordered something I'd never heard of, a dish with a Mixtec name. It turned out to be really good: a tortilla cooked on one side, with a rub of herbs on the other, then balled up and toasted some more. Three of those with a piece of tasajo. And really bad coffee.

We loaded up the car and noticed that the right front tire was almost completely flat! Eek. We hustled to a Pemex station and filled it. I'd hate to pop a tire out there, and it would be so easy on those roads.

We had a couple of choices as far as objectives for the day: visit the oracle at Achiutla, visit Maestro Antonio at Yucunama, visit Sr. Ramos at Yucuita and see if he'd show us the ruins in the next town over, or drive out to Tilantongo and see what we could see. Now, Tilantongo was the capital city of 8-Deer Jaguar Claw, a famous Mixtec king. (He's famous because through some quirk of fate many of the Pre-hispanic codices that survived the Conquest were Mixtec, and most of them related the exploits of 8-Deer.) Our various books said that the archeological zone was off limits, that the museum in town is only sometimes open, etc. And it's a long haul down a dirt road. But Tilantongo was the place G really wanted to see, so we decided to give it a try.

It was startling to find ourselves on familar roads again shortly outside Tlaxiaco. And on roads that weren't horribly twisty. Or mostly missing. Although still populated with lots of farm animals.

As we drove through Teposcolula I remembered that on our last visit the Casa de Cultura had been closed, and that there were supposed to be artifacts on display inside, so I suggested we stop. The town was buzzing, with trucks and guys in hats lining the road–looked like a cattle auction was about to begin. So parking was tight, but we found a place in the shade and went into the Casa de Cultura. Nada! Oh well. On the way out we saw that in addition to the auction a tianguis was going on just off the plaza, so we took a stroll through that. Lovely mounds of fruits and vegetables, toys, pirate cds, clothes, the usual. One of the toy stands had a bunch of plastic horses, cows, and cowboys, and the vendor had set up little plastic corrals for the plastic animals with the plastic cowboys riding herd. I stopped to take a picture then noticed some of the plastic steeds were giraffes. The vendor even had little toy-sized wood yokes and plows sized to fit the plastic oxen. Damn cute. Oh! And a tiny old lady selling baskets. Hmm. These were palm-frond baskets, square base with round sides, with an attached palm-frond tumpline. If you drive around the state you see lots of people hauling goods in them, with the tumpline going around their little shoulders. The señora noticed our interest and showed us a couple of baskets. Toys, really, about the size of a quart jar. G said, Hey this'd make a great hat, and put it on his head with the tumpline going around his chin like a strap, which set the old lady and her daughter laughing pretty hard. I picked up a printer-sized basket and the old señora started saying what sounded like "veinte" but I wasn't sure, so her daughter shouted to her, "HOW MUCH?" and it was veinte. Twenty pesos. You've got to be kidding!

Now, if any of you weave you know that while palm isn't a difficult material, you've still got to gather it, size it, then weave the darn basket. I didn't even make a pretense of bargaining, and just handed the señora a $20. I can't wait to go collecting fruits and nuts with it in the California woods.

Back in the car, and down the road. Our Oaxaca guidebook says the road to Tilantongo is in one place, but our roadmaps say it's in another, so we went with the maps. Just past the beautiful old church at Yanhuitlan we turned off the highway on a blacktop road toward Santiago Tillo. Since we'd lucked out at Nopala and had had paved road all the way into town, I was hoping for another Hermes miracle, but the pavement ended four miles later. That left 16 miles of dirt and gravel road, through a series of little towns of mostly adobe and stick houses, all with beautiful bright churches on a hill. No signs of course, except for the ones announcing the town name, so we frequently would pull up beside somebody walking along the road, or plowing their field, or herding their goats or cattle around, and asked if we were going the right way to the next town on the road to Tilantongo. Yes, yes, and yes. On and on and on.

We finally pulled up toward a town and asked a guy on horseback, Is this Tilantongo. Si! We headed toward the church and parked at the presidencia, which was thronged with farmers and their wives. Packed. And I knew what was coming: we stepped out of the car and about two hundred heads swiveled toward us and stared. We could see that a town meeting was going on, with the men in hats heading into the plaza in front of the presidencia, and the wives hanging around the margin, sitting and talking ... in Mixtec. Everybody was talking in Mixtec. No traje except modern-style, though. A little guy came up to G and started chatting away in I think a mix of Mixtec and Spanish. G later said the guy reeked of mezcal and, when he had shaken his hand, had used the Secret Mixtec Handshake ... as well as sticking his finger in G's armpit! We're not sure what that was about.

We walked into an abarrotes next to the shady spot we'd parked in to ask if it was okay to park there, and ran into some luck: the shop owner had lived in Fresno and California for four years, got his stake together and had come back home to open the store. His English was great, so while his two daughters and I smiled and made faces at each other G asked him about the mural, the museum, and the ruins.

Despite what our books said, there was no community museum (bummer) but the ruins were open to the public, and we didn't need a guide (rock on!). We took a look at the church, wading through the crowd of frankly curious locals, then, as the presidencia with the mural was full, we hopped in the car and drove another 7 miles up the mountain to Monte Negro, the archeological zone.

We didn't know what to expect from the ruins, so when we pulled up and saw not just piles of rubble or dirt-covered mounds but actual buildings, we were stoked. We put the car in the shade, fixed Vivani a bowl of sopa de Whiskas, and took off. We were on the top of a mountain (3414 meters) with a great view of the valley and ruins all around us. Plazas, temples, staircases, pillars, residences. All over. Fantastic. Not much pottery, and no carved stones–I expect they remove those to foil looters–but pretty well preserved and easy to imagine what it must've looked like when it was occupied.

Then back down the road. The tire seemed fine, most fortunately, and in town we returned our soda bottles, checked out the mural, and headed back toward the carretera.

A little ways outside of town we saw two small ladies and their burro. The burro was loaded with firewood, and lying down in the middle of the road. We pulled up and G asked if they needed help getting their burro up. They enthusiastically nodded yes, so we hopped out and, while one of the ladies held the halter rope, G and I grabbed the ropes tying the wood to its back and hauled it to its feet. It wasn't any bigger than the old lady who owned it, so it wasn't too hard. The burro kept trying to lie down again, but I propped it up with my leg while G and the señora (just one now, the other had taken off like a shot up the road) readjusted its load. Then the señora asked us where were from and when we said Oaxaca, asked us if we knew a woman who lived on Monte Alban who was from Tilantongo. We regretfully informed her that we did not. She thanked us for helping her, shook our hands, and we were off.

We spent the night in our old bed, back in Moderate Shangri-la. I think we broke our thermostats, too, because we were freezing. We went around the corner for tlayudas at El Chepil all bundled up, but everybody else was in shirtsleeves. And I'm really noticing, too, how many tourists there are in Oax-town! And that nobody stares at us here. Whew.

2004-11-10T16:10:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Oaxaca Roadtrip: Day 8 Putla - Tlaxiaco

We got to one community museum today out of a possible three, but what a one! We were quite a disruption in town -- guess they don't see too many red-haired, tattooed gueras -- which I'll tell you about in a bit, as Greg is chomping at the bit to my right. Makes it hard to concentrate.

2004-11-09T16:57:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Oaxaca Roadtrip: Day 7 Pte Escondido - Putla

I've got a painfully slow connection here, so I'll just put the bare bones for today and save the filling in for today and the last two days for a better line.

Puerto Escondido is very ... resorty. Not to the degree of Cancun or Acapulco; more like a Kona. Anyway, after almost a week of back country Oaxaca it was a bit of a shock. Our hotel room was, uh, basic and considering the area (we were down near the beach and pedestrian walkway) pretty cheap at $250 for a two-bed room with tv and hot water. But still over our preferred price range. So was dinner, at just over $200 for the two of us; quite a shock, but it was really, really tasty: we split a seafood-stuffed fish fillet, a mixed-green salad, and shrimp tacos -- which turned out to be shrimp-filled chimichangas. I normally don't like chimichangas, but these were exceptionally good, with a yummy, chunky guacamole to go on top. Some beers and a pitcher of naranjada, mmm. But the internet cafe was $20 an hour! Outrageous!

But I said I'd wait on P.E. Back to today. I'm very, very happy to report that Hwy 200, which runs along the Oaxacan coast and up in to Guerrero, is very well maintained, thanks to all the cash it brings to the state. You know, tourists driving down from Acapulco. Because Acapulco has a jet airport, and is connected to Mexico City via a cuota, so it's easy for the rich tourists to drive all the way down to Huatulco if they want. Not a pothole in sight.

And when we turned off onto Hwy 125 north, our roadway luck held. It was nothing like Hwy 131, The Ugly Highway. Oh, well yeah, in a couple of parts there were some car-eating bights in the roadway, and two complete washouts that had been built up again with loose fill and gravel, but mostly it was solid if twisty driving. Thank fucking Hermes.

Now, the only stop we had planned was a quick detour into San Pedro Tututepec to see what our guidebook said were some carved stones scattered around the plaza in front of the presidencia. A lot like our stop in Santos Reyes Nopala the day before, on our descent out of Juquila -- drive in, snap some photos, drive out. Only, surprise! Tututepec built itself a community museum. Well!

We parked in some deep shade and set Vivani up with some sopa de Whiskas and water, then went in. Nice new building with nice new (and informative, for a change) signs describing the local pre-hispanic artifacts: lots of big carved stones in the shapes of jaguars, feathered serpents, and caimans; stunning, gorgeous polychrome bowls with jaguar and eagle-head feet; lots of little clay figurines; some codice reproductions painted as murals on the walls. I was snapping away like crazy, despite the No Tomar Foto sign on the wall untill I got busted by the custodian. Fortunately, I got most of the pieces photographed, though unfortunately no the collection of pottery molds and paper preparation tools.

We had the custodian explain to us some of the exhibits, especially the town-founding story, and the story behind the codice-reproduction murals. She was extremely patient with us, and it turned out to be a very, very cool visit.

(They also had extremely cool t-shirts that looked like they were for sale, but she wasn't parting with them. Too bad!)

So back in the car we hopped, and sped on our way. We ended up staying at the museum for two hours, so we were a little worried that we might have blown our driving plans for the day, but we got to Putla by 5pm. Our guidebook describes two hotels in town: the nice one, and the okay one. They're around the corner from each other, so we took a look at the okay one -- it had burned down! The hulk of the building was still standing, blackened timbers and all, and the Hotel No. 2 was in a run-down building next to it. We took a pass and went to the nice one. Yeah, it is nice, too -- and back in our price range: $180 with parking, cable tv, and hot water, though I gave up waiting for it to get hot and just showered anyway. And a balcony, though we can't use it because it's not cat-proof. But Vivani digs the tile floor, as she can scoot and slide around on it with her hat.

We then went looking for chow, as between breakfast and checking in to the hotel we'd only had one small car snack. We found one of the restaurants recommended in the book just as we were about to double back to the taco stand, and took a seat. Mmm, comedor familiar: Greg had the chicken breast enchilada, I had the meatballs. He got beans and some queso fresco with his, I got sopa de arroz with mixed vegetables with mine. We both got pickled carrots and jalapeños, a big stack of tortillas, and a pitcher of guava agua fresca (and a second pitcher when we drained the first). Oh! and a plate of sliced apples with honey for dessert. Greg's full, and I am absolutely stuffed, so much so that I'm taking a pass on a post-drive beer back in the hotel room.

How much was dinner? $54 pesos for the both of us.

I'm so glad I'm back in real Oaxaca.

2004-11-08T17:16:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Oaxaca Roadtrip: Day 6 Sta. Catarina Juquila - Pte. Escondido

Oh, how refreshing! Our hotel room in Juquila, at the maze-like San Nicolas, had the best mattress we've slept on anywhere in Oaxaca. Sure, the pillows were bricks, but who cares! And at around 7500' in elevation, it was cool enough in the evening to need the blankets on the bed -- a welcome change after the sweltering coast.

We went back to the church the next morning to take some pictures, but as the inside was again full of worshippers (some approaching the altar on their knees) we really didn't want to start snapping photos, so we just got the exterior, then looked around at the tianguis.

It was pretty small, as Sunday had been the big tianguis day -- more on that in a minute. But we did see a pair of little Chatino ladies selling some embroidered blouses (perfect for the potato-shaped) and some embroidered cloth napkins and tablecloths (perfect for those with a home) ... and some of these local-style bolsas, a type we've seen only in the little Chatino section of Oaxaca. We asked the pair of ladies, How much for the bags? 150 pesos. Hmm, how about 125? Nope, 150. Your ultimate price, señora? 150 pesos.

Okay, if they're not gonna bargain, we could always try somewhere else, so we walked away. We went to internet. We got breakfast at the place we'd eaten the day before. We walked around town some more. Then we conferred. We both know one of the cardinal rules of Oaxaca is, If you see it and you want it, buy it then, 'cause there's no telling when if ever you'll find it next time. Like the New Zealand butter, here one day and gone the next. So we went back into the plaza in front of the church and eyed the scene. A few more vendors had set up, and it looked like a couple of them were selling bolsas. As we planned our course of action, I noticed that the older of the two original sellers noticed us and was smirking. Well! We'll show her, I thought. Then the younger of the two came over to us, and said, Still want the bags? So we walked over to her pile of stuff on the ground, only this time her elderly mother was there, too, and the old lady said, Bolsas are 170. I looked at the younger woman and said, Oh really, they've gone up? The woman quickly said, No, no, 150, so G and I each got one, and now we are really styling. (I'm glad we did, too, because of course once we left the plaza we saw nobody else selling them.)

We loaded up the car and drove a few miles outside of town to El Pedimento, an auxilliary Juquila shrine. Yes, she has two! Only at this one you can go up and touch her, pin milagros to her vestments, kiss and wipe your brow with her dress like I saw several people do. The ceiling of her little chapel was covered with murals explaining her story, there was a great view of the valley and a huge pile of extra offerings out back, banners and crosses and mementos tied to the trees surrounding it. And people taking pictures and movies, so I joined in and took some photos of the place. Then while G worked his way through the dozens of roadside shacks selling Juquila recuerdos–souvenirs–I sat in the car with the cat. Most people who make the pilgrimage buy a picture of Juquila and fasten it to the grill of their car. We will, too; I just need to get some metal eyelets in order to tie her on. He also got a litle picture of her in a wood box with a red Christmas light and plug. Groovy.

Then we were off and back down that horrible highway. Good Christ. We blew off checking out San Juan Lachao Pueblo Viejo–the name of a town with ruins if I ever did hear–just to get away from Hwy 131. Down in San Gabriel Mixtepec, where the road was still bad but not quite so curvy, we took a detour because our books and maps indicated that the town of Santos Reyes Nopala, 7 miles down a dirt road, had carved stones in its plaza and possibly a community museum. We were ready for the improved driving conditions that a dirt road would bring. But surprise, surprise, the road was newly paved. And, as we approached the bridge into town, festooned with street lights. Another photo op for the governor, I'm sure.

So we drove into town and parked at the presidencia. We could see big carved stones embedded in the walls of the presidencia, and one of the bored cops standing around kindly unlocked the gate to the second floor for us so we could see all the stones. But no museum, so after photographing the stone at the entrance to town we drove back out to San Gabriel Mixtepec and, damn, back onto Hwy 131. Where I quickly got carsick.

G was sure we could make it to Jamiltepec, or even Pinotepa Nacional, but I mentioned Puerto Escondido as a possible stopping place for the evening. When he seemed unconvinced of the town's charms as a stopover–no ruins!–I increased the level of my whining until he gave in and headed to the hotel zone.

Well, the place was a lot bigger than I expected. Much bigger than Puerto Angel; more like a Pochutla. A foreign-tourist-infested Pochutla. We asked about prices at one hotel and were told 400. Whoa! Keep driving. But looking in our guidebook we feared that that would be the norm. So then we started looking not for American-friendly hotels, but local-style hotels. We pulled into a place called the Hotel D'Carlos, perfectly fine though a bit scruffy in the Mexican hotel sort of way, and got their last room for $250. But hey, it was right on the beach: walk out door to our room, across the lobby, across a small lot, and onto the sand, crowded with frolicking Mexican families playing in the water, and fishing boats, and buckets and palm-frond mats of fish.

We got dinner, also expensive by our standards, but tasty, did some too-expensive internet, then wandered back to the hotel. No ruins!

2004-11-08T17:15:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Oaxaca Roadtrip: Day 5 Zipolite - Sta. Catarina Juquila

You can read about something, but ... okay. I've driven around a lot of Oaxaca, yet still I looked at the map and thought, oh sure we can drive from Zipolite, stop in and see this museum, look for this unexcavated site, get to Juquila and see the church, then drive back down to, oh, Jamiltepec or so. We're talking about 250 miles or so. Well, the road along the coast wasn't so bad, but as soon as we got to Puerto Escondido and turned inland, oh my hell. I think there was as much pavement as dirt and sand, but let's just call it 50-50. A road so bad that if I was ever to scout locations for a post-apocalyptic movie, I'd say: Hwy 131. G figured it out; we averaged 15 miles an hour!

Needless to say, we scouted out no ruins, saw no museums, just endured and finally reached Juquila, the town of Oaxaca's supreme Virgin (out of three). The whole town is crammed with places for pilgrims to stay, all of it down-home. And a lot more expensive than we're used to in Oaxaca. But we found our room, found some comida, then set off uphill to see the church and little Juquila. She's a very native looking Virgin: short, with dark skin and black hair. And sitting in her golden case in the middle of a riot of flowers and candles (and a large blue teddy bear) at the front of the church. Which started filling up. Hey! It's time for mass. So we stayed for mass. The pews were completely full, and people were standing (or kneeling) in the aisles, the space between the pews and the altar, and at the back of the church.

We didn't do a whole lot else, as we were full of comida and worn out from that ugly road. We went back to our room and watched Mexican TV while Vivani played with her cookie wrapper and hat.

2004-11-06T17:08:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Oaxaca Roadtrip: Day 4 Zipolite Beach

We sweated. We swam. We showered. Repeat.

Really, though, it is hot, hot, hot. Even in November. We spent most of the day passed out under the ceiling fan. This does not bode well for further coast explorations.

2004-11-05T17:27:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Oaxaca Roadtrip: Day 3
Tehuantepec - Zipolite

Yes, we're back in Zipolite one last time. We just ate a fish dinner, sans shoes (and for Greg, sans shirt).

We started off the day by hiring a motocarro to take us to the cueva above town. Motocarros, three-wheeled motorcycles with little flatbeds on the back for people and cargo, are the way everybody gets around in Tehuantepec. And the cueva is a large cave with a shrine inside, high up the side of a hill overlooking the town. The story goes that tunnels inside the cave lead all the way to Guiengola, so since we'd seen the ruins we figured we should see the cave, too.

So after another early breakfast off we went. It was quite a huff up the dirt track to the cave, but once we were up there we had a great view of the city and the coastal plain, all the way down to the Pacific. The shrine inside seemed to be dedicated to JC, and had lit candles and fresh flowers, but not much to really see, so after a short visit we walked down the hill and through part of Tehuantepec we hadn't yet explored. Because while there are taxis and motocarros in the part of town nearest the plaza, there aren't any in the area near the cave. So we walked, past the church, through the neighborhood, down to the river which cuts the town in two, and to the city dump. Yes, a fine way to end one's tour of Tehuantepec, scuttling past feral dogs and rooting pig families and herds of goats searching through a town's burning garbage, down to the river only to find the footpath washed out. So we improvised a route back up to the metal bridge and across and back to the hotel. Whee.

The cooling breeze stopped pretty much once we left Tehuantepec, and the usual brutal sunshine took over. So not only was Vivani bummed to be back in the car, but she quickly got hot, too, so we turned on the AC for her. Our only stop en route to Zipolite was the little town of San Pablo Huamelula. Now, shortly after G and I came to Oax-town, we saw an exhibit at Santo Domingo on magical spots on the coast. Huamelula was one of the towns featured. And back then, we pronounced it "who-ah-muh-lula" instead of "oa-meh-lula." So we were stoked to finally visit Huamelula, even though our guidebook said there really wasn't anything there except for a candy-colored church.

And the church certainly was candy-colored, pink and red and green, and after we took some pictures we drove back through town -- and saw a Museo Communitario in the plaza! So we stopped, but since there was no shaded parking, we carted Vivani along with us into the presidencia to ask about the museum. The kids playing soccer in the plaza went nuts to see the cat, but the adults contained whatever they felt about it while we sat and waited for the guy with the key to show up.

It wasn't much of a museum, only about a 20-by-20-foot room, mostly filled with library books and dance costumes, but the curator did play a cassette tape for us of their festival music while G looked through an English-language book and asked the curator questions about their fiestas.

After that it was a quiet, twisty stretch of highway until we got to Zipolite and plunked our stuff and the cat in a room. I thought she'd be happy to be out of the car, but the roar of the Pacific freaked her out. After a quick dip in the water we went back up to the room with a bag of beers to sit and watch the surf and say,

Sure beats having a job, don't it.

2004-11-04T15:40:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Oaxaca Roadtrip: Day 2
Guiengola Archeological Zone

Yeah, we're in Tehuantepec to see Guingola, one of the few remaining, Open To The Public ruins in the state we have yet to see (the other's Tilantongo, and I'm not sure that one is open). Because of the time change, we were up and ready to go at 7am, but nobody else was, and as we wanted breakfast and needed water, we walked around plaintively, looking for anything open until a pair of street tree trimmers took pity on us and directed us to Restaurant Scaru, which they assured us was open. It was, so we sat down and ordered.

