The last time we were in Oaxaca, in early 2012, we got bored and inserted a 2-night jaunt to the Pacific coast, to Mazunte. We ran out of things to do, and felt like we couldn't just keep walking the same streets, through the same street markets, through the two big mercados. We couldn't just keep eating the same stuff, and if I remember correctly, we found it difficult to find good food; finally, we found a place called La Olla and had a good dinner and went there the next morning for breakfast.
For this trip, the final version of our itinerary gave us four nights in Oaxaca, then two nearby, in Teotitlan del Valle -- a major weaving village -- and then we'd be off to the coast. Would we have enough to do, this time? The best memories from our previous trip were complete accidents; we were accidentally in one spot when a photo shoot took place of men and women in traditional dress, posed and also dancing (the masthead above is a photo I took that day), and then one afternoon on the zocalo I stood listening to music and a young Oaxacan man started talking to me about our insane political system, the terribleness of Republicans in particular. I stood there in wonder, knowing not one thing about his political system. Oaxacans are very political, it's an aspect of their identities. Lightning probably wouldn't strike twice, I imagined, and give me these kinds of startling experiences.
Primarily, again we walked through the streets and markets, sat on the zocalo, wandered around looking for and trying different restaurants, and finally being a little bored. We won't need to return to Oaxaca, even as we had a really nice time and enjoyed the city.
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| chocolate de leche y pan |
I especially loved our morning routine of walking two blocks to the zocalo and having chocolate (de leche for me, and de agua for Marc) to start our day. It seems typical for them to having chocolate and bread, and sometimes then to follow with breakfast. Our first two mornings we got two different kinds of bread, and WHOO were the loaves big! I was still full at dinner, which was a problem because we wanted to be able to have lunch every day, to try all the different kinds of food we might discover. Marc, especially, wanted (always wants) to eat street food, and to have lunch in the mercados, so we just had chocolate in the morning, listening to the extremely wonky marimbas that start at 8am. The two guys play all day every day so you'd think they'd have been better than they are! It always sounded like the same music, but suddenly I'd catch a snippet of Mack the Knife, or a Jobim passage. The tone of the music was all wrong; Mack the Knife is dark, and this music sounded like crazy calliope music. One morning we had a waiter who spoke English and we talked about the music -- he rolled his eyes and said he gets a headache by the end of the day.
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| our tlayuda mixte |
Our days took a regular form, in part (large part, probably) because I have that tendency toward establishing a routine. After our chocolate, I sat in the zocalo and watched people, sketched, stitched, took notes of things I saw and overheard, and Marc rambled around. Some mornings he found coffee for me. Together we'd walk through the crowded streets and into the mercados, and he scouted lunch spots. The best lunch we had was on our last day, in the fancy mercado (2nd de Noviembre). There were dozens and dozens of places to sit and eat, some at a counter right next to the cook, and others set up more like casual restaurants. We picked a place like the latter, and took our seats at a long table. A very kind man brought menus and explained things to us, in his very little English, and we ordered tlayudas mixte. A tlayuda is a very large, crisp shell (maybe 14" in diameter, but served on a 12" plate, so hard to deal with) spread with a thin layer of black beans, and then stuff is on top -- thin slices of avocado, meat