Now, inside this restaurant the walls are covered with brightly painted murals of Istmeño life, some standard, some kinda bizarre. Pictures soon. Breakfast turned out to be a bit pricey and just okay, but it was food and we knew we'd need full tummies before hiking up to Guiengola. We gave Vivani food and water, and knotted up a few empty cookie wrappers (her favorite toy, along with her palm frond hat, which we brought with us), and set off.

The ruins aren't too far outside town, and our guidebook says that you pick up a guide at the Comedor Gema, at the turnoff from Hwy 190. Well, on our last abortive attempt, the folks at Comedor Gema said, no, there's a muchacho up there already, go ahead. This time the comedor wasn't even open, so we drove past and down the dirt road. The directions in our book are awfully vague, but we figured, how hard can it be? And the road this time was nice and dry. When the road forked a sign indicated the proper direction -- pretty damn rare in Oaxaca, signage -- and we hadn't gone very far up the fork when a guy popped up from the brush at the side of the road. Our guide! Can you imagine that for your job? Sit in the shade at the side of the road (after walking there from where the bus drops you off on the highway) waiting for tourists to show up. Or more likely, not. He said the road was no good for cars, though it looked okay to me, so we parked and set off up the road, up the hill. His name was Feliciano Gonzalez, he spoke Spanish and Zapotec, so we used our crummy Spanish. G did pretty well too, quizzing Feliciano about the site's history, local stories, and the like. And Feliciano was more than willing to spill, including telling us about a series of dreams he had, where he imagined himself in Guiengola when it was a living city, meeting Cosiojeza (Cosiopi's dad) and having the king tell him that he needed to be here to be a guide and guard the site. We were all definitely on the same page.

Because of the breeze, and because it's November and the trees still green, what could have been a brutal 3km walk up the hill in the tropical sun turned out to be very nice. Pretty vegetation, vistas, and soon the start of walls indicating houses. Then we were on top of the hill, standing in the middle of Guiengola, looking at the plazas and pyramids and trying not to be blown over by the breeze, which was now a respectable wind. It did stagger us a few times, that's how strong it was.

Feliciano took us up the pyramids, showed us traces of the original painted decoration, an adobe brick with a child's footprint, a cave wall with paintings, the rich people's residence, houses, tombs, a large round tina (a bath), everywhere. He told G he couldn't take us to several interesting features because it was too dangerous. This was after he led us into a cave -- the hill on which Guiengola sits is limestone, and it's riddled with caves -- without a flashlight, and with several side caves that seemed awfully big and awfully deep in the feeble light coming from my keychain flashlight. I mean, the kind that you could fall in and seriously kill youself in. Hey! It's Mexico.

Pictures a'coming, folks. It was a pretty damn cool day; we were there from 9:30a to about 2:30p.

Now, we hunt for garnachas.

2004-11-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Oaxaca Roadtrip: Day 1
Oax-town - Tehuantepec

Uneventful drive, which in itself is news: Vivani was a sweetheart, no problems. And she actually fits in the half-size airline carrier.

We got to Tehuantepec early, so we got a room at the Oasis, a popular hotel in town. Yeah, the pillows are rags stuffed in a casing, and the shower in the bathroom ... well, I didn't think there was any hot water until G pointed out that the knobs were reversed, and the showerhead aims directly at the toilet, but it's clean, it has windows on both sides of the room to catch the breeze, and grills over the window so we can leave them open without Vivani escaping. All for $130 pesos a night. Not bad, not bad.

After a really yummy comida at Comedor Perla across the street -- G's pork was so good he wouldn't even let me try it, the bastard -- and a nap we set off to examine the church founded by Cosiopi, the last Zapotec king (his dad was king when Cortes came marching through) and an early Christian convert (later burned at the stake by the Dominicans -- thanks, guys!). Our guidebook says that the church and convent Cosiopi built is probably the only church in Mexico funded by a native. Anyway, it still has a lot of the original frescos inside, including a great fresco of JC on the cross in a field of magueys. Upstairs in the ex-convento, now the Casa de Cultura, they have a little museum of local costumes and archeological finds. And, of course, what everyone did in the Revolution. It's actually a very pretty building, and it was crammed full of kids taking classes, everything from regional dance, guitar, Zapoteco ... and karate! And all sneaking glances at the gigantes.

I wondered out loud why on this, our second visit, the town seemed so much more pleasant. I mean, for one, the weather: last time we were here it was oppressively hot and humid, and this time there's been quite a breeze, so it's nice and cool. Then G reminded me that the last time we were here Izzy was dying and we were arguing over what to do. Oh.

We were too full from our excellent, $60 for two comida to eat dinner, so we just got a jamaica from a vendor in the plaza and watched other people chow down on garnachas. But tomorrow, garnachas for sure!

2004-11-04T15:27:00.000-08:00

Blogger ate my post about Election Night.

2004-11-02T08:40:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of globalization I present to you this photo from the cemetary in Santa Maria Xoxocotlan:

2004-11-01T09:54:00.000-08:00

Gringolandia. Some call it a blight on the Oaxacan landscape, but no matter what you think sooner or later you smash yourself on its treacherous rocks looking for a fast-food fix, or bulk groceries, or a dozen-count box of blue Bic pens.

Lately somebody or other has been trooping through the streets with a pair of banners railing against the creeping globalization of McDeath. Myself, I feel pretty ambivalent about it. Is an Extra Value Meal #3 wrong, but a ice-cold coke from the corner miscelanea right? Is calling Domino's for home delivery wrong, but buying imported New Zealand butter right? Starbucks bad but 7-11 coffee good? I mean, bad coffee must have its fans, because it's still around and going nowhere as far as I can tell. Or those awful Bimbo hamburgers -- Ronald McDonald has simply been unable to drive little Bimbo from the streets of Oaxaca.

It's one of those paper-or-plastic questions with no right answer. So while you're thinking about that, take a look at this.

2004-10-31T08:43:00.000-08:00

You know the feeling American towns and cities give off during important national holidays? That ghost town feeling? Or maybe it's the "What am I doing on the street when I should be inside warm and cozy with my family" feeling. The kind of feeling you can experience Christmas, Thanksgiving, Superbowl Sunday. Oaxaca is feeling a little like that for Day of the Dead. Or, it would if the streets weren't crammed with tourists and the vendors catering to them.

Yesterday in Soriana, one of our supermarkets, people were loading up with groceries for the long weekend, and in the downtown mercado and in the Abastos, people were loading up with Day of the Dead supplies: flowers, candy, chocolate, and bread, sugar cane, candles, tissue paper flags. Tons of it. Because most people started building their family altars last night, or today, because tomorrow the dead start showing up and everybody wants to be ready. Me, too, only I built my a day early so that it would be ready today, Halloween, a holiday not really celebrated here -- though street kids don masks and plastic jack o'lanterns and ask for money -- but certainly celebrated in the U.S.

Mexicans say that the spirits of dead children show up around noon on the 1st, and that the adults and old people trickle in later in the day and on the 2nd; everybody goes home on the 3rd, unless it's Sunday in which case they wait until Monday. But I think that -- and here I am, showing my gringa excentrica nature again -- that the spirits of dead cats come back a day early, on Halloween night. Trust even a dead cat to cadge not one or two but three free meals. So the tins of tuna and Whiskas and chicken-flavored kibble are out, along with some fresh water and balled-up paper. Welcome back, kitties!

2004-10-31T08:36:00.000-08:00

Packing boxes + 1 kitten x a fair amount of chaos = ... well, let's just say that I'm glad the bathroom has a door, and that Vivani's nest box is in the bathroom.

But after she exhausts herself attacking every moving thing, she crawls into the nearest lap, starts to purr, and goes to sleep. Yesterday, as I went to lift her out of my lap before leaving to see that crappy movie, I called her Evil-O, but G-man said, No, there was only one Evil-O, and he's right of course, so we decided that Trouble-O would work.

We're done with school, and as soon as the holiday is over the three of us will hit the road.

Miss Izzy--the original, the only Evil-O--was so good on car trips because not only was she deaf, but she really hated being left behind, so much so that riding in the car was to her preferable. However, tender young Vivani hears quite well, is highly excitable, teething, and doesn't have Izzy's old-age perspective. May the gods of car travel help us!

2004-10-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

I just saw what I'm pretty sure will be my last movie in Oaxaca. And what I'm pretty sure will end up being the worst movie I see in 2004. Yeah, Anchorman. G-man and I actually walked out, rating it (in my world) a true F -- unlike Paycheck, which I only wanted to walk out on. I think this synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes sums it up best:

"A coarse, one-joke affair; Ron Burgundy might not have actually been an SNL skit, but 'Anchorman' sure feels like a movie based on one."
-- Frank Swietek, ONE GUY'S OPINION

2004-10-28T14:19:00.000-07:00

Wasn't that eclipse beautiful? I hope you got to see it.

In the It's A Small World Afterall department, I've been e-mailing a couple of folks who saw my blog and sent me e-mail with vacation and living-here questions. Yesterday G decided on a whim to stop in at Oaxaca International and say goodbye to everyone, and when he got there the school was holding a presentation on traditional spirituality. While he's there at the presentation, G starts talking to this guy, who turns out to be a friend of one of the women I've been e-mailing. The guy says, "Oh, you're Greg!" which of course left G completely in the dark until the two of them came over to Moderate Shangri-la so I could explain what was going on and he could see the place and report back to his friend, who is moving here. Wow.

Tomorrow I go shopping for altar supplies and then I get to set up our Day of the Dead altar: flowers, candles, a loaf of dead bread, a can of tuna. I'm not sure what we're doing after our final class Saturday, or Sunday or that matter, but on Monday we're going out to Teotitlan to have lunch with Zacharias and his family. Mmm, turkey mole, here we come!

2004-10-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

You are kidding me:

"This is the first time a total eclipse of the Moon will be visible from a major league ballpark during a World Series game, and such a coincidence is not likely to happen again until the second half of this century," it said, quoting US astronomer Joe Rao.--AFP (Paris)

2004-10-25T12:01:00.000-07:00

On Friday, while G and I were busy typing away at the internet cafe, we kept hearing sirens and zooming vehicles going down Alcala, right outside the door. Frankly, it sounded like a 9-1-1 call back in Albany. I'd say we heard rushing vehicles for a good 20 minutes before we finally logged out and took a look.

Road rally!

Now, Alcala is the cobbled tourist walkway leading from Heroes de Chapultepec -- aka Hwy 190, aka the Pan-American Hwy -- past Santo Domingo and down to the zocalo. It seems a little odd to funnel race cars down the city's one pedestrian walkway, but hey! It is Mexico. So we walked (carefully) down to the zocalo to check out the action.

Normally the zocalo is stuffed with couples, tourists, and families with kids out enjoying the afternoon and early evening. That Friday, it was thronged with men armed with video recorders and cameras, oohing and aahing over engines. I'm not sure why an engine needs to be videotaped, but hey, it's not my hobby. We noticed all the cars were vintage, from the 40s to about the 60s or 70s (as far as we could tell), and from just about all over Mexico, the U.S., and Europe! Fords, Chevys, Chryslers, Triumphs, Corvettes, Porsches, Mercedes Benzes, BMWs -- stuff we couldn't even tell what it was. And all the drivers swaggering through the crowd or standing around their race cars drinking beer.

We asked a pair of drivers about the race, and they told us it was the Pan American Highway Road Rally. They'd started in Tuxla Gutierrez, in Chiapas, were stopping for the night in Oax-town, and were heading out in the morning for Mexico City, and eventually Laredo, Texas. We talked about what it was like going down city streets, over topes, and driving on the generally crappy and full-of-surprises Mexican highways, and he agreed it was something to be zooming along through town at 140kmph, police escort or no. He said someone got nailed, too; one of my students on Saturday said it was a traffic cop! What do they call topes Down Under? Sleeping Policemen? Heh.

2004-10-22T13:41:00.001-07:00

One week to go. We've been saying goodbye to our classes; sometimes their responses have been quite touching.

At home, the fruit tree -- ask me about that in a minute -- is dumping fruit like mad. Only now the fruit is rotten, so it really splats when it hits the bricks. We have to scoop it up several times a day and throw it in holes I dig in the garden to keep the bugs at bay. The other morning I counted: 154 pieces of fruit mushed onto the patio. Ugh.

So, our landlord Juan Carlos and my students say it's a ciruela tree. Ciruela means "plum," but the fruits are about as plumlike as apricots. Less, even, because these fruits aren't stone fruits. Oh, there's a pit, a big ropy thing, maybe 80 percent of the fruit's volume is pit. And they make good cat toys, or so Vivani says. So maybe ciruela means plum like miel means honey. Now, honey is miel. But so is pancake syrup, corn syrup, molassas, fructose sweetener. If it's sweet and syrupy, it's miel. Maybe if it's tasty and leafy-tree-grown, it's ciruela.

G-man found another lunch venue. It's across the street from Santo Domingo, next to the Oaxaqueño ice cream parlor. It's all take-out; the entire operation is, oh, about 6 feet across at the most. But she makes great comidas, and $20 pesos, just like Donut Lady's. But we feel guilty when we get comida at the new place, and try to scoot past Donut Lady without her seeing!

Today, though, on our way here to internet, I took a peek inside Donut Lady's trunk and saw she had pechuga and macaroni salad today, so we stopped and got two. She announced to her small crowd of family helpers, Hey! Guera wants two comidas! Donut Lady's daughter, sitting in the back seat on tortilla detail, said, Her name's Suzanne, remember? So Donut Lady says, Susi! Just like my daughter's name.

So there you have it: only two people in the world are allowed to call me Susi, my mom ... and Donut Lady.

Plus, lunch was only $35 today. The I-know-your-name discount?

2004-10-16T15:41:00.000-07:00

Nothing new to report. Haven't gone anywhere. Haven't decided on a course of action. Though I must say I love have a short-timer's attitude.

This morning on the way to school I gave my breakfast to a street dog; believe me, he needed it a lot more than I did.

2004-10-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

I'll just cut the fat and say that yesterday G-man and I gave our notice at school; we'll finish out the month teaching, then do some driving to visit some places in the Mixteca we haven't yet visited. After that, I'm driving back to San Francisco, and G will follow as soon as he feels he has the materials he needs for his book.

That's right! I'm heading home.

2004-10-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

G is working on a book about Oaxaca, so we have a little direction for our Sunday drives and various roadtrips. He wanted to head over to Mitla and look for some pre-Village sites (caves) behind town ... somewhere ... but as we didn't have our FM3s in the car, and often there's a military control point on the highway between Oax-town and Mitla, we headed the other way. (Our documents are at Migracion while they update our address and renew our visas for another year.)

Well, we didn't have much cash on us so we didn't want to blow it on tolls, so we drove to Huitzo on our way to Suchilquitongo, which has a community museum we have not yet seen.

We drove through Huitzo on the free road, keeping our eyes peeled. Huitzo has been inhabited a long time, and is supposed to have pre-Columbian ruins though they're closed to the public. But you never know, and we might spy some carved stones or whatnot meandering through town.

Well, we did not, but on the way out of town I swear I saw what looked like an unexcavated pyramid on a hill, so we turned around and tried to get there on the twisty, unpaved roads. I think we got near it, but we couldn't see the pyramid from the in-town roads, so after a bit of driving we gave up and recrossed the bridge heading out to Suchilquitongo.

Suchilquitongo, though it fails to appear on any of my Mexican maps or atlases (atlii?), has always struck me as a prosperous town: lots of people out and about, lots of shops with actual merchandise, cars, cement (not adobe or stick) houses, that sort of thing. But we got to the center of town, to the presidencia, and we saw that it was fenced off! What tha'...? I've never seen that before. The town had put up signs saying basically, the presidencia (and museum) closed until we get the money promised us to do X, Y, and Z. Strike two!

We decided to try Mitla after all, and I'm glad we did because the roadblock was absent, we saw a couple of smaller groups of ruins in town besides the main one with all the fancy greca stonework, and I remembered some caves I'd seen from the road on my way to San Juan del Rio ... which are kinda behind Mitla.

We left the pavement and crawled along a dirt farm road, until it got too rough for Little Jumbo. Then we parked and walked along a creek, through cornfields, toward a small canyon with said cliffs. G wasn't up to the scrambling, so I set off on a path I'd eyed from the road. Well, the only people using the caves now are cows and goats and swallows, judging by the poop. A few pottery sherds, but no construction, no corn, no fire-blackened walls or ceiling. But if people had been using the caves for a long time it'd be hard to tell because the ceiling of the cave -- to judge by the look of the cave floor -- keeps flaking off and crashing to the dirt below. But it was a fun scramble.

That was pretty much it for the day; not much. Certainly nothing like Yucuita! But this morning after classes we drove over to Migracion and picked up our FM3s with their shiny new stamps, so we are legal in Mexico for another year.

If we make it tha long.

2004-10-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

In Pendragon terms, I am Suspicious 18, so naturally I think they're fucking with me at work. This last Saturday it was Greg who had to stumble around Moderate Shangri-la in the dark to get ready for early morning classes, not me. I got to sleep in. Only I'm so accustomed to getting up to the alarm that after he got up and I fell back asleep, I kept dreaming of the phone ringing -- yeah, we use our cell phone as our alarm clock.

So at 7:30 I got up to start my day, and while I'm putting my contacts in and fending off the kitten, I hear the phone ring, announcing an incoming call. It's 5:30a in California; who'd be calling at that hour? I grabbed the phone and it was G-man, telling me to get my ass to school pronto for my 8:00 class. My what? Yeah, the scheduled rotation got pushed back.

Well, I got there at five minutes to 8 -- late by school standards, but before any of my students arrived, so I had enough time to grab the books and put on a happy face.

Now, today during the second of my morning classes, I looked at my watch and said, Oh! time to go, do these exercises for homework and I'll see you Wednesday. My students looked at me and said, But we have another half hour of class! Huh? Apparently, to make up for some lost school days, my San Antonio group is going to be an hour and a half instead of an hour for the next three weeks.

"But didn't Gilo tell you?"

Mmm, no, he did not.

2004-10-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

I've always found the schism between writers/editors and art/production people fascinating. Did you see this? It's a great example. This month one of the local free papers had another: all the articles across an inside spread had "the subhead goes here" and "the caption goes here."

"Don't you read the copy?!"

"Don't you look at the design?!"

And from what I've seen, the answers are no and no.

In other news, finally! Fahrenheit 9/11 has come to Oaxaca! Only ten months after it was in the States. Still waiting to see if Hero comes here, too. Then I could see it again, only instead of dubbed into German like the first time I saw it (Jet Li speaking German -- trippy), I could see it dubbed into Spanish. My own personal game of Around the World With Hero.

In other, other news, I know I've mentioned my brushes with tejate, that crazy YooHoo of a Oaxacan beverage. Here's an article from the Oaxaca Times about trying tejate. Too bad the picture's black and white.

Soon it'll be cold enough for atole, that watery hot corn drink. Mmm. Oh, and by "cold enough" I mean temperatures consistently in the 70s. Brrr!

2004-10-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes my school schedule stinks, and sometimes it’s pretty darn good. In October I’d have to say it’s definitely the latter. I rotated out of my early Saturday morning class, so no more getting up at 6am on the weekend–though I still have to get up before the sun Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. But I have no classes Tuesdays and Thursdays. So I’m going into exploration overdrive!

This last Sunday we drove out to the Mixteca to pick up Teposcolula; not a big day for Pre-hispanic artifacts, but a beautiful drive, and we had fun.

Tuesday we went back to the Mixteca for a third try at the community museum in Yucuita. On our previous visit we’d explored the ruins–including the bat-filled waterworks–and seen the carved stones in the town plaza, but it had been a Sunday and the museum was closed. We figured we’d have a much better shot at it on a Tuesday.

Well, we didn’t. It was again locked up tight, and the holder of the only key wasn’t around. A woman working in the presidencia directed us to a house up the street; the woman in the house up the street directed us back down the street to another house. As we hesitantly walked past the presidencia on our way to the second house, a man came over and asked us something we didn’t catch. We mentioned that we were in town to see the museum. He affirmed that it was closed, but asked us if we wanted to see the artifacts he had in his house.

I have to say, city girl that I am, my first reaction was suspicion: what, walk into a stranger’s house? To look at "artifacts"? It sounded like the set-up to a TV movie of the week, one involving ignorant gringos ending up in Mexican jail for antiquities theft. But then I came to my senses, and we said, Sure! Let’s go.

His name was Sr. Javier Ramos, and he lived just off the plaza. We walked into his house, and he invited us in to the living room and offered us a seat at the dining table. It was a typical middle-class village house, made out of concrete with rooms around an open courtyard. Only this house had a very motionless, very quiet, very old lady, head draped with a rebozo, holding a cane and sitting in a chair. She never looked at us or spoke to us, much less moved. (Turned out she wasn’t being stand-offish; she was blind and almost deaf.)

Sr. Ramos’s wife Sara came out and offered us something to drink. While she busied herself in the kitchen her husband brought out a small box filled with–wow. Sr. Ramos said that the museum was always closed because it wasn’t really a museum but a room in the presidencia the town used to store local finds. And apparently it either didn’t all fit in the presidencia, or people also brought stuff to Sr. Ramos. In the little box were several strings of beautiful polished jadeite, shell, and bone beads, delicate conch mother-of-pearl buttons and dangles, small pottery offering jars and human figurines, and lithic tools made from both the creamy-colored local chert and black obsidian imported from the Mexico City area: scrapers and a score or more of lovely arrowheads, and faceted obsidian points of some mysterious use.

The Sra. handed us our drinks and sat down to watch our reactions as Sr. Ramos brought out box and bag after box and bag of artifacts: a large incense burner. Rasps and polishers and metates. A gorgeous heart-shaped mortar. Polished stone labrets and pendants and other face and/or body jewelry. A beautiful bone sewing or basketry awl. Possum and eagle and jaguar and dog figurines. Stamps for making pottery. Small, incised pottery discs. Polychrome pottery bowls. What looked like a small stone dildo. Metal bells. A clay rattle. By the time the last box had been trotted out, the Ramoses not-small dining table was covered with Pre-hispanic artifacts. Artifacts that we got to handle and touch and scrutinize to our heart’s content!

While we were flipping through a pair of oversize books on Mixtec art and history, Sr. Ramos asked us if we wanted to see a piece found while the town was working on the road. We said sure, and the Sra. went off to retrieve it from her brother’s house. When she brought it in to the living room we were stunned. It was about a foot tall, and a lovely polished red and orange polychrome with a bird design around the rim. A major museum quality piece, which we also got to hold and admire close up.

We took so many pictures we filled a 256mb memory card and just about drained our camera battery. I’ll post a movie shortly so you can see what I mean. Finally, Sr. Ramos brought out several maps and talked to us about the next pueblo up, Santa Maria Yucuñdahui, which has a related set of ruins. He said, if we wanted to see it we should call him and he’d take us up there. So now I have his phone number and another reason to go back to Yucuita a fourth time. This town really sticks like glue.

2004-10-04T06:46:00.000-07:00

As you I think know, I have two classes Saturdays: an adult class from 8a-11a, and a kids class from 11a-2p. Two adult classes wouldn't be so bad, but man those kids wear me out. Part of it is, the kids are anywhere from 8 years old to almost 12, so there's a huge scism between the older ones and the little kids. And the school has been trying out kids in all the Saturday classes, so sometimes I've had fourteen kids when I've planned for 8 or 10. It makes for a long three hours, and by the time I get home in the afternoon, I'm ready for a nap or a drink. Or both.

But this last Saturday I just took a nap, then played with the kitten, did some e-mail, saw a movie -- usual Saturday stuff. And by the time we were heading home it was late enough that El Chepil, our tlayuda restaurant around the corner, was open so we went there to get some dinner.

There was only one other diner when we sat down, but right after we ordered this huge group came in. The gods of restaurant timing were definitely on our side that night. We can see them sneaking peeks at us, then the kids started looking and making like they wanted to come over to our table but were too shy. Well, they finally worked up their courage just as our food arrived. They wanted to know our names. They wanted to know where we lived, and where we were from. Were we married? Did we have kids? What kind of food do we eat in the States? Is that a tattoo? Do you like Oaxaca? How do you say ... well, just about every word they could think of to ask. The kids, four girls, were seven and eight and eleven and twelve, two sets of sisters, all cousins.

When their little brains started to fill up, they went and got paper napkins and pens and started writing down what we said. Only through a kid Spanish filter. For instance, one kid asked me, "Como se dice 'verde' en ingles?" How do you say 'green' in English? I saw her write on her napkin, verde=ruin. Say "ruin" with a really fake-sounding Spanish accent and it kinda comes out as "green." Her napkin was full of that, but "ruin" is the only one I can remember.

Dinner lasted two hours! But it was the funnest thing we did all weekend.

2004-10-04T06:18:00.001-07:00

I believe the kitten has a name. We have to try it out for a bit to see if it works, but so far, so good.

Vivani, which is a Zapotec name and means Dawn.

Who picked the name? G-man!

2004-10-04T06:18:00.000-07:00

As Sunday Drives go, it didn't have much in the way of excitement: we didn't get lost, we never left paved roads, we ate no strange food or encounted any strange languages. We just drove out to Teposcolula to see the old church, community museum, and other odds and ends. Because after several trips to the area, we had managed not to see any of that.

We did try to spice it up by taking Hwy 190, the free road, the whole way there instead of taking the cuota to Nochixtlan. Which is what we've always done. And what we will go back to doing, because like most of Oaxaca's free roads the stretch of Hwy 190 between Oax-town and Nochixtlan is slow, twisty, and liable to have sudden washouts, landslides, and gargantuan potholes. Plus, it was raining so we didn't even have a view.

Poor us.

But I managed not to throw up, and G-man managed not to send us careening down the mountainside. And once we got to Nochixtlan the road was familiar and relatively fine. We took the turn to see if our random-encounter Tony or Ron had done any trenching or surveying work at Pueblo Viejo; nada. We drove into town looking for lunch, because driving the free road took forever and we were starving. We ate at the Moon guide-recommended Restaurant Eunice: chewy little beef steaks with gravy, beans, salad, and tortillas.

Now, the subject came up last week of just what the Spanish word for gravy is; our dictionaries all say salsa, which doesn't sound right and only puzzled my students. As did my explanation of "it's meat juice." So Greg asked the woman serving the food, who said it's jugito, or "little juice." So I was on the right track after all!

We ate then strolled through the plaza to the Casa de Cultura, which in this town also doubles as the community museum. A very fat, very bored-looking guard told us it was closed. Darn. Okay, down to the church, a big ol' 16th-century affair. It was open, and free on Sundays, so maybe it evened out. The church was interesting, but just, with some old paintings of the life of Santo Domingo, and some life-size wood statues of churchmen or saints or something. I didn't see any Pre-hispanic carved stones incorporated into the church as sometimes happens; too bad. Then we set off looking for the Casa de la Cacica.

Now, a cacique (or cacica for the ladies) is/was the local village leader back in Pre-hispanic times. And if you were a particularly good cacique your village would venerate your remains so you would intercede with the gods on behalf of the village. So back when the Spanish came through the area, they built the local cacica a fancy stone house to live in, hoping she'd settle there and her people would, too. I don't know if they ever did, or what happened to the cacica, but her house is still in town, and we wanted to see it. And it only took us asking directions, oh, three or four times in this tiny town to find it.

Well! They are renovating it, so there wasn't much to see other than your typical construction site stuff. But it's turning out to be a handsome-looking building, and I'm actually excited to see it when it's finished. It should make a kick-ass community museum, and who knows? Maybe it'll even be open Sundays.

2004-10-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

We often turn on our fan when we're home to foil the mosquitos, but for the past few days we've been tuning it on to drown our our neighbor's new Rod Stewart cd. They often play classic rock while they work in their haunted back room, but Rod Stewart is unsafe at any volume.

And I thought the Celine Dion the workmen next door listen to was bad.

In small furry animal news ... Greg was unable to resist, and has been absorbed into the Body. All hail Landru.

And this is my guess as to the still-unnamed kitten's brief history. It's not feral, and is quite used to being handled. It does not like the kids next door; whenever they come over to ooh and aah over it, and cart it around a bit, the kitten gets angry. It doesn't take it out on the kids, but waits until it's back with me. At some point in its young life its tail was broken. It was completely healed up when I brought it home, but the kitten's tail is L-shaped. So I think that while it was being handled by young kids its tail got broken, the family never had it set properly, and couldn't give away a kitten with an L-shaped tail, so after the rest of the litter was gone Dad took the unwanted kitten and chucked it in the dirt lot behind the Hombre de Papel newsstand. Or maybe he was aiming for the river and missed, which would make him an asshole and a poor shot. I first heard it crying Wednesday morning (I thought it was a bird), fed it Wednesday night, and scooped it up Thursday morning. I'm surprised it lasted that long, what with all the stray dogs in this city.

Since the kitten can't talk more than baby-talk, all I can do is guess, but I'd say I'm pretty close to the mark.

2004-09-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

Well, one decent movie this week at Cinepolis, so I saw it Saturday afternoon. The Terminal. Judging from how the Office of Homeland Security comes across, I'd say ol' Steven Spielberg is one of those Hollywood liberals. Or maybe he's just controlled by Hollywood liberals. Or liberal space aliens. I don't remember how that's supposed to work.

And, as is often the case with subtitled movies, The Terminal, the Spanish-speaking audience, and I had a bad case of outofsyncitis, especially noticeable during the Star Trek references. It pretty much went like this:

Joke lead-in
Suzanne laughing
Joke
Silence from audience

I am a hard-core Star Trek: The Original Show fan -- have you ever played a home-made Star Trek: Trivial Pursuit game? -- and big-time geek. I'm used to us Trekkies and gamers being mocked in the media. We bring most of it on ourselves, true, but man it was nice to see a pretty gamer who was not the butt of jokes! Live long and prosper, Officer!

Frankly, it was the best thing about the movie, though I did enjoy Tom Hank's EFL speech.

2004-09-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

As far as Sunday Drives go, it was pretty tame – at first. I played with the kitten; G-man worked on his book. “Should we go somewhere?” “Sure, where?” “I don’t know...” and so on. By 2pm it was pretty clear we weren’t going up to the Mixteca or in search of a red triangle mystery.

As dinnertime rolled around – American dinner time, that is – we chose to let our stomachs do the deciding, and went off in search of Casa Blanca, supposedly the best Chinese restaurant in Oaxaca.

We didn’t have an address or a phone number, or a phone book, but G remembered seeing an ad for it on the way to Ceviarem. Yes, there was the ad, phone number only and “Servicio a Domicilio!” Okay. But G thought it was up near the fountain of the seven women (each one representing a region of Oaxaca; it’s cool). So off we went, and we spotted a sign, Casa Blanca, with an arrow. We zoomed up the street in the direction of the arrow. Another sign, another arrow. And another. And another. Good thing, too, because we were in a colonia we hadn’t been in before. I felt like we were driving through the twisty, narrow roads of the Berkeley Hills, and the streets were lined with houses, but we kept seeing signs so we kept going.

And there it was, tucked between houses on a clearly residential street (zoning? ha!). We parked and took a look. Two levels, the top full of people eating and the bottom full of kids playing on plastic jungle gyms in the patio. We went upstairs but were told it was full, “but downstairs is the same.”

Well if chatting over gleefully screaming kids versus chatting while looking out the windows at the cityscape is the same, yeah, it was. But this is Mexico, not France, and children are always included in family events, especially on Sundays. There’s a saying: Friday for friends, Saturday for sex, Sunday for family. If Friday and Saturday nights are the big nights for movie theatres in the States, here it’s Sunday, and the whole family comes.

But back to Casa Blanca. Our waiter came over and started setting the table. He looked to be a teenager, and shyly asked, “Do you speak English? French?” “Hablamos ingles y espanol!” He asked if he could speak English “to practice” and G said, Okay, you speak English and we’ll answer in Spanish – we need to practice too!

He asked us if we wanted the buffet, but we said no thanks. He handed us two menus and went off to bring us our drinks. We took a look and got pretty excited. Now, when G and our friend Dale tried the Chinese restaurant near Santo Domingo, it was so bad that G couldn’t eat any of it. And in Tehuacan, The Pagoda restaurant had more Mexican dishes than Chinese on its menu. Casa Blanca’s menu didn’t list a single Mexican food entree! The dishes were divided roughly into sauce types: oyster sauce, lobster sauce, frijol cantones – “Frijol Cantones?” “Black-bean sauce!” – sweet and sour sauce. Plus broccoli dishes, chop suey, chow mein, and chau fan. Chow fun?, I thought. Then I saw chau fan con cha siu, and thought, No way! Chinese-style bbq pork chow fun?! I picked that for my dish, and G chose black-bean sauce pork.

Our waiter came back, poured the beers, and took our order. Greg ordered frijol cantonés con cerdo, then I asked about the chow fan. He said that chau fan was a rice dish – bummer! – so I switched to chop suey cha siu. We also picked a California roll from the Maki Rollos section. I pointed out to G that, technically speaking, California rolls and chop suey are American food. Then we tried to order steamed rice, but the waiter said no! Too much food, he said, but if you decide later you want the rice, I’ll bring it. Okay. Chinese and Japanese food by way of California eaten in Oaxaca, who needs rice?

So how was the food? It was ... okay! I had specifically gotten a California roll instead of a Philadelphia roll to avoid cream cheese, but that’s not the way sushi works in this town. And we couldn’t distinguish between the black-bean sauce pork and the bbq beef chop suey. At all. But the vegetables were fresh, and cooked just right. If I hadn’t lived almost my entire life in major metropolitan coastal areas or married a guy who’s half Chinese*, I probably would’ve thought it was great. I’m sure it’s better than all those Chinese buffets I saw sprinkled across the U.S. And what better way to end the meal than by splitting an order of fried ice cream?

We weren’t ready to end the evening, so we hopped in Little Jumbo and took a joyride around the city. We ended up somewhere south of Sta. Lucia, the colonia where Oaxaca International’s Independence Day party was. It’s fun to explore the city, especially when we run across fun signs and pretty buildings, but Col. Ramona seemed to have none of these things. We followed a dirt road along the river – yeah, even the capital has lots of dirt roads and shanties. We crossed a bridge and headed uphill. The road dead-ended near a large crumbling ediface: an old school? a factory? a hacienda? No clue. We turned around and headed back vaguely in the direction we’d come.

I turned onto another dirt road and followed it downhill. It had rained that afternoon, so the roads were wet, and the large potholes were filled with water. We passed some goats. The potholes got larger and the mud deeper and I started worrying about getting stuck. Nothing like a little on-road off-roading as an after-dinner treat. I stepped on the gas, figuring a little speed would help us slide through any tricky spots. And slide we did! Little Jumbo started fish-tailing down the wide, muddy street as I howled with laughter. Where were we? That’s right! The capital of the poorest state in the country, swerving along looking for pavement.

We got through the mud, and I swung the car onto the asphalt and headed for home.

*Greg does not have a Chinese parent. But his first wife's parents were Chinese, and that's what he learned to cook. So now he says that he's half Chinese -- his stomach. The ladies at dim sum love it.

2004-09-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

So, apparently there’s something in the water in D.F. I don’t mean the usual pathogens swimming in Mexico’s tap water. I mean like some kind of mind-control substance. Because that's where the school's supervisory personnel go for "training."

A couple of months ago at work Manuel got demoted from Instructional Supervisor to a regular ol’ grunt of a teacher, and Jonathan got promoted in his place. One of Jonathan’s beefs was Manuel’s surprise observations of classes, and after he got promoted Jonathan promised to end that practice. Not like it bothered me, but I thought, ah, maybe he’ll clean house of some of the school’s more asinine practices. Like no weekly schedule, or fruitless and boring (mandatory) teacher development sessions. But, no, things continued pretty much as they had under Manuel.

Then little things started cropping up. A post-it note asking me to please indicate which book I was referring to in my kid’s lesson plan. (There is only one kid’s book.) Or progress report templates that wouldn’t accept the current date. It’s not like I haven’t worked in countless offices filled with their own petty requirements and snafus, so for the most part I just let it roll off my back.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Jonathan came up to me and said, “What are you wearing Saturday?” Huh? “Oh, Patricia wanted me to remind you that you’re supposed to wear jeans on Saturday.” Oh, really. Last year the rule was, absolutely no denim or sneakers of any color or style, ever, to this spring when Patricia (the director of the school) said we could wear jeans and sneakers during Saturday classes because of the heat. Though I am still unclear how jeans and sneakers are cooler than any other kind of pant and shoe, but whatever. To now, apparently, that we had to wear jeans on Saturday. Again, whatever. Jeans aren’t great pants to bike or hike in, so even in San Francisco I only had one pair. I brought them with me to Oaxaca, but usually it's too warm to wear them, and after losing so much weight last year they don't fit that great. But hey, if the director wants us to wear jeans on Saturday, I’ll wear jeans.

Then this last Thursday, Jonathan says, Can I talk to you a minute? It seems that Patricia wanted him to tell me that I wasn’t following the dress code for the school on Saturdays. But I wore jeans, I said. Yes, but not blue jeans. You have to wear blue jeans. I started to lose my patience. I don’t have blue jeans, I said, I’m wearing the only jeans I have. Well, Jonathan said, Patricia said that if it was a problem she would help teachers buy the clothes they need. ! That’s not the problem, I said. If Patricia knows of any place in this city of midgets where a 5-foot-10 woman can find a pair of blue jeans, I’ll be happy to buy them. I wanted to say “of midgets” but I didn’t. Well, ah, then you should wear what you wear during the week, he said. Fine, and fuck you, I thought.

To be continued.

2004-09-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

God's irritation with Florida means I got this notice from my ISP:

Folks - it's been one heck of a week. Monday, as you know, was not a very good day. Explosions and fire took our network center off the grid for nearly half a day. And now on Friday of the same week, we find ourselves facing yet another hurricane. This time, it's headed straight for our area. (See: www.nhc.noaa.gov, www.floridatoday.com).

In other news, our neighbors have a dog, Coco. She's fine as dogs go, although she barks at us like we're invaders every time we come in the front gate. To help keep her entertained while the kids are in school, they often chop up a coconut for her to play with. It's sorta like a tropical Kong toy for dogs: she spends hours digging out the coconut meat, then tossing the husk around the patio.

Today, though, the entertainment was definitely the kitten in my lap. Oh, Coco stared! and when Buixa (Boo-EE-sha), the middle daughter, came over and fawned over the kitten, Coco went nuts. She kept coming over to me (which she never does) to sniff the kitten and look it over closely. And when her doggy face would get too close the kitten gave her swipes, which only added to the insult and set her off barking petulantly.

Yeah, I brought home a little bag of bones in a cat suit this morning, after giving it a couple of "dog bombs" last night on the way home from work. Miraculously, it was still there this morning, hiding behind the newsstand at the Intersection of Death.

I have seen so many starving, sore-riddled dogs over the past fourteen months. Excruciatingly pathetic, wobbling down the street, trying to stay out of kicking range. And the lost kitten that our handy-man mercifully killed -- if unfortunately in front of me, the starving kitten hiding in the stump near work, etc etc etc. I can't believe it's wrong to try to save one little life from a short, crappy existence. My beloved Miss Izzy Vasquez, the queen of piss and vinegar, died two months ago today, too. I know she wouldn't mind.

But G is pissed.

2004-09-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

And the milestones keep comin'. Despite my desires for a Roja or a Gigante, my Mexican nickname is definitely Guera (Lighty). You shouldn't take nicknames personally down here; everybody gets one, and it's usually based on a physical characteristic. Like Fatty, Slanty-eyes, Skinny, or Lazy. It seems as if the same dozen or so epithets are used again and again, which makes me think there must be a d12 or d20 table around somewhere. Maybe it's part of your citizen pack. Yesterday I stopped by Donut Lady's car to see what she had in her trunk for lunch. Mmm, pollo enchilada, frijoles, and espagueti. While she's packing it up on a little styrofoam plate, she turns to me and asks, Como se llama? Suzanne, I tell her. Ah, like my daughter, she says. And your name, I ask her. Irma. So know she's Irma the Donut Lady, folks. And it only took her, oh, about 10 months to ask me!

Here's the information you requested! Before I forget: spamshirt. It's a little pricey at $25pounds but maybe you can take the idea to your local printer for less.

2004-09-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

My 200th post! It's a slow and boring week for such a milepost, I'm sad to say. No movies, no excitement, no work hardly (though that changes tomorrow when I get a 7a-8a class to go with my 8p-9p students). However, G stopped by at Ceviarem today to chat with Jorge. After 14 months in Oaxaca we are friendly and sometimes socialize with one family: Marcos and his wife Osvelia and her brother Jorge and his wife Barbara. So whaddya know but that Osvelia and Jorge used to live in San Juan del Rio! Yeah, when they were kids their dad was the town doctor. Jorge was pretty surprised we'd been there, and had seen the for want of a better term I'll call the town's offering stone. This morning he told G some stories about San Juan that had us shaking our heads in disbelief -- but I'll let him tell the story. Keep checking his blog.

2004-09-20T08:27:00.000-07:00

A pretty quiet Sunday; just drove out to Santa Ana del Valle, near Teposcolula, to see their fine community museum. On the way back G and I stopped at some intriguing caves and did a little exploring. Pottery sherds galore, many inscribed and colored. You can click here to see the quicktime movie of the day's exploration if you want. Now I'm off to the bank -- ATM, fortunately. The banks are crazy crowded here! -- and the supermarket for some of that DIY lamination stuff.

2004-09-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I found myself with two consecutive days off in a row. Wow! Even better, Greg also had the same two days off. Unheard of! We looked at our maps and books for a good overnight destination, and quickly settled on Tehuacan, up in Puebla state.

Now, why Tehuacan? It’s not on the tourist track, its local craft industry is carved onyx which I have seen a lifetime of courtesy of Tijuana, and it’s not even in Oaxaca, a state with many corners still left to explore.

This is why: it’s got a regional archeology museum, the valley is one of the possible birthplaces of corn cultivation in the Americas, it’s far enough away to be a roadtrip but close enough not to exhaust us getting there and back, and we like it. Or we thought we liked it. We’d passed through once before on our way home at the end of Roadtrip Verano 2004, and even though we’d ended up on the edge of town in a Love Motel, the town piqued our curiosity. It’s tidy and has a nice bustle to it. And it’s got more pet shops and aquariums than I think we’ve seen in all the rest of Mexico. We wanted to get a closer look at these pet-loving people.

Tehuacan is only 2.5 hours away via the toll road, but I figured we’d likely take the cuota back to Oaxaca, so I wanted to take a free but slow way up. The only problem was, Wednesday night had been El Grito, the shout for Independence Day, and we had been up late watching fireworks, drinking mezcal, and making party talk in Spanglish with the staff and students at Oaxaca International. I consider it a victory that we were able to leave as early as we did, which was 2pm Thursday. Ouch! Half the day gone.

And we took the free way anyway, even though we knew it would get us into Tehuacan late in the afternoon. But we didn’t care; we were excited to be on the road and taking what we thought was a new road for us. It wasn’t until we descended out of the mountains and into the awfully hot and dry Canada that we remembered, Hey, we’ve been here before. That little valley’s climate is unmistakable.

Someday I’d like to drive through there again when I’m not on my way to somewhere else. Cuicatlan is supposed to put on an interesting tianguis, when the mountain folk come down to market, and twice now I’ve noticed a sign for Santa Maria Ixcatlan, just outside Santiago Quiotepec, indicating a noteworthy church 46km up a dirt road. Looking at my atlas I see the dirt road goes through the mountains and out to the cuota at Tequixtepec. Looks like fun.

We passed Teotitlan de Flores Magon and crossed the border into Puebla, leaving the Canada and entering the valley of Tehuacan. Immediately Hwy 135, twisty and narrow but otherwise fine, degraded into a potholed mess, with cars and trucks in both directions frantically swerving to avoid the worst of the bumps and voids. Mario Cart!

Somewhere in the valley, Zinacatepec or maybe Ajalpan, we passed a roadside restaurant with I can only think of as Revenge of the Happy Foods. The iron “hot tub” and wood paddle the pig is wielding are the tools used to cook carnitas Michoacan style.

As we got closer to Tehuacan, near San Diego Chalma, we noticed people lining the sides of the highway, whole families. What’s going on? We drove up on an ambulance with its lights on and its back door opened and I wondered, is there an accident? Are all these people looky-lous? No way! I eventually got around the ambulance, which wasn’t going very fast at all, and saw a trio of bikes and a runner with a race number pinned to his t-shirt. Ah, road race! I punched my hazards on and crept up the highway, passing strings of runners, support guys on bikes, and what seemed like everyone living along Hwy 135 sitting and standing along the side of the road, clapping and cheering each runner as they passed – and sometimes clapping and cheering the passing gueros, too. Some families were handing out bags of water and sports drink. And this went on for miles, all the way into Tehuacan! It was incredibly sweet to see all the pueblos turn out, enjoying the race and encouraging all the runners.

The finish line was in Tehuacan; that, and coming into town from a new direction got us lost pretty quick. It’s a little city, though, and as soon as we found the zocalo we knew where we were and how to get to where we were going. Zooming up Heroes de Independencia, we saw a corner building decorated like a pagoda – and it was called The Pagoda, and advertised Chinese food. Hmm! Then driving down Reforma we passed a place advertising Japanese food. Whoa! And a couple of American “western-style” restaurants. What was going on?

We checked into a hotel out of our Sanborn’s guide, the Hotel Monroy, and got a huge room. Spotlessly clean. Fluffy white cotton towels. Polyester pillows (that’s a good thing; the cotton ones are like bricks). A showerhead positioned above head height. Cable TV! And to remind us that we were still in Mexico, mirrors and a bathroom door well below head height.

We were a bit tired of being in the car, since it had taken us about six hours via the free way, so instead of hopping back in the car and driving down to The Pagoda, we walked up the street a few doors to the Japanese restaurant, Susushi. We both adore Asian food, and have had almost none since moving to Oaxaca 14 months ago. Oh, except for the Chinese food so bad G couldn’t even eat it, or the “sushi” we’d had with Tony at Kyoto – and had never even wanted to go back to. Thai? Indian? Cambodian? Forget it! Not even possible.

So I was practically trembling with excitement when the chef/owner came out ... in a little Japanese work jacket (a yukuta?) and handed us our menus. And the menus featured Japanese food! (Once burned by Kyoto, twice shy.) We picked gyoza, some mixed tempura, and two maki rolls to share. I think they gyoza were frozen, but I didn’t care ‘cause he cooked them up in a soy sauce glaze. The tempura was fresh but I must remember that there is no tempura batter mix anywhere in Mexico, so it comes out more like a, geez, like what? Like the batter on a Mrs. Paul’s fish stick, thick and chewy. And I was a little disappointed that the tempura did not come with any battered jalapenos.

But the maki, oh the maki! They were not cream-cheese-and-rice rolls as we’d previously experienced, covered with mystery sprinkles a la the “crunchy roll.” We tried the narco roll, with a little cream cheese, true, but also mushrooms, avocado, and crab. Tasty. G had been dubious about the second roll, but I wanted to try it, and it was fantastic. Banana maki! It could have been awful. Our sushi chef used fried bananas inside the rice, coated it with breadcrumbs and fried it crisp, and served it with a dipping sauce of condensed milk – the usual topping for fried bananas in Oaxaca. We also added a little wasabi/soy sauce and mmm, fantastic! I was in seventh heaven.

We told the guy he had better sushi than anywhere in Oaxaca, which pleased him, and that we’d be back. That must have made him happy, too, as we were his only dinner customers that night.

After dinner we took a walk around town, scouting out stuff to do tomorrow. We saw an open aquarium and went in. Israel, the owner, knew some English from his school days and was eager to practice because, he said, none of his friends would speak English with him and there weren’t a lot of native speakers in town. His store actually had aquarium supplies, and some nice bowfront tanks, and he had a tank of beautiful angel fish, so I half-participated in the conversation while I watched the fishies.

Friday morning we strolled down to the zocalo because from our last visit we knew we’d be able to get an early breakfast there. We went back to Sabores and sat at the same table as last time. The zocalo was filled with swept-up piles of leaves and confetti, and it was pleasant to sit there and watch people on their way to work.

We walked up to the Complejo Cultural el Carmen, a pretty plaza near our hotel, and played string games on the steps while we waited for the museum to open. I was excited to see some books for sale, but they were all in Spanish, so I took a pass. The building and museum look new, with new displays for the artifacts, but somebody forgot to put up signs that actually give details and facts about the stuff. It was all very cursory. So we gawked at the painted pottery pieces, something we haven’t seen much of in other museums. Like yellow-and-white-and-blue-painted flutes with animal and human faces. And molds used to make mass-production ceramics. And strange, jester-looking articulated clay figures with hats that looked like half-peeled bananas. And carved wood pieces covered with turquoise and shell mosaics. Beautiful.

And, of course, corn cobs, from little things no bigger than the end of your thumb to later, full-size cobs. Archeologists have found cultivated corn cobs thousands of years old; some say 7,000 years or older. But they were just cobs, and I found myself underwhelmed. Americans are so difficult to entertain!

The museum also had a display on local palm and cane weaving, and some of the baskets had really interesting starts. And a room on the ecology of the valley, with some stuffed animals and birds, and pictures of others. Whoever skinned and mounted the specimens didn’t do too good a job; all the animals looked pissed off. Or maybe the unknown taxidermist had managed to capture their last expression in life, who knows?

And that was pretty much it for the museum. We were there maybe an hour, an hour and a half. So we went over to check out The Pagoda; G went in while I double-parked, but he soon came back out with a discouraged air. No menu, and the guy inside said they had some Chinese dishes, but mostly Mexican. Um.

And then it was back on the road, the toll road, to head home.

2004-09-16T09:52:00.000-07:00

Oh, it was festive last night! I didn't have very many students in my classes, either. My guess is that most of them were preparing to party with their friends and families in the evening, along with the rest of Mexico. I did ask my students about traditional foods for Independence Day; turns out it's pozole, though nobody could explain why. Nor could anybody tell me why the hotcake stands at the ferias are allways named Exquisite Hotcakes.

G and I had been invited to an Independence Day party by our Spanish school, Oaxaca International. I say "Independence Day" loosely because all the parties are in the evening, so really it's Independence Night. Leticia told us the party would start around 9pm Mexican time, her emphasis, so we made plans to show up around 10. Neither of us wanted to show up at the party hungry, or wait until late, late, late to eat dinner, so we browsed in the Llano -- cecina enchilada tacos! garnachas! exquisite hotcakes! -- watched some BBC, then drove out to Col. Sta Lucia for the festivities, whatever they'd be. We weren't really sure what would go on.

Leticia had given us a map -- useless, but we remembered how to get there from our bus trip to the area to make tortillas as part of a school activity. The party place was close to a pretty blue church with a mini-feria of its own, lots of music, crowds, and of course fireworks. We do have some similarities between U.S. and Mexican Independence days. We walked through the building to the patio in the center to see a big table of folks from the school, all chowing down on tamales. Well, so much for the rule about never showing up for a party hungry! So it was crazy Spanish conversation among Oaxacans, Americans, and Japanese lubricated with beer and mezcal. Everybody's kids -- little kids, too -- were there, and when they started to poop out beyond the point where another cup of soda would help, the adults whipped out little bolsas de dormir: sleeping bags, or in Spanglish, just "sleepings". It was very, very fun and we were out very, very late.

Today we're off to Tehuacan, up in Puebla, to check out their fine museum and see what we see along the way.

Happy 16th, everybody!

2004-09-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

Groups at school are supposed to be named after cities, so a group learning German might be named Hamburg, a Japanese class Osaka, and an English class Kentucky. Wait -- that's a state. Okay, now we'll call the group Charlotte. So I gave Gilo, who names the groups, a list of American city names. After Gilo said, no Spanish American city names, I scratched off San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Gabriel, but places like Wichita and Paducah made it through okay. Plus some others.

We just got a brand new English class named Riverdale.

2004-09-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

In Spanish, falling bodies go "pum!" not splat. That's how it gets translated at the movies, anyway.

Back in May, when I left to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail, I was bummed thinking I would miss my patio tree's fruit season. When I left in early May the green fruits were already full-sized. Well, I got back and they were still on the tree, still green. They were still green when we left on our summer roadtrips, they were greeen we we returned. They were green when school started. Nor were they any bigger. I've seen (and tasted) in the market, with orange skin and tasty pulp, so I know that eventually something will change.

About two weeks ago the fruits at the top of the tree started ripening ... then dropping half-eaten onto our patio. I figured it was the birds pigging out, but then lizards started dropping out of the tree and onto the patio, pum!, before running up the trunk and disappearing into the crown. G thinks that maybe the fruits are fermenting. I don't know. But there continues to be a lot of lizard activity around the tree. Oh! and a lizard hitting bricks sounds more like a plop than a pum.

In other news, our FM3 renewal paperwork was accepted on the first try! Amazing. Maybe they figure if you can get through the process the first time, and actually live here long enough to renew, they can cut you some slack.

2004-09-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

I keep meaning to go out to the new Chicken Place, down near the river, but somehow Sunday rolls around and it doesn't work out. For instance, this Sunday for a change we took our Sunday Drive into the southern arm of the Oaxaca valley, toward a little town called Santa Maria A-something. One of my maps shows a little blue pyramid next to it. The drive was nice, and on a piece of highway we haven't yet driven on -- the road to Puerto Escondido. On the map it looks even more twisty through the mountains than Hwy 175, which is why I've avoided it so far. But we were strictly on the flats this trip.

We pulled into the center of town, just off the highway, intending to ask about "las ruinas" to whoever was around the palacio municipal, but there must've been twenty or thirty guys in the plaza! We drove around it and headed back to the highway. We didn't go too far, though, before stopping and giving ourselves a pep-talk, and with courage restored, we drove back into Santa Maria determined to suck it up and ask someone in the crowd about any possible ruins.

Only this time there were closer to fifty campesinos in the plaza, and then we realized, it must be the town meeting. We didn't want to interrupt, so we drove out -- at least this time our tails were held high. G saw a well-dressed guy walking in the street in the direction of the plaza and asked him about the ruins. He answered too fast for G to catch, but I understood him to give us directions to the caves in San Sebastian, a big attraction listed in the guidebooks. Not quite what we wanted, so we thanked him and drove off toward our second target destination: an unnamed map marker between the towns of Santiago Apostol and San Pedro Huixtepec. [update: our fellow diners in this post were from S.P. Huixtepec, and were astounded that we not only knew where it was but had been there!]

Well, San Pedro was easy enough to find, as it too is on the highway, and it looked easy enough to get to Santiago Apostol, as there appeared to be only one road to it, but what none of the maps showed was the maze of streets in and around San Pedro leading to homes and fields. We cruised through town a couple of times, not finding our way, then asked an old guy who spoke English for directions. He told us there weren't any ruins, but the church in Santiago Apostol had some carved stones in the foundation. He gave us directions, though the little town of Santa Ines, and we were off.

I don't think we quite got his instructions right, but we did finally (after asking again) find the road out of town and to Santa Ines, a dirt road but in good repair, and busy with horse and donkey-carts going to and from the fields. Quite a bit of traffic for a Sunday! We reached Santa Ines -- Santa Ines Yatzeche in full -- and cruised through that town, too. We weren't exactly sure which way to go to continue on to Santiago Apostol; most of the roads were dirt and drifted around in random directions. We found the center of town, with the plaza, the mercado, and the church when I spied out of the corner of my eye a big stone outside the church. We pulled over and took a look. It was carved with some guy kneeling down, in profile, with a big headdress and other stuff we couldn't quite make out. Unlike the sweet little plaza in Yucuita, this plaza was pretty run down and only had the one carved stone.

[Update: anonymous commenter Crescencio, who is from Santiago Apostol, says "I lived not to far away from that church that was closed at that time, and I don't know if you know the name of that town with the carved stone, but it's name is San Lucas, it had population once upon a time but some desease killed every body..." Wow! Thank you for the update, Crescencio!]

While I tried photographing the stone in the overhead light, Greg took a walk around the pretty plain church to see if he could spot more stones. He did, but of a different kind: behind the modern church, on a little rise, were the ruins of a much older church, looking like they'd tumbled down in a quake. We clambered through the ruins, took some photos, admired the view of the valley and the Rio Atoyac from the bluff, then got back in the car and tried to find our way to Santiago Apostol and the promise of more carved stones.

We did find our way to the correct dirt road, and it was a short ride before we pulled into S.A. and parked outside the church plaza. What a church! The facade was painted three or four colors, with banners and a big Jesus on top like a birthday cake candle. The church was closed, but an old guy came out to talk with us: he and the other men in town were getting ready to eat lunch after prepping for a calenda, or parade, scheduled for sometime that afternoon. Everybody was happy for us to take photos, and I could hear "gringo!" and "photografia!" every so often as I snapped away at the flower- and saint-decorated baskets the ladies would carry in the parade. He invited us to stay, but since "en la tarde" could have meant anything from "right after lunch" to anytime before dark, and we didn't want to crash lunch, we regretfully begged off.

Oh, and no carved stones, just an old brick oven in front of the church. So on to the next town, Ocotlan, where we'd turn off the dirt road and get back on the paved highway back to Oax-town. Well, we were surprised at how pretty the church in Ocotlan was, so we got out to take a look. The inside was just as beautiful as the outside, and reminded me even more of a cake, only this one looked like a fancy wedding cake. Yummy! And next to the church, on the plaza, we found a little gallery completely covered, walls and ceiling, with a beautiful mural depicting Ocotlan-regional trades. Marvellous!

Back in the car. Wait, what's this? We passed a signed turnoff to one of the many artisan villages in the area, Santo Tomas Jalieza. Only this signed turnoff also had a big blue pyramid sign! We took the turn and drove into the center of town. Now, none of my maps or books mention anything about ruins around Santo Tomas, so I had no idea why the sign would be there, but again, there were carved stones -- two this time -- in the plaza. One, badly worn, had a guy's face with a headdress. The other had some symbols we couldn't quite recognize, and a very recognizable jaguar head in profile. Cool. We asked about ruins and were told, nope, but there's a "tourist attraction" five minutes up the road. Hmm. We gave it a try, but didn't find anything other than dirt fields untouched by car tires, so we gave up and headed back home. Maybe the tourist office knows something.

Oh! But back to Chicken Place. By the time we got home it was 4 o'clock and we were starving for lunch, but as it's almost Independence Day and the feria is back in the Llano, we headed across the street to the park for tacos, tacos from the guy who remembered us from Guelaguetza back in July. I'm sorry, Chicken Place! Maybe next week.

2004-09-11T13:37:00.000-07:00

Independence Day is rolling around -- it's ... Wednesday? Thursday? I'm not sure. The shout, or El Grito, that began the independence move will be reenacted in squares, plazas, and zocalos across Mexico this Wednesday at midnight. So you could say it's Wednesday. But we get Thursday off. And while I enjoyed watching el grito in the drizzle last September, with hundreds of people shouting "Viva Hidalgo! Viva Guerrero! Viva Mexico!" and so on, what I really remember with fondness was the fair in the zocalo. (Until I add the link: kiddie rides whizzing dangerously close to gringo head height; exotic foods and drinks like tejate, the squash drink, and the chunks of roasted maguey heart; not so exotic foods like tacos and macro paletas, kettle chips, and cup o' noodles; and more pirate cd/dvd booths than at Ashby flea market the Saturday after checks come out.) So for the past week I've been buzzing the zocalo checking on its return, only nada.

But this morning on my way to school, I saw that booths popped up overnight in the Llano, right by Moderate Shangri-la. I walked through it on the way home; they're still setting up, but the garnacha ladies said they'll be open for business tonight. Yes! Garnachas. I can't wait to eat myself silly.

So I'm happy about the fair. I'm happy I just had a huge Donut Lady lunch: macaroni and beans and six huge tortillas and cecina enchilada and a bag of lemonade, for $20. And sitting on the curb eating it reminded me of eating at the taco truck by Fruitvale BART, which in turn reminded me of Tom and Janina.

I'm happy because my Saturday classes are over for the week, and I can be unperky for a couple of hours before reverting to type.

I'm not happy my Banamex card still isn't functioning; in fact, I'm not happy even thinking about Banamex, which is every shitty thing a big bank can be. I'm not happy that for some unholy reason, Cinepolis (and Multimax -- two chains that show the exact same movies every week. Why?!) is still playing Catwoman, A Day Without Mexicans, Dodgeball, Around The World In 80 Days, Anaconda 2, House of a Thousand Corpses, AND Yu-gi-oh. I thought it was funny that Yu-gi-oh only has a 2 percent "fresh" rating on rotten tomatoes, then I saw Superbabies has a zero! So why isn't that playing this week?

But mostly I'm unhappy because I really, really miss my friends. I thought I might be making progress with the rugby guys, but now that school is back in session that's a goner. If Oaxaca weren't so completely charming it'd be a no-brainer. But it is, and it's just damn frustrating, is all.

2004-09-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

I don't think I ever reported back on the Great Mattress Search that ended, pretty quickly, with us purchasing an air mattress at Sam's Club.

We are all about style.

At first I wasn't too impressed, but a set of fresh D batteries and a wood frame to get it off the concrete floor helped a LOT. As did the two vinyl-and-foam pads Jorge lent us. It's no Sapphire Ultra Plush, but it's not bad! Only ... well. I don't know if the air mattress really isn't queen size or if the bed frame isn't really queen size, but the two don't quite fit together. The frame's a little small from side to side. Normally, it's nothing: we just center the air mattress on the frame so that there's maybe 4 inches of overhang on each side. No problem. But sometimes we forget to check, and vinyl on vinyl is pretty slippery. So the other day the air mattress was NOT centered over the bed frame, and when Greg reached over for a magazine on the chair ... it was like a boat capsizing. Pretty slow at first; we weren't sure what was going on, just that things were somehow not right. Then really not right, then BAM! we're on the floor with the air mattress sitting on top of us. Concrete's hard.

2004-09-06T09:03:00.000-07:00

And see it he did: we went back to Danguilac this Sunday.

I'd arranged to meet Francisco, our guide, between 8 and 9am, but we didn't get there until closer to 10a. Turns out they don't change their clocks in San Juan, however, so we were right on time. Now, when I'd been in San Juan earlier in the week, Francisco said that the ruins were about 3km outside of town. He just didn't mean San Juan, so we collected Francisco's friend Cesar and drove maybe five minutes up a steep dirt road to a tiny little pueblo called El Porvenir Quiatoni, where it seemed that nobody spoke Spanish. All the town's kids collected in a knot and gawked at us.

We walked through town and started down the hill through corn and maguey fields. The ruins are on an isolated ridge about halfway between Quiatoni and San Juan. Lots of pottery sherds, although nothing fantastic like at Pueblo Viejo, adobe walls, plazas, some mortarless stone walls. And a pile of rocks in the middle of a plaza with a ... well, it sure looks like a Shiva lingum, with a face and red coloring around the mouth. Clearly recently put there, and clearly still being worshipped. Greg asked Francisco about it, and he said yeah, the campesinos come here. We both got the feeling, too, that Francisco and Cesar were scoping us out, making sure we were okay. Francisco also mentioned that, while the site is unexplored, the Saturday before we showed up, a party from INAH, the Mexican archeological folks, had come out to see the ruins as well. Pretty curious timing if you ask me.

Well, after exploring the ruins we had to go back up the hill to get the car. Poor Greg! (I suggest you read his blog to get his side of it, too.) While Greg sat in the car and recovered under the curious gaze of about 20 kids, Francisco, Cesar, and I set off to get some more water and some sodas. I hadn't see any on our drive in, but that's because Quiatoni isn't at all set up for visitors: we squeezed between houses, cut through people's yards and across patios before stopping in a little patio while some guy opened up what looked like a shed but turned out to be the town abarrotes, or corner grocery. We sat down and Francisco popped open a trio of ice-cold cokes -- damn! they're awfully bad for you but they taste so, so good -- while Francisco explained to the woman behind the counter who I was and why were here. In Zapotec, and when I tried to talk to her in Spanish I got no response so I don't think she speaks it. During our little ruins exploration, Greg and I chatted in English and Francisco and Cesar chatted in Zapotec. We finished the cokes and I grabbed a couple of waters for Greg.

We dropped Francisco and Cesar off at the Palacio in San Juan, and thanked them for spending half their Sunday tromping around with us. They asked when we would come back, inviting us to come back out and visit. We asked Francisco if we could pay him for his services, but he said no. Then Greg asked if we could make a donation for the town, and he agreed that would be good. Yay.

We then took off to get some lunch in San Bartolo as it was about 4pm and we were famished, and San Juan doesn't have any restaurants. We ended up at Restaurant Mary, which has a bit of a gnat problem, but the food was good and the sodas also ice-cold, and after we finished lunch the entire family came out to chat with us about why we were there. "To visit San Juan?! Why? Ruins -- oh, in Mitla? In San Juan?! Really? I've never heard of ruins there." was a pretty typical conversation. We had the map with us and showed everybody the mark that lead us there in the first place. It ended up being a very long lunch as we chatted with people, who all seemed to speak Spanish and NOT Zapotec -- strange, as we were only ten miles away from where the opposite was true. But they also invited us to come back and visit, and the kids all practiced their three or four English words on us as they waved goodbye.

2004-08-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised to hear myself say this, but I'm glad there's a teacher development session at school tomorrow, because after two road trips in two days, I'm a little tired.

Yeah, with a free day ahead of me I decided to scrutinize my map and go somewhere solo (G had class in the morning). I decided to look for the mystery ruins listed on only one of my three maps, and not mentioned in any of my books: Danguilac, apparently next to the pueblicito of San Juan del Rio. (It's in the top middle third of the map on the left-hand edge.) I know it doesn't look like much, but that's ten miles of dirt road. So take a look at Soledad Agua Blanca, or San Juan Lechixtla, in the middle of the map and on very tiny roads, and imagine what it must be like to get there. Not possible by car, I'm sure!

So in yesterday's blog of my Sunday Drive, where we ended up in Yucunama and it was like a ghost town it was so quiet, that was only three miles or so up a graded gravel and dirt road. San Juan del Rio, like I said, is ten miles up and has no big town anywhere close on the paved road. Except for the stray satellite dish peeking out every so often behind a plank or cane house, it was like going back in time. Especially when I got to San Juan and ... once when I was visiting my friend Dale at his house in Elgin, Ill., he took me out for a ride on his Harley, and in the course of driving around we ended up in the middle of some little town's 4th of July parade, waving at the people lining Main St. Pulling into San Juan was kind of like that, in that everyone stared at the site of a strange car (very, very few cars in evidence), driven by a red-headed guera. Oh, people were really friendly, returning every smile and wave with an equally enthusiastic one of their own. But they were plainly shocked to see me. And nobody was speaking Spanish except when talking to me -- they were all speaking (I think) Zapotec.

I ended up giving a couple of campesinos a ride into town, then chatting with the municipal secretary and his amigos at the presidencia. The ruins are just outside of town, and now I have the town phone number to arrange for a guide when I return. And they were very curious about my tattoos, too.

And I will go back! G has GOT to see this.

2004-08-29T17:06:00.000-07:00

Sunday roadtrip. Again. I'm getting so predictable. And I even went back into the Mixteca, just like last Sunday.

G-man and I decided independently that we should try to find the ruins in Yucuita, which we had failed to find on our first visit. Driving there today, I don't know what we were on last time that we missed them -- they're right on the road. Though probably a year's worth of experience picking this shit out of the landscape helps, too. Our guidebook says there's a community museum in town, so we headed there first. It was closed. Not unusual. So we start asking around to see if someone can open it up for us, but apparently the guy with the key was down in Oax-town. We wandered around the little plaza for awhile, taking photos of the carved stones scattered about, and the presidencia municipal with its Quetzalcoatl-head downspouts and chatting to a local who'd lived in LA as a child. His English had an Angeleno accent, too! Then back down the road to the ruins.

I'd read this in the guidebook, too, but had forgotten, that you can either walk up the small rise to the ruins, go up the stairs, or crawl through a stone tunnel. So of course we went for the tunnel. It reminded me a lot of the water tunnel in Grand, only this water tunnel -- smaller versions were everywhere -- was dry. No scorpions, no snakes, but Greg rousted a very surprised bat from its nap. It bumped into G's shoulder, then my shins before grabbing onto the wall and staring at us. I'm surprised I didn't deafen G with my squeal.

But aside from the fun tunnel and some stairs and retaining walls, there wasn't much to see at Yucuita other than piles of unreconstructed buildings, pottery sherds, and cornfields. So we walked down the stairs to the car and headed to our second stop, the community museum in Yucunama.

Back to the guidebook again, which says that Yucunama's musuem has a 14th-century bark-paper document detailing tribute payments. And while there are doubtless ruins about, they aren't excavated or open to the public. So we drive up to the Hwy 190/Hwy 125 split and take the gravel road up the hill. A couple of miles later we're in Yucunama, a cute little town. And a very, very quiet little town. No car noise (other than us), no pedestrians, nothing. As quiet as a ghost town. We drive to the plaza and park, then wander around. Not unexpectedly, the community museum is closed. Somewhat unexpectedly, the one abarrotes, the one miscelanea, and the one cafe in town are also closed, and we're pretty hungry and thirsty at this point as Yucuita had nothing in the way of refreshments.

So we're wondering what to do while G starts to bonk, when we see a woman walking by the church. I ask her, The museum's closed; who has the key? She says, Two blocks down is La Unica (the little abarrotes), ask in there. Thanks, I say, and walk to the store. It was closed, just like 10 minutes before when I'd driven past. I saw a gaggle of small kids eyeing me, and I asked them about the key to the museum, and they said I needed to find Don Antonio, and pointed to the open gate to the house next to the abarrotes. I could hear a woman in the little outdoor kitchen making tortillas, so I knock and say Disculpe! and out she comes to open the store. Inside is a woman who, when I explain why I'm there (like there's any other reason), she agreed that Don Antonio was the guy with the key, and that I should go back up to the cafe and knock and ask for Don Antonio there. I bought a coke and a bag of peanuts for G -- both doctor-forbidden foods, but my choices were limited as I didn't think he'd much care for the Bimbo snack cakes also for sale -- and headed back up the hill. We knocked, and an old man came out and introduced himself as Don Antonio.

He took us inside the musuem and explained the exhibits to Greg, who tried to catch as much as he could, while I wandered around the dusty single-room museum taking photos. They had fossils, a collection of smashed brass musical instruments, two early 20th-century typewriters, a diorama of traditional Mixtec life in the pueblo, and a collection of artifacts from the Pre- to Postclassic. A full skeleton. Murals on the wall depicting Mixtec legends and writing. Pretty darn interesting, really. I think we were in there a little over an hour!

Near the end of our visit, while I was perusing the museum's register (the entry before ours was August 1), a family came in. The woman seemed to know Don Antonio (which we later confirmed; she'd been a student of his) and when Don Antonio asked everyone if they wanted lunch, we all said yes and headed across the plaza.

I don't know if the woman's husband got spooked or what, but they ended up leaving before lunch, while Don Antonio was bustling about in the kitchen of his little cafe. The walls were crammed with knick-knacks, so we had plenty to look at while we waited. He brought us a pitcher of agua de tuna, one of my favorites, then brought us a bowl of squash-flower-and-cheese empanadas. I thought, well, he'll probably bring us a bowl of stew or soup next, and after our little lunch we can be on our way to the community museum in nearby Teposcolula. But he didn't bring out stew or soup, he brought out a big bowl of spagetti. Then a bowl of nopal (cactus pads). Then a bowl of squash. Then a bowl of chicken in vegetables. Then big handmade tortillas. Oh my lord! Four or five people could've had a big lunch with the food piled on that table. We ate til stuffed, and chatted with Don Antonio while he ate lunch with us. He asked us if we wanted dessert or coffee, and G groaned and said, Oh no, please no. But I said, Sure! I have such a sweet tooth. And so he disappeared into the kitchen and came back with little plates of ... something green. Que es esto? I asked, What is this? He said it was a Prehispanic sweet, made with maguey hearts (where the sugar is) and a local herb. It was ... it was strangely good. Yummy in its own way, though fibrous and slightly fermented. As we ate we talked about the traditional medicine that is still a part of many pueblos, and about the ruins near Teposcolula. Don Antonio knew Ron Spores, the archeologist who got Tony, the guy we drove to Pueblo Viejo with months and months ago, to come to Oaxaca, and from whom we haven't heard from since. But Don Antonio said Spores is working the site. I hope so, as I'd like to see it restored, and to see what they find there.
But we finally finished the meal, and started winding down the conversation. We waddled up to the car after giving our thanks and saying goodbye, then drove out the dirt road toward Teposcolula, but we ended up passing it by. We were completely full with good food, a good musuem visit, and as much Spanish conversation as our brains could hold, and we didn't want to pollute it with another experience. Some other time.

2004-08-26T16:39:00.000-07:00

Another roadtrip? Yes indeedy. This month our school schedule gives us both Tuesdays and Thursdays off and I'm sure it won't last so I want to take advantage of it while I can. So after this morning's tea we headed out to Huajuapan to see Cerro de las Minas, an early Urban Mixtec site. If that means anything to you.

The ruins were ruinful; the little community museum cute as a button. It's housed in a new building with a lot of fun details and well-displayed artifacts and documentation on the revolution and traditional life in the area. For instance, the signs for the different rooms (administration, the bathrooms, the main exhibit hall) have signs in both Spanish and Mixtec, illustrated with evocative Mixtec glyphs -- like a seated man pointing used on the men's room sign. Or footprints on the ceiling, looking like the walking glyphs in Mixtec and Mayan. Well worth the 5 pesos admission price.

In all, we were in Huajuapan about three hours. It took us five hours to drive there and back, and that was partly on the cuota, or toll, road. The toll roads are expensive -- today's jaunt cost us $112 in tolls -- but can really be worth it, because I still have trouble driving on the shoulder down here. Why would I do that, you might ask. Other than the cuota, which is in a class by itself as far as Mexican roads go, the roads, primary and secondary, are one lane in each direction. A center line, yes, but no passing lanes, reflectors, lights, guardrails. There are some exceptions, of course, but most often it's exactly like driving on Grizzly Peak Rd, except I don't expect to encounter livestock on Grizzly Peak.

So because it's one lane, there is often a half-lane shoulder used as ... well, lots of things. As a breakdown lane, as a place to park (!), a place to walk or ride your bike or wait for the bus or herd your livestock along. And as a passing lane: when you want to let someone pass you, you pull onto the shoulder as far as you can and the car or bus or truck goes around you. But since it's half a lane, the passer usually ends up with a good part of their vehicle in the oncoming lane. And people will pass anywhere here, double-yellow lines, curves, hills, no problem. If I see a truck up ahead coming toward me, I watch for people trying to pass the truck so I can get out of the way and avoid a head-on collision. A lot of people just drive on the shoulder all the time to stay out of the way of passing vehicles, but like I said, it gets pretty crowded not to mention times when chunks of pavement are missing. Keeps the drive interesting, to say the least.

But if you pay the big bucks you get to drive on the cuota, with two lanes each direction, sometimes a divided highway, a shoulder, safety features. Pretty cush. Although about half the time I drive on the cuota in Oaxaca I end up either slowing waaay down or stopping for animals on the highway. Still, better than a head-on with a bus, right?

2004-08-24T13:09:00.000-07:00

San Jose Mogote, Take Two!

No school today, so I woke up determined to find the elusive San Jose Mogote ruins we missed during Sunday's excursion. I checked both my paper maps of the state, but neither listed a San Jose, San Jose Mogote, or a Mogote anywhere near Oax-town. Although one map did have the pyramid symbol floating between a couple of town names, which was intriguing but ultimately unhelpful. So after dropping by the post office we strolled over to the Tourist Office to ask them about San Jose Mogote. It's on their tourist map, and with some directions from the information officer, we felt like we had a chance to find it.

(For those of you with the Moon Handbooks: Oaxaca guide, you head north out of town on the free (libre) road, and turn left on the road to Nazareno -- signed, and the first possible left after the El Padrigal baleanarios. About a third of a mile later, you turn left at the bus stop shelter with the big Community Museum sign, and by that time you'll see the ruins on your left.)

We could see a crew working on some of the ruins as we drove into the center of San Jose Mogote, a tiny, tiny pueblito: the bus stop, one street, and the museum. Cement block and adobe brick houses for the most part; a couple of wood or carrizo. They don't even have their own church; it's a pretty little blue-and-white building up the road in Guadalupe.

We walked up to the museum and waited while the municipal president's wife went and got her son to open up the museum for us, and while we waited we chatted with a backpacker also waiting out front. Damian from Austin had just seen the museum and was fixin' to catch a bus back to Oax-town, but hung out when we offered him a ride back after our visit. It's a nice little museum, with a section on the finds at the site -- Olmec-influenced pottery figures, Cosijo urns, some carved stones, a pair of anthropomorphic jade figures, and a big cinnabar-colored brazier that looks awfully devilish. The second part of the museum details hacienda life in San Jose during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Then scooped up Damian and walked behind the school to an excavated pyramid. As usual, pottery sherds were everywhere underfoot. The pyramid didn't have any of the carved stones that make other pyramids so impressive, but the view from the top was lovely (and I remembered my hat this time), and the architecture was interesting: big fatty boulders on the bottom of the structures, and a modified talud and tablero (it looked to me) building style. No scapula, no jaguar mouths or milky way representations, but a couple of cool narrow stairways to the right of the main stairs. Lots of pretty flowers -- and people's houses. The site is smack-dab in the middle of the pueblito, so people's houses are on top of mounds and right next to the excavated pyramid. It was a bit like taking a tour through people's backyards.

We then walked toward the bus stop to get a look at the ballcourt. Turns out that's what the crew was working on, though they're still on the structures fronting the court itself, which was just an I-shaped mound of plant-covered dirt. The more of these we see, though, the easier it is to imagine what it looks like underneath.

But that was the whole site; maybe we were there an hour, including the museum visit. And Greg got to stuff Damian with as much pre-Hispanic history as he cared to hear. So we drove out the roundabout way, seeing the little blue-and-white church and grabbing some soda and water, then hit the highway. Ooh! Pollo asado! So we pulled over and got a grilled chicken and tortillas lunch and chatted with Damian, who spent a couple of years in Africa in the Peace Corps, and is on his last day of a two week vacation to Oaxaca. Very enjoyable. We drove him back to the Centro and said goodbye, then ducked into Moderate Shangri-la just in time to see Ana Guevara's 400-meter race -- and Mexico's only hope for a medal these games. She came in second, so everyone will have to settle for a silver medal, but still, better than nothing. And now we're here at the internet cafe, and we have the whole afternoon and evening ahead of us for mischief-making.

2004-08-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

It's Sunday, and you know what that means: roadtrip!

We decided San Jose Mogote was a worthy destination, as it's an important Pre-classic site, and less than 10 miles from Moderate Shangri-la. So we grabbed the guidebook, the road atlas, and our book on Mexican archeology and zoomed off.

Now, our guidebook, while sometimes overly florid or just plain out-of-date, is usually pretty accurate with directions. But this time we just could not find San Jose Mogote: no roadsigns, no tell-tale ruins, no village of San Jose even. And of course it's not listed in the road atlas. We ended up cruising through suburban Oax-town on a combination of paved and dirt roads before being thwarted in our search by some rough patches of road requiring high-clearance 4WD. Or burro. Without either, we changed plans and headed south to Lambityeco, another set of ruins we haven't yet seen.

There's not a whole lot at Lambityeco, so it only took us about 20 minutes to explore, if climbing a small pyramid and circumnavigating the off-limits tomb complex can be called explore. As it made for a short day of sight-seeing we stopped in San Jeronimo Tlacochahuaya -- you see why sometimes my brain hurts -- to see their supposedly lovely 16th-century church. Only we stopped by during siesta time, and it was closed. On a Sunday!

We did, however, manage to find a really good chicken place over on the Atoyac frontage road, near the turn for Atzompa. So it wasn't a waste. The plan now is to go to the tourist office in town and ask them how the heck to get to San Jose Mogote, via car or bus, not by burro. Tuesday, I think, I'll try it again.

2004-08-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

Basketball powerhouse Puerto Rico beat the U.S. mens basketball team. And now Lithuania. Just keep drafting 'em out of high school, boys!

In Moderate Shangri-la-related news ... we are no longer sleeping on the floor or eating off plastic chairs. Yes, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and I don't just mean the seasonal merchandise crowding the aisles in Sam's Club. Yesterday G and I went to the Abastos to get us some furniture. The abastos, always an adventure! The big day is supposedly Saturday, but Friday was awfully busy, too. We worked our way down Taxi Street to the entrance to the furniture section, and started browsing. Except for the plastic housewares and plastic tarps, it's an all-around third-world experience: men and women sitting on the ground with their produce, piles of it; mounds of pottery, including huge green-glazed bowls for tejate; live animals like turkeys and chickens, and pieces of animals hanging up for sale, along with that ripe odor. A hoot, in other words!

We stopped at a booth with a couple of pieces that caught our eye; the proprietor was ready, or at least knows his gringos. Instead of starting with his optimal price and haggling down, he gave us a price, then immediately said a second, discount, price. We looked, we asked, we hemmed and hawed (me, mostly -- I got to play Bad Cop, because everybody in Oaxaca knows the women hold the purse strings), got a little more of a discount, then arranged for a truck to haul our pickings home: two dressers, a desk, a bookcase, another bookcase to use in the kitchen, and a bed with drawers underneath. Six pieces of furniture, USD$320. Another $8 for the truck and the guy to help me unload everything.

That only left the matter of a stove -- which we were still without. Damn! It's been a week of Juan Carlos saying, yes, it's coming, my amigo is bringing it, and so on. So yesterday, when we realized 1)no stove forthcoming as of Friday evening, and 2)an early-morning wake-up Saturday without the prospect of a hot beverage to send us on our way, G told Juan Carlos, in his best pidgin Spanish, Look, if your friend doesn't bring that stove by the time we're home from school tomorrow, we will go out and buy our own, then take the money we gave you for the stove off the rent.

Now, Juan Carlos caught a raft of shit from his wife last month when he borrowed, in small amounts during the month, the entire rent. And he's getting close to it again this month. So I don't know whether it was fear of his wife's rage or what, but hey! we now have an estufa. We're eating at home tonight!

2004-08-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

My friend's new car was stolen off the streets of San Francisco, so he and his girlfriend went out and stole it back. Really.

2004-08-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

As of yesterday we again have hot water for the shower, and Juan Carlos says that sometime today we should have an estufa, too, which is good because I am out of denatured alcohol for my backpacking stove and haven't been able to make hot water for tea for coffee since Saturday. An estufa, for the folks playing at home, is just the stove top, the burners. No oven. I just don't feel right buying a whole stove/oven combo if we're not staying here, and since everything is up in the air ... the estufa will do for now.

Took G to the hospital Monday morning* to get some medication. He's now up and about, though still woozy with infection. But he's on the mend.

Time's up!

*Update: This is for everyone who's ever gone to Kaiser or their local HMO without an appointment for anything other than a gunshot wound. I drove G to the hospital and dropped him off, then went up to school and told them he wasn't coming in to teach. Then I drove back home, dropped off the car, took a quick bucket shower, then walked over to the hospital with a book to sit down and wait for G. I was figuring on a couple of hours, easy. But Greg was standing out front, waiting for me! It took him about half an hour, tops. So while yes, I agree that national health plans have their downsides, dropping into the emergency room for treatment of a flu-like ailment isn't one of them.

2004-08-15T14:42:00.000-07:00

So I guess when it rains, it pours, and right now poor G has a whoppin' storm cloud overhead. Four days after starting his new blood-pressure medication, he came home after his first day back at school, lay down on the air mattress, and hasn't gotten up since.

Flu!

Jonathan, one of the teachers at work, had scheduled a little after-work party at his house, but after I mashed up a tub of guacamole -- mmm, non-watery California-style guac, with tomatoes and onions and cilantro -- I realized G-man didn't just lie down for a nap, so I dropped off the guac and beer, picked up a thermometer at the farmacia, and came right back home.

I spent yesterday and today keeping quiet around the house, ducking out for an occasional break, and keeping G supplied with chopped-up watermelon, juice, Tylenol, and water. Puffing up the bed. Changing pillowcases. Turning the music on, turning it off. I am so glad it's not me who's sick!

But the watermelon eventually ran out, and as it's Sunday and the usual host of chopped-fruit sellers are at home enjoying their day off, I took Jums out to Gringolandia to buy a whole watermelon. And see a movie, too. I wanted something without a substantial amount of Spanish, so I passed on A Day Without Mexicans and that new Denzel movie where he blows away a bunch of DF kidnappers -- that should be well-received down here -- and chose one I hadn't heard of, but decided what the hell, it's got Toni Collette in it. Carla and Something.

Whoa. It's Connie and Carla, and I really wasn't expecting a movie about dinner theatre performers who hide out in West Hollywood from a drug lord. And as his goon searches for the pair in has-been venues across the country, they end up as the starring performers in a drag show. I must say, it takes a lot of guts to be willing, as an actress, to say, Yes, I do look like a man in this makeup and wig. Then Debbie Reynolds shows up! I was fully expecting John Waters to saunter onstage for the finale. He should have. Anyway, it beat Garfield by a long shot, I'm sure.

But then I walk out of the movie, that part of my heart that lives in California all warm and glowing, and into Soriana for that watermelon. I don't know what was going on, but the store had set up big speakers in the produce department, Gigante-style, and was playing ... disco music! Born to be alive! What tha'?! My head's still spinning.

2004-08-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

The furniture is gone.

I came home yesterday to see Greg sitting on a little mattress on the floor, surrounded by a couple of small piles of our stuff.

We borrowed Jorge's Sam's Club card and picked out a mini-fridge. Not the hotel room mini-bar-sized fridge I was eyeing, but a big one -- about the size of a kitchen trashcan. It even has a little space for an abbreviated ice-tray.

Osvelia said she got her really nice mattress at Sam's, but we didn't see any really nice mattresses, only mattresses from unheard-of manufacturers, and of dubious quality. We detoured to the lawn furniture section to pick out some plastic chairs in order to give ourselves a chance to think. But next to a lovely selection of plastic tables and umbrellas we saw a display of air mattresses, and wouldn't you know it, being the cheap bastards we are, we are now the proud owners of a Wenzel queen-sized air mattress. No frame yet, so it's set up on the floor, with the little mattress as a headboard.

"Well, how did I get here?"

How did I get here, to a partially-enclosed house with intermittent running water, sleeping on an air mattress? Editing career in the toilet. Thirty-nine years old and still without a clue as to what I'm going to do for a living next year (if I make it that long), when I flee back to the States. Or even where I'll live when I get there? Would living out of my car be a step up or a step down? And instead of making me sad or depressed or angry, I'm just shrugging it off with a laugh at this point. I mean, if the last two years have taught me anything it's that there's no telling where I'm going to be -- where G and I are going to be -- in six months time. I'm just glad I have company.

2004-08-12T10:25:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure that today Osvelia and her crew of hearty men will come by and remove the furniture. Not certain, mind, but likely. So we're off, tarjeta in hand, to Sam's Club to get a mattress and some fine plastic chairs.

While we explore the dark heart of Gringolandia, maybe you, if you haven't already, go out to see I, Robot. It kicks ass! We had a great time. Great sci-fi, a cat, Will Smith, pie ... a very enjoyable B. If it's still in the theatres down here next week I'm gonna see it again.

And, I made a couple of little QuickTime movies of our summer roadtrips. The first, smaller (2.4MB) file, which you can download here, is dedicated to all the restaurant signs we saw depicting animals serving other animals as food. Delightfully disturbing.

The second, larger (6.1MB) file combines our three summer roadtrips into one: north into the Papaloapan, south to the Isthmus, and way north to Texas and back. I think we put about 3,000 miles on Little Jumbo this summer. But now she's got all four windows again! She still squeaks, but when you get a look at what we drove over, you'll see that a little squeak isn't so bad really.

2004-08-11T10:34:00.000-07:00

For a lot of people, mezcal is pretty much synonomous with blackouts and bad hangovers. Or is that tequila? But Mexico is trying to give it some respectibility, and finally got an appellation for mezcal, which means for it to be called mezcal it has to be made in Oaxaca and must be 100-percent agave. But for all the aged mezcals in their fancy bottles there are an equal number of mezcals bottled in recycled, usually hand-painted bottles -- or mezcal sold by guys carrying it around in plastic gasoline cans.

So yesterday, while waiting for Osvelia, Greg starts chatting with Roberto, one of the artists with stuff in Osvelia's shop. They decide to walk over to Ceviarem and wait for her there. And while they're sitting on the curb and chatting, a guy with a blue plastic gas can walks up and asks if they want to buy some mezcal. G and Roberto show just enough interest that the guy gives them a taste using the plastic cap on the gas can. Roberto says, It's pretty good, but I don't have a container. The guy looks around and picks up a discarded water bottle but says, It's dirty, then spots another one that meets his cleanliness standards. He fills it with mezcal and tells Roberto, This much, 30 pesos. Well, says Roberto, I only have 15 pesos. The guy says, This much, 15 pesos. Roberto buys the mezcal and the guy wanders off.

2004-08-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

G and I drove out to Gringolandia yesterday to see King Arthur at Cinepolis. Let's just say that Excalibur is still the best Arthurian movie made. Okay, let's not: what a piece of crap! A 'D' for sure.

(If you plan on seeing the movie, stop reading right now.)

I'm not some hoity-toity Arthurian purist -- Sarmatians, Germanicus, the Pelagian Heresy, bring it on. And an abbreviated number of Round Table knights is sensible in a movie, otherwise it's just too overwhelming. But Dagonet? Come on! And if you've got to kill off your knights, Mister Fuqua, next time start with Galahad. And don't kill Lancelot before Arthur and Guinevere get married, especially if that's how you end the movie. Geez. And why did you have to make my favorite knight, Tristan, the only one without a personal stylist? Surely Lancelot had enough grooming products to share.

G and I talked about the best parts of the movie (short conversation) and the worst (much longer). Then we wondered which characters we'd choose for our six companions to Arthur. Me? I'd pick Tristan, Ywain, Gawain, Dinadan, Palomides, and Pellinore. How about you?

2004-08-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

This Associated Press item is too good not to share:

(08-10) 06:31 PDT BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) --
A Belgian airliner made an emergency landing after an agitated passenger -- a cat -- got into the cockpit and attacked the co-pilot, the airline said Tuesday.
The SN Brussels flight from the Belgian capital to Vienna, Austria, had been in the air about 20 minutes Monday when "it was noticed" that a passenger's pet had escaped from its cage, "although it is not yet clear how," according to an airline statement.
"Once free, the animal proceeded to wander around the cabin," slipping into the cockpit when meals were being delivered to the two-man flight crew, it said.
"At this stage the animal became agitated and nervous," it said. An airline spokeswoman added that the cat scratched the copilot's arm.
The pilot decided to return to Brussels as a precaution, and the 58 passengers departed once more two hours later on another flight.
The cat had been checked in Oslo, Norway, in an internationally approved "flight transport bag," but the airline said it may end up changing its procedures for pets in the cabin once it concludes its investigation.
"At no time throughout the incident was the passengers' security affected in any way," it said.

2004-08-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Oh, to be back in a city where I don't drip sweat standing still! Yeppers, I'm back in Oax-town, drinking a coke and typing away in my favorite, DSL-equipped internet cafe.

Let me recap my adventures from my last blog entry in Thomasandcharlie. One, I wrote down the real name of the town: it's Tamazunchale. I was a little put off at the price of the Hotel Tamazunchale, a tad over 600 pesos, but the AC was worth it, as was the seemingly unlimited hot water and real towels and sheets. Plus, the hotel restaurant makes a damn fine plate of chilaquiles. We hung around town long enough to eat those chilaquiles, or half of them anyway, as it was an awful lot of food, then waddled around their Sunday tianguis. Got some interesting bowls in the local style and a bag of peeled tunas to snack on in the car. Our only real stop of the day was in Ixmiquilpan to see their 450-yr-old church and to use a sanatario. As we walked around the zocalo, Greg noticed that the big statue of the Aztec archer was naked. And had breasts. We took a closer look and realized it was a big naked Diana. I don't know why this little colonial town has a huge statue of a Greek goddess in its zocalo; maybe you can figure it out.

We also drove through Actopan but didn't stop as it may cause drowsiness.

Thumbing through Sanborns didn't reveal any hotels nearer Teotihuacan than Sahagun's Hotel Plaza Motel, so we went there again. Besides, it gave us a chance to eat another fabulous dinner at Restaurante Santa Lucia. We knew the ruins of Teotihuacan were big, but as the only Mesoamerican ruins I've seen so far have all been in Oaxaca, plus Tulum out in Quintana Roo, I was picturing something Monte Alban big. We left early and made the short drive and got to the pyramides between 9 and 10am.

Well, they're big alright. Huge. Gigante. And very, very impressive. We started with the pyramid of the moon and worked our way down the avenue of the dead to the pyramid of quetzacoatl, a little over two miles (!) away. I didn't get as close a look at the pyramid of quetzacoatl as I would have liked, as it was aswarm with archeologists, but even at a distance the carvings decorating the sides of the pyramid were still interesting. We left around 4pm, sunburned and tired and happy we stopped. Too bad we missed Zempoala and Tula!

Because we spent longer than we anticipated at Teotihuacan (and because we got a little lost around Puebla), it took us a lot longer than we anticipated to reach Tehuacan, our stop for the night. And because we were on the cuota, there wasn't anywhere else to stay. (It's the opposite of the US, where the major highways are cluttered with hotels and Macaroni Grills and the local routes are desolate -- here, there's nothing along the cuotas until you reach a town or interchange.) We didn't get to Tehuacan until a little after 8pm, in the dark, so we took the first hotel we came across, on the outskirs of town.

Our Sanborns guide mentioned the place and its Arabian Nights-themed decor. What it didn't mention, or what perhaps changed between editions, was the nature of the place. We drove into the inner courtyard to see a row of closed garage doors, and the one under the blinking 3 slowly opening. We drove in and parked, and an attendant rushed over and started to close the door. The door had a little hole in order to pay the attendant, and stairs inside the carport leading up to the hotel room. It didn't dawn on me until I saw the folded towels with their packets of shampoo and packet of condoms that I realized the Taj Mahal is a love motel. Again, like in San Antonio, images of Disneyland flashed through my brain. After a shower and a rest we drove into town to find a restaurant -- I guess a love motel doesn't need one -- and ended up eating at a taqueria a few doors down from the Hotel Monroy, where I think I'll stay next time I'm in Tehuacan. We continued the theme of the night by dining on tacos arabes.

And now we're back, Roadtrip Verano 2004 at an end. Pictures as soon as I can, though it'll be tough as there are a lot of movies playing at Cinepolis that I want to see. I think you'll like the collection of animals serving themselves for dinner, though.

2004-08-07T18:19:00.000-07:00

News flash! Greg just got an e-mail from Berlitz:

"I would really appreciate it if you would call us as soon as possible about
your classes starting Monday August 9..."

Sorry, Charlie! These tunas are on the road and unavailable for school before the 14th!

2004-08-07T17:40:00.000-07:00

Hola from Thomasandcharlie!

That's not really how you spell it, but that's about how you say it according to our copy of Sanborn's, and that's all I can remember at this point.

Our trip south so far? We liked San Antonio so much we decided to do it again -- back to the Menger. We didn't leave SA until about noon, but when we did, when we sat down in Little Jumbo and got ready to leave, sweat was actually pouring off our faces and bodies in rivulets and streams. We finally turned on the AC. And stopped by a Chicken Express for two gigantic teas. We should've gotten the gallon of iced tea, but I thought (incorrectly) that that was a little extreme. So yeah, it was hot and I was sad to go, but I love being on the road so it was okay. We didn't get any gizzards, and why hasn't McDonalds customized their menus for Texas by adding McGizzards to their menus?

We got to the border in good time, and got our car insurance renewed and picked up two more Sanborn guides for the trip. We then asked about what we needed to get over the border and were told the standard line, tourist visas and car permit. But, we said, we have working visas and we already have a car permit. Well, we don't know; you'd better just go in and ask them. Yeah, right -- I want to wait in those interminable border lines sweating like a pig and watching the clock. So I said to G, you know we have everything we need, let's just drive across and not stop. Which we did.

Now, when one of the many military checkpoints along the highways actually signalled for us to pull over, and they asked for our paperwork, well then I started to sweat. And I really started to sweat when one of the eight or so cops surrounding our car started messing with Greg about the validity of his FM-3, but then they handed back all our papers (and they checked everything: passport, visa, registration, insurance) and waved us away. Oh, my, we needed the air on for a while after that.

Our first night back in Mexico we stayed in a little hotel just south of Monterrey. Not bad. We went into town and cruised the zocalo looking for a spot for dinner. As tempting as Los Japones was, they were blaring music so we picked Melvins because of their frog mascot and took a plastic seat. The basic menu was carne asada, arrachera (?), and moleta -- yes, gizzards! -- in tacos, piratas, and tostadas. I'm still not sure what a pirata is, even though I ate three of them; tasted like fried wheat tortilla taco with cheese and meat and yummy grilled onions to me. Greg had the same. Then we grabbed some beers from the convenience store across the street and headed back to our hotel to veg.

We actually got an early start this morning, and hit the road after breakfast, just before 9am. A pretty drive. In the afternoon Greg, reading the Sanborn, said Hey wanna see some surrealistic jungle house just off the road? And just then the turnoff came up, so off we went to Los Pozas, or Edward James' house, a genuine Mexican roadside attraction. So in the 60s this English guy moves to the jungle and has some local contractors build forms and pour concrete according to his drawings. Until I get the pictures up, the best I can do is, combine the Swiss Family Robinson with Mad Mark's Castle on the Albany bulb and you'll have a good idea. And as fun as it was to roam around the remains of this guy's house, he built the whole thing on the mountainside along a waterfall, which has been built up into a series of pools for wading and cooling off in the jungle heat. We didn't realize from the book just how much fun this place would be, so we ended up just wading around and dunking our heads in the water -- ahh! -- before vowing to come back and spend the day swimming and snacking and swimming again.

We were probably at Los Pozas for about an hour and a half or two hours, easy. So with it inching on toward 6:30p, we decided to stop for the day in Thomasandcharlie. We checked in to the hotel and set off in search of food and internet. We found internet first. And maybe after we're done here I'll grab a raspado and we can stroll around the zocalo, see the church, and get us a roast chicken or some tacos. Just hold the moleta.

2004-08-05T06:46:00.000-07:00

It's been a 36-hour meat orgy here in central Texas, at mom's house. After spending the day before yesterday talking about possible future plans, I was told to put my money where my mouth was, so I made a big pan of meatballs and a cherry pie. G certainly didn't go to bed hungry that night. The next morning my cousin Joanne came over with two kids she's watching, and somehow the subject of bbq came up and the next thing I know we're loading up the minivan and zooming down Hwy 14 to get lunch at Wright's. Pork ribs and brisket! (Kirby's was open -- surprise! -- and to judge by the amount of cars parked out front, still had meat. And the only reason that's of note is because apparently Kirby's has good bbq but keeps erratic hours, so I've never been able to sample their 'que for myself. And sometimes when they are open, they don't have any meat. Whatever.) But my cousin was right and Wright's was the right choice. We grabbed a box of ribs for Joanne's husband Steve, back working at the ranch, and headed over to Teague to hang out.

Now, when Joanne came over to my mom's house in Mexia with 10-yr-old Dalton and his sister, Leighann, at first the kids wanted to 1) watch The Cartoon Network, 2) play their gameboys, and 3) play with Maggie, the gigantic Shepherd-Husky puppy my mom took in and is trying to find a home for. Because it was almost a 100 degrees the puppy play petered out pretty quick, and instead the two kids latched onto G and me for entertainment. Which I take as a compliment -- being preferred over cable TV. Much to my mom's horror, we played table hockey at Wrights before moving onto the trading of cheap rings and bracelets and, at Joanne and Steve's ranch in Teague, making swords out of sticks and practicing our killer kung fu moves in and around the tree fort, all the while looking out for snakes ("Copperheads and water muksins," Leighann said) and "poison trees." Ah, to run around and be a goof! We had a good time, and the kids were genuinely bummed when it was time for us to go. But now I have a set of the Mexia Dollar General's plastic wrist bracelets, and Leighann has one of Oaxaca's finest blue aluminum rings.

Since my running around in the oppressive heat after a bbq lunch didn't finish me off, my mom decided to break out the big guns and grill a trio of J&S t-bone steaks. Good Christ in heaven! I haven't eaten a whole t-bone steak in years. It tasted so good, I'm a little shocked at how good it was. I didn't touch my potato or salad until the steak was down to the bone. But I got my revenge by keeping my mom up late with tales of life in Oaxaca. And after she went to bed G and I settled in to watch a little HBO. We caught a little Bill Maher and Da Ali G Show, which had us in horrified stitches at song lyrics like "Throw the --- down the well!" repeated by (hopefully) blythe bar patrons.

Sometime today I'm going to say good bye to the land of family, plentiful food, air conditioning, and American political humor tv and head back to Oaxaca for the start of school. And I think that my time in Mexico must be drawing to a close, because I'm so happy to be here, even in a land where everyone assumes I moved to Mexico to do missionary work. Talk to you again from the road, y'all.

2004-07-31T19:11:00.000-07:00

Hola from Mexia!

Let's see ... after stopping in Naranjos for money and e-mail, we drove on and on an on, to Ciudad Victoria. A long drive, and one we assumed would be past more services than we saw. But there was nothing. We ended up reaching Victoria after dark, in the rain, stressed and tired. We checked into a hotel and crashed, both room fans blazing.

Next morning we were up and, bypassing the institutional cafeteria in our hotel, crossed the plaza and ate at Daddy's, the restaurant in the HoJos. And that time we both ate breakfast so we'd be on the same food schedule. Oh, it was hot, but not as bad as on the coast. We got to the border about 1:30p, crossed quickly, and got the biggest iced teas we could find while we arranged for US insurance. It was 105 degrees.

Then we zoomed north on wonderfully paved American highways, with all the reflectors, lane striping, and shoulders we love and none of the random livestock encounters, missing chunks of asphalt, or topes we've come to expect while driving. But you know what? It was so easy driving on 281 north from McAllen that it was boring -- at least driving in Mexico is like playing Mario Bros.

I thought we would make Austin, so I had hotel and restaurant info for that, but we only got as far as San Antonio, so poor G had to put up with me cruising around downtown looking for an interesting hotel to stay in. I mean, if we were gonna pay outrageous rates -- you know, something more than the $15-$18 US we had been paying in Mexico -- I wanted it to be something fun. And we lucked into the last non-suite room at the Menger Hotel! Then we went off and ate American food, pork chops and mashed potatoes and gravy and Steiner Bock, collected some squished pennies, and crashed. Before we left the next day we went down and toured the Alamo. Gentlemen, please remove your hats before entering the Shrine.

After that unexpected and really fun bit of tourism, it was a pretty straight shot to Mexia: stopped at a roadside attraction (snake farm!), ate bbq in Austin, talked to the Subaru dealer in Temple. Now we're here, playing with animals and horrifying my mom with stories about living in Oaxaca, drinking California wine and organic milk, playing with animals and generally glad not to be whizzing along at 110 kph for awhile.

2004-07-29T14:07:00.000-07:00

Hola from Naranjos!

And well you may ask, Where is Naranjos? It's in Veracruz, south of Tampico. We're heading north and just stopped in to use an ATM and e-mail. It's hot, hot, hot, but the drive has been beautifulx3. I don't know how far we'll get today.

Oh! G had deer for dinner last night, and sheep for lunch today.

2004-07-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

We're leaving -- again -- in about an hour for part three of Roadtrip Verano 2004. Only this time we're headed north to Texas. I know I'll be able to blog and check e-mail while in Mexico; I hope to do the same in Mexia, but you know how that is. (Or maybe you don't; I just tried searching for the post about being banned from the only public internet access within 30 minutes of my mom's house, but I didn't find it. So there you go: I've been banned from the only public internet access within 30 minutes of my mom's house by the evil Teague library nazis.)

Before I go, I just have to share this: as you may or may not know, Cinepolis had been showing the same Hellboy preview for months and months. So I was stoked to see that this week Hellboy finally made it to Oaxaca. Except the theatre is only showing a dubbed version -- no subtitulo! Bummer. Greg and I saw a single-screen theatre, Sala Versalles, while walking around looking for a shovel, so Sunday we stopped in to check it out and see if maybe, just maybe, they were showing the English-language version.

On Saturday, the earliest showtime was 4:15; on Sunday it was 3:45, so we missed the first 30 minutes of the movie. We were the only people in the theatre, so when we stumbled out into the lobby -- the theatre was spookily dark inside, enough that we needed Greg's keychain light to find our way around or even see each other -- to inquire about this, thinking maybe they'd switched reels or something, they told us if we wanted to we could sit through the next showing in order to catch the beginning. Fair enough. Only, we didn't want to. Maybe it's better in English and viewed straight from the beginning, but we weren't impressed. Except when Cthulhu and the cthonian showed up, but that was all too brief. And of course when the credits started the lights came up, bam!, and the projectionist turned off the machine. That's when we got a look at the inside of the theatre, once I'm sure a lovely little place with a balcony and red-velvet chairs retrofitted with cupholder armrests, but now tattered and grimy and not very appealing. Which is I guess better than stupid and not very appealing like ol' Hellboy: The Movie. And now I hear that Catwoman sucks! Damn. But ... I just read online that Blade 3 is in the works. Whoo-hoo!

2004-07-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

Back in time, back to Tehuantepec ...

We never did make it out to either of the two moderate hotels on the highway: while driving there G spotted a posada on the main road into town, 5 de Mayo. We stopped to take a look and even though we both knew it would be a noisy location, the people there were nice and the rooms awfully clean, so we decided to stay. And I mean, clean! No tv, but it was too hot to stay in the room so we sat on the walkway outside the rooms and read. And the bed, get this -- real sheets! None of that 60-threadcount shit, and nice pillows, too. Next time I'm in Tehuantepec -- likely, as we both liked the town -- I'll bring ear plugs and stay at the Posada Colonial San Fernando again, no problem.

That night it rained really hard, and we could see that Izzy's kidneys had stopped functioning. The next day, with her sleeping on the bed with the ceiling fan on high, we drove outside town to the turnoff to the Guiengola ruins. Our guidebook said to stop at the Comedor Gema and pick up a guide, but the people sitting around the comedor said, naw, there's a kid up there that can show you around, just drive up. So off we went down the dirt road into the jungle. Only because of all the rain, the road was pretty muddy and wet. But hey, Little Jumbo has all-wheel drive, right? No problem. So we went a couple of miles down the road ... until we got to a spot where water covered the road for at least a hundred yards. Trees and the road's own curves blocked our view of any farther ahead. And AWD or no, I really didn't feel like 1) getting stuck, and 2) walking back through the mud to Comedor Gema and asking for a tow. So we turned around and headed back. We also argued about what to do: stay or go. Which would be better with a cat at death's door? We eventually decided to kind of stay, and not drive helter-skelter up to Texas but take a short drive up the relatively-flat coast road to Zipolite and wait it out there.

We did some asking around and although there's no such thing as a pet crematorium in Oaxaca (if not Mexico), there are for people and folks we talked to seemed to think that it'd be no problem to cremate a cat. Well. It just may be that there is a single crematorium in the state, in Oaxaca-town, and that it is illegal to cremate animals. Which we were told when we drove back home after finding out there were no facilities in Pochutla, the nearest town to Zipolite of any size. It was another of those "gringos ask the strangest things" moments, I must say. So with Juan Carlos's approval, we buried Izzy under the fruit tree on the patio, a pretty spot, now planted with red-blooming flowers. Maybe in a day or two we'll head out again.

2004-07-24T17:46:00.000-07:00

Izzy Vasquezle chat sauvage
April 12, 1986 - July 24, 2004

2004-07-20T17:42:00.000-07:00

Hello from Tehuantepec!

G and I did indeed leave today on part two of Roadtrip Verano 2004. We chose another unexplored highway to travel, this time Hwy 190 southeast to the Isthmus. More humid heat. Cat's fine; she enjoyed the air-conditioning.

Hwy 190 was twisty, as apparently is required of all Oaxacan highways, but not too bad. We marked out Matatlan for a return trip (mezcal capital of Oaxaca) and passing through Santa Maria Jalapa we got a great picture from a roadside comedor of a chicken serving a platter of chicken.

We rolled into town about 6pm, and two out of the three hotels recommended by our guidebook were full! What're people doing here -- they should be in Oaxaca-town Guelaguetza'ing. We were on our way out to the highway to find a room at the expensive hotel when G spotted a posada. We checked it out; it's fine, so we checked in, settled the cat, and set off to find some dinner. We found an out-of-the way restaurant, Biche Mariscos y Bar, which turned out to be lots of fun. We shared a plate of shrimp diablo and a seafood salad -- minus any actual salad, unfortunately, but the seafood was good on tortilla chips with some of the diablo sauce. Including raw oysters, so we'll see if my Mexican gastronomic luck holds.

Tehuantepec is a small town, just up the highway from Salina Cruz, the port town in these parts. We're off now to find a cool breeze -- we're dripping sweat -- and tomorrow, ruins! I think we'll be here tomorrow night, too, then head up the coast to Zipolite; er, I mean, Puerto Angel.

2004-07-20T09:38:00.000-07:00

My friends point out that I often blog about food; it's true, I know. It's just that I really like food. And it's so much easier to talk about food sometimes than other things. Like my continuing depression. My worries about what I'm doing with my life. Izzy showing her true age.

She woke us up early this morning, meowing to go outside. She didn't want her food -- she hasn't been eating hardly anything -- and she didn't want the water in her bowl. She wanted something else, and when I finally relented and got up so she could go outside, she wandered around the patio looking for water: the neighbor's outdoor faucet, rainwater collected on the plastic lid of the crabitat, the cistern. Despite the effort it took for her to reach the water in the cistern, she drank from that and also from the bowl of cistern water I placed on the ground for her. She's creaky, her balance is going, she's not eating or sleeping well. But she still purrs when we pet her dulling fur, and she still gazes at G with adoration whenever he walks into the room.

I still think of her as young but only because I compare her age against Fuzzy's incredible lifespan. But all of us -- me, G, and Iz -- know, I think, that she probably won't make it to 19.

2004-07-19T14:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I thought we'd leave Sunday, but we decided to stay through tonight in order to see the kick-off of Guelaguetza. Especially since the Llano turned into a fairgrounds, with kiddie rides and games, pirate cd & dvd booths galore, crafts, and food. They've also got the 2nd Annual Mezcal Festival set up in the middle of it, and a section of the park devoted to Oaxaca state coffee growers handing out samples. They weren't handing them out at 8am this morning, only as of this afternoon and evening -- people here think nothing of drinking coffee late at night.

We cruised the park last night, looking around -- got another couple of bobble-heads* -- before spotting what we were really after: tacos! G had three and I had three, then made another circuit before heading back for another trio each. Mmm. A lot of booths are selling regional sweets, which is almost always worth a look and taste. We got some toffee peanuts, as usual. But we also tried these meringue cookies -- yeah, I know, raw egg whites, with the meringue sitting in a plastic bowl behind the guy's counter -- but they were really good: fresh meringue plopped onto a wafer with another on top, like a little meringue throne. After all that we were too full to get any fried bananas or potato chips or the local version of a Big Stick, served with chamoy sauce and chili powder. Maybe tonight.

We went again for lunch today, and got taquitos; G had chicken and I had something called tinga. I still couldn't tell you what it was, except that it was good. We then went looking for a sweet when I saw a hand-lettered sign proclaiming Tacos Cochinita Pibil. Whoo-ya, Yucatan-style pork! A woman sitting in front of the booth asked us if we knew what pibil was, and cleared a space for us to sit down -- she was a pretty enthusiastic customer! I had pibil 14 years ago when I was in the Yucatan, and I still remember how good it was, and told Enthusiastic Customer that. She said the woman running the booth was from the Yucatan. G and I sat down and ordered a plate of little tacos with pickled onions and a very, very hot green sauce. Oh, my, they were tasty! We waddled over here to internet, swimming through the crowds of people in town for the festivities.

I'll blog from the road and let you know where we end up going.

2004-07-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

No news here, really, but check out the news about San Francisco's beloved 4-Star Theatre!

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/07/16/DDGO97LSNC1.DTL

Let's hope they can work something out.

2004-07-14T16:06:00.000-07:00

I often look around at long-time Oaxaca residents, all bundled up when the mercury dips into the 70s, and wonder wtf? Yet after only three days in the Papaloapan, I grabbed a sweater for the walk over to the internet cafe. WTF?

We're back from stage one of Roadtrip Verano 2004. San Jose Chiltepec ended up being Greg's favorite town, while I really liked Ixcatlan, so I think a return visit to the hot 'n' humid north of the state are in the cards. Plus, I have to find some more Queen Cola, which I did, at some little abarrote along the side of Hwy 182 west of Huatla.

Yesterday was our mellow day of the trip, with only a short drive (about an hour and a half) and a lot of lazing around in the heat. After grabbing pineapple juice and beers and some books and sitting on the palapa-covered patio and reading most of the afternoon, we walked down the street to the restaurant recommended by the guy that runs the posada. It's a good-sized, palapa-covered place right on the river. There was only one other customer inside when we entered, and we sat near him at a table overlooking the high and muddy river. No menu, just whatever was in the kitchen that day, which happened to be more mojarra frita, carne a la mexicana, and some other meat dish, pork maybe. We both chose the mystery carne a la mexicana. Umm! First, tortilla chips, some really tasty, cheese-covered refried beans, and salsa as starters with our beers, then the carne a la mexicana -- beef with stewed tomatoes, onions, and jalapeños -- with really good tortillas and (at our request) more of the delicious black beans. As night fell we watched the birds come in to roost in the trees across the river, and a couple of fireflies trying to get the action going without much luck. We strolled up the street to an abarrote for some more bottled water before heading back to the posada -- the guy in the abarrote made his money in the States working at a Japanese restaurant in my hometown, San Gabriel! Right on the corner of Las Tunas and Mission ... nice guy.

We left early, after brewing up some coffee and grabbing a breakfast of champions at another abarrote -- you know, coke and sugary crap, in this instance, cookies -- and drove out to the highway and on to Santa Maria Jacatepec, which, according to our guidebook, is supposed to have a surreal altar in the town church. Well, it was a pretty church, but I think the townsfolk got tired of the parade of gringos, because it looks like they've repainted the mural behind the altar. No extra surrealism, just the regular Catholic kind. But! The abarrote did have a ... are you ready for it? A high-class quartz clock!

After our trip to Puerto Angel we were dreading Hwy 175, but it turned out to be a good stretch of road, especially in the flats before the mountains, but even up in the mountains, too. Then we remembered our short trip back in October of last year on Hwy 175 and eating barbacoa conejo:

For a major highway, 175 is awfully small: it's one lane each way, very twisty and curvy, with no lights, no shoulder, no cats-eyes, and plenty of potholes and ruts. Good thing we weren't in a hurry.

Ha! Now it's "a good stretch of road."

We blew past the little pueblas up in the mountain stretches, except to stop for lunch at a comedor in El Punto. And a spur-of-the-moment stop for mezcal at a little stand in Guelatao, which turned out to be a very pleasant stop, chatting with the proprietors, Victor and Yolanda, about mezcal and teaching English. But all of us were getting a bit tired of the car, so that was the extent of our stops today.

I think we'll be in town a few days then take off again. I'm not sure where.

2004-07-13T13:11:00.000-07:00

Roadtrip Verano 2004: Day, uh...?

We're in San Jose Chiltepec, a little ways south of Tuxtepec. We're staying the night here after a super-short day of driving. Still in the Papaloapan, so it's hot 'n' humid. Our posada is roofed in tin.

Yesterday we were in San Somebody Ixcatlan, on the shores of the state's big reservoir. A nice little town, as was Jalapa, the "big" town near Ixcatlan. Our hotel had a rooftop patio with a view of the reservoir and mountains, and we had big fried lake bass and tortillas for dinner. Scrumptious.

It's also really pretty countryside to drive through, and someday I'd like to come back and do the hike to the top of Cerro Rabon, a massif looming over Jalapa. Everything's very green, very tropical, though our guidebook says we're in "tropical evergreen forest" and not rainforest. Still, just think tropical and you'll be on the right track.

We only stayed in Tuxtepec, the city alongside the Rio Tuxtepec, only long enough to buy some contact lens solution and see a very unimpressive ruined Aztec watch tower before continuing on to this town -- much like the day before, where we pretty much blew through Huatla before continuing on to Ixcatlan. We had planned to spend some time in Huatla looking around, but neither of us liked the vibe. But the mountains Huatla sits in were stunning. A great drive on a sometimes iffy road.

Tomorrow we might stop in Ixtlan up in the Sierra Norte, but I bet we end up going all the way back to Oaxaca. Guess we'll find out tomorrow.

Man, it's hot.

2004-07-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

Hello, and welcome to Roadtrip Verano 2004!

We left Oaxaca around noon today; not an early start, I know, but once we packed and loaded up the car, we stopped in at Soriana first to get duct tape to tape plastic over the broken window. Except I saw they sold plastic window screening and adhesive-backed velcro, so I bought that and some scissors and G and I made a ghetto-fabulous screen for the window, which took some time.

We drove over the mountains and into the Cañada, a region on Oaxaca characterized by dry tropical scrub, if you can imagine: palms, bananas, papayas, bouganville with palo verde and cacti. All surrounded by dramatic red and chocolate-brown cliffs and green mountains covered with clouds. Hardly any traffic on the highway, and only small pueblos.

Right now we're in Teotitlan del Camino, near the border with the state of Puebla. The "del Camino" refers to Hwy 135. It's the equivalent of a county seat, but it's only got about 5,000 people in it. We got in just in time to see everyone packing up the Sunday tianguis, so after we checked in to our hotel for the night and got Izzy settled with her box and food and water, we walked a couple of blocks to Restaurante Sylvia for dinner. Today's comida was chicken in red sauce, pasta soup, rice, and tortillas, washed down with a beer. This internet cafe is right down the street from Sylvia's. When we walk through the town plaza back to our hotel we will have done the town.

Tomorrow: Huatla, the hometown of Maria Sabina, the famous shaman of the Mazateca.

2004-07-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

Almost forgot:

Tomorrow we're loading up Little Jumbo and departing for roads unknown. Yes, a roadtrip, probably into the northern part of the state, the Mazateca. Not much as far as ruins, but mostly scenery and Maria Sabina's home pueblo -- I figure that if G is studying with Jorge, one of her students, then it's a good place to visit. And mountains, of course, lovely Oaxaca mountains. I'll post updates from the road if possible.

Also ... do you like sushi? I know I do, and I miss it terribly, though not enough to ever go back to Restaurante Kyoto and choke down more examples of Oaxacan sushi. But tucked away in the many treats and surprises crammed into Greg's luggage on his return from the States was, a small bento box of sushi from the international terminal at SFO. Oh, good lordy! It was divine. Airport sushi was divine.

2004-07-10T17:19:00.000-07:00

So today was my second Saturday of rugby practice, and this time enough people showed up that after about 45 minutes of drills we played an actual game. Although because I pulled my left quad during one of those drills, and because I'm not an idiot, I decided that I would play defensively and not get right into the scrums and rolling catfights that characterize determining control of the ball. The worst part was, being picked last for teams! For those of you who grew up butterfingerly, gangly, or otherwise unsuited for athletics, I'm sorry, but I've never before been picked last for any sport. Christ on crutches! But at least the team that got stuck with me cheered when I walked over, and while I wasn't up there scoring touchdowns (or whatever they're called in this game), I was making some plays, passing and blocking. Ron, one of the team captains, even bowled me over, right out of my shoes.

The best part was, Greg came by to see me play and came away greatly reassured that I wasn't playing with a bunch of meatheads, so now he feels a lot better about it. Even though I told him that was so; they're nice guys. Which frankly is fine with me. You can imagine: playing rugby in Mexico, being the only girl on the field, is a little intimidating. At least I'm taller than most of the other players (though beefier would be more handy) and can handle the ball and myself. But still. Then to get this constant background buzz of, ooh, it's dangerous, you shouldn't do that, what if ..., blah blah blah. It makes it hard to stay confident, and I don't like not being confident. Especially when the alternative is to take up something safe, like guitar or embroidery. I have to run around and be in motion, I've learned that, or I go crazy. And if there are some risks, okay by me. But try saying that and then living with all your friends and family (which, down here, is all of one person) disapproving what you do. I don't have it in me, at least not for sustained periods. So apparently I've got the constitution to be slammed to the ground and stepped on by my teammates but not to live in conflict. Crazy, huh?

2004-07-10T17:04:00.000-07:00

Oh, more on that love/hate thing:

It just worked out this way, but the only bill we have due on the first of the month is the fee for the parking lot. Everything else is due around the 10th of the month: rent, cable, electricity. We split the electricity with our landlord, Juan Carlos; so far we've just given him the money to cover our half, but this time he handed us the bill to pay. And unlike in the States where everything is paid by check and mailed in -- or, if you're a Bay Area geek, paid for online with a credit card -- here everything is cash. You can pay your electricity bill at the supermarket, or at neighborhood payment centers. We went to the local payment center and saw a bank of machines similar in appearance to BART ticket machines. But oh so much simpler: stick the electricity bill in front of the barcode reading eye on the machine, and a display comes up confirming how much you owe. Stick your money in the slot and the machine gives you your change and a receipt. Damn! Way, way, way better than anything back home.

Now for the hate: I finally went in to tell Banamex that their ATM ate my debit card, and that I have a new address. I had a note with handy banking phrases all written out in Spanish, and my dictionary. Well, the teller said, you have to call this 800 number and report it. Well, I said, can I just have the money from my account? No, first I have to report the card lost, then I can get the money. I didn't bring my phone, and she certainly wasn't going to use bank resources to call for me, so I trudged back home, called Banamex and managed to report the card stolen. Then walked back to the bank to get my money. Hey, no money in this account -- you took it all out in Puebla. Ah, I haven't been in Puebla for some time. Okay, you need to report that via the phone number. Can I at least change my address now? Nope -- only over the phone. I'm not exactly sure what it is they do in the branch. So, back home to make another call.

Anyone who's dealt with a big bank can pretty much guess what happened: transfers, please hold, transfers, whispered conferences in the background, hold, transfer. Until the battery on my phone ran out. I plugged it in to the charger and called again. More transferring, holding, waiting. Finally, I got two different (or was it five?) somebodys to take down my new address and to take down the report of stolen funds. Here's the kicker: since I have reported the card lost, though, I can't actually put in for a change of address until I get the new card ... although I've already moved and will never receive the new card. Even though I can go down to the bank with three forms of picture ID to prove it's me and not the thief trying to change the address ... no can do. Fine, I say: I have one more item. I want to close my account. Hey, there's something they can't do over the phone -- I have to do that at the branch. Before I could get really wound up, my phone went dead, this time from running through all my minutes. I went down one more time to the bank to cancel the fucking account in person, but it had closed for the day. I seriously considered testing whether an isshinryu straight punch could take on a bank window, but the disadvantage of bringing your spouse along when you're royally pissed is that they tend to stop you from those kind of experiments. So I had to content myself with an anti-anger Corona and asking Patricia, the director at Berlitz, to cancel the account the next day. At least she agrees: Banamex sucks.

2004-07-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

Last week I was hating being in Mexico; today I'm feeling optomistic and happy. Greg comes back tonight, and I get to pick him up in a very clean, very non-squeaky Little Jumbo. Yes! Not only did I find a mechanic on my own, I managed to find one that tuned her up and fixed her brakes in two days. Incredible.

I also successfully braved the Abastos on my hunt for furniture, and found two more places with stuff I like at reasonable prices, so I'm feeling better about Moderate Shangri-la, too.

And playing rugby helps -- Christ, I would've taken up curling if the opportunity presented itself. It just feels so good to be running around.

And since the car is fixed and Greg coming back, I'm hoping that this Sunday the three of us can hit the road for a little roadtrip around the state. I've got a couple of loop trips plotted out already.

Whee!

2004-07-04T15:43:00.000-07:00

Big fun yesterday; today, not a damn thing. So lemme tell you about yesterday ...

Our friend Osvelia's story just keeps getting more and more convoluted and unhappy. Without going into details -- there must be a megabyte cap on these blogs -- I'll just say that her husband Marcos is still in the U.S. and isn't coming back to Oaxaca for the foreseeable future; Osvelia and Lluvia are probably moving back to Oregon; the daughter of the woman who owns the building housing El Viejo Shaman is out to drive Osvelia from the shop, contract or no, in order to get more money, and has resorted to intimidation and petty vandalism in her efforts to succeed; the furniture Osvelia left behind in Moderate Shangri-la will at some point, maybe soon, maybe not, be moved up to Osvelia and Marcos's place in San Sebastian. So I need to buy me some furniture, or use my camping gear to pretend I'm sleeping in an Appalachian Trail shelter.

Sure there are furniture stores all over town, but why spend a lot? So I went down to the Abastos tianguis Saturday afternoon for some shopping. Anybody been to Koby's swapmeet in San Diego? The Abastos is at least five times larger, and crammed with low-slung tarps, guy lines, and people selling their wares on the ground. Plus the throngs of very small people. I had a rough idea where the furniture vendors were and, on my way to find them, I stopped in at a sanitario to pee -- a sanitario that sold beer in front! But I passed on the beer, got directions from two guys carrying an armoire to a waiting truck, and started browsing. The style of furniture at the Abastos is called rustica, and that basically means stuff like you'd find at Busvan For Bargains or The Sawmill: cheap wood furniture, cheaply assembled and finished. Fine with me, frankly. And it was fun buying a table, getting the guy to add a finish of my choosing, then arranging for a truck to take it and me home. When G comes back next week we're gonna go back and get more. Like chairs, a pantry, and some dressers.

While I was at the Abastos I also saw guys selling honey out of wheelbarrows: you choose your jar from the vendor's collection, and he ladles it full of honey dripping off the frames perched on top of the wheelbarrow. And one of the many mystery fruits on sale was ... well, I don't know what it's called because I didn't write down the name the woman gave me, but it's like a tuna only round and not sweet. It's got an almost squash-like scent to it, but it's not squash-tasting. Anyway, it was good peeled and mashed up in a fruit smoothie for dinner. I'll have another one tonight.

Saturday morning I took the bus out to the sports field on Universidad near Gringolandia to play rugby with a local club. I'd found out about it months ago, but they practice Saturdays at 11a, possibly the worst time for me as a Berlitz teacher, so it wasn't until this Saturday that I could go. I told Ron, the guy who'd given me the flyer and who I called Friday evening, that I'd never played rugby before, but he said it didn't matter. Despite my confusion over the continuous and free-floating line of scrimmage, I had a lot of fun, and since the game doesn't involve throwing the chubby-football rugby ball but rather tossing it, I didn't have to humiliate myself with any girly throws. And fortunately I catch better than some of the other players -- all guys at this point, a mix of Oaxacans and Americans, but Ron says sometimes women play.

Between the rugby and the market I barely made it to 9:30p before sacking out -- only to wake up at 11:30p, like I'd just had a nap and was now ready to go another 6 hours! Thank goodness a Xena dvd was near at hand.

2004-06-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

I have four adult classes this month at school, all around the same level -- high enough to have some fun, at least. So this month's Real Live American English examples are:

What the heck?!

Howdy!

Yeah, I know: I can't believe they don't know those yet! But I love it when they get confused about something -- say, when to use present perfect versus present perfect progressive. Like any of us know! -- and I hear somebody say, What the heck?!

2004-06-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

G-man is still in Ohio, whooping it up at Origins with the assorted tribe of geeks, nerds, and pear-shaped mouth-breathers that make up the gaming community. Wish I was there! And this year they're having a blow-out Hall of Famer reunion, too. And, he's running a Pendragon game! Damn! Although I'm sure he won't find any decent Mexican food in Columbus, he says he's having a blast.

I was thinking today how lucky he is: not only is he a self-taught expert in the esoteric language of mythology, he gets to use it in his chosen profession, gaming. And not only does he get to use his favorite themes in his profession, but he's one of those rare individuals who actually had a hand in shaping his industry. That's my guy!

2004-06-26T12:02:00.000-07:00

Well, that's over.

I just finished my Saturday classes -- my last ones until August. And you know what? Despite all the whining about having to wake up before dawn on a Saturday and be up, up, up for six hours of perky English instruction, I'm gonna miss my students!

Yesterday after my afternoon class I hurriedly did today's lesson plans, then scooted off to Manuel's house for a little English-polishing work: Manuel's wife, Carla, is working with a mezcal exporter that wants to clean up its marketing materials. Manuel took a look at it and decided it needed a professional hand, so he asked me over. We sat down in his lovely grass-covered patio and I took a look while he popped over to the miscellanea for a 940'er to split and some Cheetos for his 6-yr-old daughter, also named Carla. Well. That was some fun English. The brochures weren't too bad, mostly some unobtrusive misspellings and "this sounds translated" klunkiness, though I'm still chuckling over the Reserve mezcal in the collectible, "punking"-shaped bottle. The Pun King, indeed. I'll have to get one for my friend Gus.

The worst was the tag placed around the neck of the bottles. Oh my hell, that was some fractured English. I was often at a loss as to what they were trying to convey. Manuel said they've been using the tag for awhile now, but somebody wrote them a note saying that the company needed to get its act together, so they passed it along to Carla. I'll try to snag one and post it here.

After we finished, Manuel went to pick up Carla from work while little Carla and I did cartwheels on the lawn and played with her naked Barbie. Little Carla's English is about as good as my Spanish, so it's fortunate that the language of play is universal. Then off we all went to get tlayudas. Manuel suggested the stands on Libres -- the best tlayudas in Oaxaca -- but I pointed out that it was still about an hour too early for them to be open, so I suggested El Chepil, my usual place around the corner from my house. It was awfully nice to go out and do something even quasi social, and it was positively giddy to be able to show them a new place in town, and be in the know about going to the miscellanea down the street to buy beers to drink with dinner, but by the time we were all done and Manuel had draped little Carla in the backseat of his car and we all said our goodbyes, it was awfully late.

I was pretty keyed up, so I watched an episode of Xena on my laptop, and finally turned out the lights about 11:30. I was planning on getting up at 6am for class, but Christ on crutches, I woke up at 4am! So my ass was dragging even more than usual this a.m., but I got in and started to prep for my first class. Now, if I may, I'd like to put my cranky pants on for a minute. The support staff at school just can't seem to get it together enough to do more than unlock the door and turn on the lights when they open the school in the morning. They don't turn on the computers in the computer lab, they don't start the coffee or tea, they don't unlock the bodega or at least pull out the cd players we're supposed to use in every stinkin' class ... what is the problem? Nor could they make the copies I'd requested yesterday. It's reception: how hard is it? (and before you get on my case, I've done reception work; it's not challenging)

Okay, pants off. So I'm upstairs, writing out my gapfill exercises, getting Chapter Review Jeopardy ready to go, when I go downstairs to make another pass for a cd player, when Gilberto says something about ... something. I stopped and said, what? and he explained again, in English, but I swear I couldn't understand what the hell he was saying. So I asked him to repeat it again, and this time Andrea, a fellow teacher, joined in. It turns out that they ("they"? they who?) had arranged for the three adult classes to work on a presentation then all three classes would get together and each student would give their presentation in front of everybody. This was news to me. So much for the lesson plan! But it actually went well, and if I were teaching next Saturday I'd already have my lesson plan done since I didn't use it today; ah, well. It was fun, and the class ended half an hour early, so Adam, Andrea, and I scooted off down the street to grab some breakfast before the next set of classes.

We talked about doing more of this kind of activity at the school -- presentations, not last-minute changes -- while waiting for our food, then Adam looked down at his watch. Oops! Almost time to get back. I wolfed my chilaquiles con pollo y pan down with my cafe, then we ran back. Now, teachers have been preparing for weeks for this Kids Fest thing, where all the kids and teens perform in front of the parents. However, I have also been operating under another directive: Finish The Level. So we haven't really done any prep in my class. Gulp. Better get to it. We actually ended up making big "My Favorit Things" flowers, then presenting our favorite things huddled together in a group on the makeshift stage. I literally had my knee in one kid's back and my hand clamped on his shoulder to keep him from fleeing; I didn't make him speak -- just repeat the level! Yeah, I flunked kids. I'm so cruel. Then we handed out the diplomas and I told the parents what I really thought of their kids, the parents asked me questions ... and they requested that I teach their kids the next level in the next school session. Aw!

Now, I could go home and crash ... or I could skip off to the movies to see American Splendor, and of course I'm going to the movies. I pulled my movie reviews out of the sidebar 'cause I got tired of it, but if you haven't seen Mean Girls yet I found it pretty darn funny, so color me surprised because not only is it a teen movie but an SNL movie too. Guess their drought's over.

2004-06-23T10:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve been adding links to some personal Oaxaca milestones, and while going over my blog archives I realized some things. Like, I’ve lived in Oaxaca for almost a year now – Guelaguetza next month will make it a year ago that Greg and I flew down, procured jobs, then flew back to Texas, loaded up the car and drove here. Also, that I’m still unhappy. More on that in a bit. And finally, when I think of my favorite places to eat in Oaxaca, all my favorites are streetcorner stands. Eating street food – unrefrigerated mayonnaise! mystery chorizo! is “res” beef, ‘cause I can’t tell! – used to be such an adventure; now eating inside a restaurtant, especially one that caters to tourists, is the adventure.

Why am I unhappy? People give me props all the time for having the balls to pick up and move practically sight-unseen to another country, and usually I can say, yeah, that was ballsy, and be glad I’ve got that in me. But sometimes it is so hard looking back at what I miss, and while I miss a lot of things – Jason, other family being within a day’s drive or short BART-ride away, so many restaurants, my house and garden, friends, the dojo – what I really miss the most is all the physical activity. I remember Manuel giving us this test during our training to see what kind of learners we were, and it was really no surprise to see that among other things I am a physical learner. I’ve always thought of myself as kind of a lazy person, what with that feline influence and all, but I did a lot of running around in the Bay Area, what between all the karate, the biking, the hiking and backpacking, and the general walking around The City and East Bay. And it’s making me crazy that I don’t do that here. When I came back from DC after my section hike this year I returned with the resolution to just accept being a Californian and not try to be a Mexican, and if that means hiking from pueblo to pueblo instead of taking the bus, then that’s what I’m fucking going to do. Only, I have to say, I am a little nervous about it. My Spanish is better, though that’s not always a help out in the sticks where a lot of folks do not speak Spanish. And I wish I had some hiking buddies like the fabulous folks in BayAreaHiking. Maybe I’ll find them, I don’t know. But I have to either get out and hike or get out of Mexico. I just can’t sit still.

If only it were that easy.

2004-06-19T18:45:00.000-07:00

Saturday night, and what am I doing? Sitting at a fucking computer at the Internet cafe. Loser.

Part -- only part -- of the problem is that it is Saturday, which this month means my getting up at 6am and stumbling into Berlitz by 7:30a for the first of two classes and many mugs of second- and/or third-rate coffee on the patio. By 2pm I'm tired from having been "on" for six hours, yet wired from all the caffeine. And since Manuel got demoted, no one brought fruit today so yes, I ate hydrogenated palm oil-laden cookies and candies to counter any off-putting coffee breath. So I got home and scooped up G and off we went in search of a rotiseria, and again came up empty, but we did find some okay carnitas for our vitamin T. Which I then topped off with a pineapple raspado. Totally stuffed, I rolled back home and took a nap; G woke me up at 5pm before he left for a temescal at Ceviarem. So not only is it 9pm and I'm not tired and I'm not hungry so I won't be eating dinner or going to bed anytime soon, this week is not a good movie week. But, gee, I guess I am a little cranky, huh kids?

Shrek 2 opened in Oaxaca, but only in Spanish! And three weeks of language class helped a lot but not that much. Calendar Girls and The Ladykillers are both playing, but only matinee times. And there's still Troy, which G has already seen twice, so I think it'll be difficult to get him to commit to another three hours of Brad.

But, I want to end this on a good note, so ... next Saturday is my last two-class Saturday! And my second class will be a puff class since it's Kid's Fest, which is the school's "Hey Parents Come Watch Your Kids Parrot Some English!" performance. Then June 30, I am outta there! The school finally breaks for summer, and I won't have to think about English verb tenses until the middle of August.

Shit! I forgot the biggest news of all: Moderate Shangri-la now has hot water! Hoo-wee, a couple of days ago our landlord Juan Carlos came by and said he had the part to hook up the gas tank to the water heater. Turned out he was still shy a part, so G gave him the 40 pesos or so and he got some metal bit, attached everything ... then said, not enough pressure in the gas tank. Hey, no kidding -- the next day while heating up some water for tea the stove went out. Dry gas tank. So I used my alcohol backpacking stove while G grumbled and stumbled around waiting for either a gas truck to go by or for the local coffee shops to open. Well, he ended up going to a coffee shop, then sitting out on the sidewalk in front of the house waiting for a truck to go by. Hey! Know we know why people hang out in front of their houses -- they're waiting for services to go rolling by. The gas truck finally came around, Juan Carlos hooked up the full tank, and voila, a hot-water shower. Wow.

2004-06-18T10:27:00.000-07:00

No biscuits this morning. English class until 9pm Thursday squashed that but good. But we have a full tank of gas, so I could have made them if I'd wanted to.

Instead, I sat on the patio this morning, reading Harper's and drinking my tea and listening to the squeals of children playing before the start of school. Moderate Shangri-la backs up onto a primary school, and every school morning G and I are treated to the sounds of playground fun, or recitations en masse of who knows what -- pledges of allegience? Multiplication tables? The morning's news? -- songs, speeches, and so on. This morning, after some contemporary Mexican music, the raucus shouting morphed into a rhythmic chant, that only slowly penetrated our consciousnesses: b ... b ... ba ... bas ... bas ... bas..ll ... basket...ll ... basketball ... basketball ... basketball! Only down here it comes out bahskeetbowl, bahskeetbowl!

Also, today was the end of my three weeks of Spanish class. Ahora, practicar!

2004-06-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

Every Friday at Spanish school Leticia and Iliana take us on a little field trip, like the outing to the house of a woman who makes tortillas. Because of my Berlitz work schedule, I haven't been able to go since I actually signed up for classes! So last Friday, as a way of participating, I busted out the corn meal G brought back from the States and whipped up a batch of corn bread, one for Spanish school and one for Ceviarem. I was late for class as the stove has no numbers on the temperature dial so I had to guess at the temperature then watch the cornbread like a hawk. Well, I finally got to class, set up the corn bread, butter, and honey, and stood back. Oh -- apparently they don't eat corn bread in Mexico. Here, in the heartland of corn cultivation and consumption, it is as mysterious as an organic burrito with a spinach-flavored wrap. Leticia and Iliana pronounced the corn bread "good ... interesting ..." but Jerry, the English teacher, and William, a fellow student, are both from the south and they pounced on the corn bread, and were two very happy guys.

If I wake up early enough, I'm gonna bring biscuits tomorrow.

2004-06-13T16:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday after work I had a real hankering for meat, and the fried eggs and reheated tamal I ate for lunch did not fill the bill, so after the movie and a trip through Gigante, G and I went downtown looking for the next-best thing, tacos. Pig head, cow head, tripe ... ah, yes! plain ol' res. Three beef tacos and half a Fanta later I was satisfied -- but only for the moment, because G mentioned carnitas.

Oaxaca has a lot of mighty fine food, especially the local Vitamin T: tacos, tamales, tlayudas. However, it does not have, in addition to the bevy of Asian cuisines we urban Californians take for granted, any burritos, fish tacos, or carnitas. Yeah, yeah, it's possible to find a fish taco -- I hear you can get 'em down in Huatulco -- and every so often a carnitas sign pops out, but the folks here like their pork sliced thin and covered with chili. Aka cecina enchilada.

We'd had some rockin' good carnitas out at El Tule with Ian and Caroline, so we decided that as part of our Sunday Morning Drive we'd go to El Tule and get a carnitas lunch. El Tule's out Hwy 175, as are a couple of sites that our little Oaxaca guidebook treats as afterthoughts. But still, we decided to see Dainzu. It's not far.

Well! I hope you click on the link because it's a pretty little place and, other than the caretaker and the parking lot attendant, G and I were the only ones there. So after a thorough exploration we headed off to our carnitas lunch. And with G heading back to the States in a few days, we decided to pick up a few gifts there, too. It's small, and has a pretty church, a pretty pedestrian walkway, garden ... it's a nice little place to visit on a Sunday, and if you're in Oaxaca I recommend it. Lots of folks were strolling around today, sampling mezcal, eating helados and raspados and other summer-day snacks. And a fair number of small ladies were selling the local red pottery (I finally succumbed). We parked Little Jumbo, turned the corner onto the pedestrian walkway, and ... where the carnitas fonda had stood was a bare patch of dirt. No tarp, no grill, no plastic chairs and tables and cold beers. Most importantly, no carnitas. G asked a neighboring vendor, who said, yeah, they were unique in Tule and, yeah, they're gone. Damn! So we got tlayudas with chorizo and a couple of tuna helados and while it was good, it still wasn't the big old meal of meat I was craving. So acting on a memory, we drove back into town and down the Periferico toward Gringolandia, where Greg remembered seeing the word "carnitas" attached to one of the funny signs along the road. Turns out he was right! At the sign of an alarmed Porky Pig in a fiery cauldron, we did indeed see:

Los Michoacanos Carnitas

We parked, walked up, and asked, ah, can we get some carnitas to go? Sure can, how much you want? Quarter kilo enough? Here, try some while the muchacho bags up your order! Oh, my, yes! Carnitas, tortillas, pickled carrots, guacamole, salsa, a bag of chipotle peppers, we had everything we needed for some bang-up tacos. Except ... we got back in the car and drove a little past Gringolandia, to the drive-thru miscellanea in the shape of a giant Tecate six-pack. As we rolled up, G asked, what's Spanish for six-pack? I said, I don't know but the Spanglish word is six-pack, and since the guy in the Big Six understood Spanglish, pretty soon we were whizzing back to Moderate Shangri-la with a complete taco party.

2004-06-12T16:22:00.001-07:00

Where to start? I was going to start by talking about The Day After Tomorrow but got sidetracked looking for a link for hoopdy. And then I got distracted thinking about a site dedicated to sites about people's cars, then by the mass of slang dictionaries with .uk and .edu addresses. I almost had to cut the cord! Which brings me back to ... The Day After Tomorrow. See it with someone who will makes jokes through the movie! My two favorite parts -- and I don't think I'm giving anything away -- were when the Fox News reporter was smashed by the Angelyne billboard, and when Greg shouted "¿¡Habla español!?" at the screen while the gringos were wading across the border into Mexico.

So, when Dale was here he told me why he uses majortom as his e-mail address. It's a scenario that'll be familiar to anyone who's ever lived in SF and then moved across the bay: you disappear from your friend's radar, unless of course you happen to go back into The City, in which case poing! you're back online socially. Only it was Dale's kids who pretty much didn't realize that living on a sandspit in Belize with a town connected to the mainland by a dirt road (or boat) and far, far, far from electricity or any blacktop makes it difficult to live according to American standards. So he'd ask them for emergency parts, and they'd forget to send or bring them, that kind of thing. And damn if my most excellent family doesn't come through not once but three times with goodie packages while he's here: magazines, letters, exotic foodstuffs. Oh, it warmed my little heart!

2004-06-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

Greg got back from Atlanta yesterday, so after making kissy-faces we gorged on Indian food and California wine and cookies.

In other news ... another "Oaxaca's Great!" bubble burst, courtesy of my Spanish teacher, who says the throngs of campesinos protesting in the Llano, or in front of the governor's house, or in the zocalo aren't there demanding social justice. They're there because the Big Man in their pueblo paid them to stand around in order to increase his prestige and a chance at a lucrative government job. Crap.

And, how's this for Oaxaca-style comida corrida? Breaded cutlet with refried beans and spagetti with picante tomato salsa, and a bag of juice? Lovingly served out of the back of a hoopdy!

2004-06-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

We had kind of planned to take Dale out to see Monte Alban Sunday, but Leticia, Greg's Spanish teacher, said there was a field trip out to a puebla on Sunday, so since Dale said he's seen plenty of ruins we decided to join the school on the excursion to Huamelulpan. We didn't know what was on the agenda, just that Huamelulpan is a traditional pueblo in the northern part of the state. Fine with us!

Aside from our trip down Hwy 175 to the coast, the only other trips we've taken outside the Valley of Oaxaca have been up the cuota and out Hwy 125, once to Pueblo Viejo and another time to see the big church in Yanhuitlan. So naturally it follows that the road to Huamelulpan is also along Hwy 125, which I'm growing very fond of, mostly because it travels through the Mixteca Baja, a part of Oaxaca state that I find very pretty and alluring. And this time we used one of the city's many servicios turisticos, or 16-passenger vans that run folks from point to point in the state for around 40 or 50 pesos. So I got to look out the window for the 2 1-2 hour trip instead of focusing on the road.

The van, which was full, dropped us off at Leticia's request where the road to the pueblo dead-ended at Hwy 125 so that we could walk the half-mile into the center of town. I immediately took off at my own pace instead of strolling along with everyone else, and got rewarded for my brisk pace with another caracara sighting, and a chance to sneak a few cookies while waiting in the zocalo for the rest of the party to show up. And lucky me, instead of going into the community museum right away we waltzed over to the woman selling tamales and atole and got some snacks. Mmm. While people ate a couple of us entertained ourselves feeding the stray dogs and puppies bits of tamal and atole. I don't know what the señora thought about that, but I'm thinking of Moonstruck while I write this.

Nice little community museum with artifacts from the ruins underneath the town, and a little section on community healers and medicinal plants. After the museum we started walking up the hill behind the zocalo but instead of going to the ruins, we went to a house. The house of one of the community healers! The señora was 87, and came up to Greg's elbow, but she invited us to sit down in front of her house while Leticia translated her explanation about what she does. She asked if anyone wanted a cleaning, and four of us said, sure!, so we followed her while she gathered herbs from the margins of her fields, and from her beautiful garden, then we sat down on her palm-front tapeta and plucked the leaves from the big pile of branches. Then we went inside her house -- adobe walls, dirt floor, a wood-framed roof holding up clay tiles, and a couple of pieces of furniture -- while she prepared the herbs by grabbing big handfuls and twisting them into pieces. It was like watching someone rip apart a phone book. She put the shredded herbs into a jar of cane alcohol, added some camphor, and started "cleaning." First William's knees -- his comment was how strong her hands were. Then Rebecca, who asked for a "find-me-a-boyfriend" cleaning. The señora told all the guys to sit outside, then had Rebecca strip down to her skivvies and lie down before rubbing her all over with the herbs and chanting. After she'd stuffed a big handful of herbs down the back of Rebecca's underwear she told her to get dressed, wrapped her in a patchwork blanket, and had her sit and keep warm. Then she cleaned me off but good to get rid of my sore throat -- my undies thankfully stayed herb-free -- wrapped me up and set me down, then had Marcos come in. She made poor Marcos, a 23-year-old from Manchester, strip to his skivvies, too, but in front of all us ladies before giving him the herb treatment. Poor guy -- it was his first experience ever with any kind of massage. Then she stuffed his shoes full of herbs so that he would find a girlfriend. Not something he requested, but something apparently the señora felt was necessary. In addition to the embarassment, of course. We then drank a nasty herbal tea, said our goodbyes, and off we went, this time up to the top of the hill to explore the ruins. Pretty fun, with a great view of the town and the countryside, and the local church. This one had a pyramid with tombs in the base connected by a passageway passing just behind the front stairs, so it was a fun tomb-crawl, especially since it was wasp-free. Wasp-free is always a good thing. Then it was down the hill, back through the pueblo and down the road to the main road to catch the mini-van back to Oaxaca.

Again, I was way out front only this time Dale was with me too as we were heading downhill. We were almost to the road when we saw a mini-van pull up, so I went racing down the road to flag it down. No luck, so Dale and I stood on the carless road ... then it started to rain. We ducked under the eaves of a house next to the intersection and waited. It really poured. Soon enough, Greg, Leticia, and the rest of the group came walking up, totally soaked, and stood under the eaves with Dale and I. Twenty minutes later a mini-van went by. And kept going; totally full. Then another one. The third one stopped but was pretty full, and it looked like only half of us would fit -- especially since William needed to sit in the front in order to avoid having to learn the Spanish word for "puke." But, no, people squeeze and scootched around until we all fit, even though Dale was sitting on the wheelwell.

By the time we got back to Oaxaca we were famished, since the last thing we'd eaten were the tamales in the morning and a couple of cookies each on the walk back to the road to await the van. So as we walked down the street toward the zocalo, when I saw a restaurant that had rotisserie chickens, in we went. Ah, yummy. I mean, it wasn't good enough that I would go again to get a chicken, but starving, yeah, it was great.

I think Dale passed out as soon as we got home.

2004-05-29T17:44:00.000-07:00

I mentioned that I brought back a package of Newman-Os and The Da Vinci Code; they were both presents for G-man. I thought that The Da Vinci Code was some religious book along the lines of The Purpose-driven Life -- thoughtfully left at Appalachian Trail shelters throughout at least Virginia, and which I was never bored enough to even skim through -- but people on the trail said no, it's this cool murder mystery with all this neat historical stuff, including a bunch of Holy Grail stuff. Well, that sounds interesting. And next week Greg, Mister Mythology, Mister Arthurian Shit, will be at a mythology conference in Atlanta, so if everybody is talking about this book, which evidently they are, it would be a good idea for him to read it before he goes. So I bought a copy and gave it to him with the cookies, which he finally opened after I broke down and asked if he was ever planning to, even though I gave him the package for him to eat and only hoping he might share, which he did, mmm so good. But back to the book, though damn, those cookies hit the spot. Last year on the trail everyone was talking about Cold Mountain -- the trail goes right over it -- so I bought that, too, and read it and didn't think it was very good. Then the movie came out and I saw that and didn't think it was very good, then I hiked over the damn thing this year and well, just another Virginia mountain. Nothing fun like Albert Mountain or Unaka or Mt. Rogers. So I guess you could say I didn't think the actual mountain was very good, either.

G is finishing The Da Vinci Code as I type, and the report is ... not encouraging. I'll read it myself, but I'm beginning to think that if a book makes it on to the NYTimes Best Seller list it may be an indication to stay away. I mean, jesus, have you looked at it lately?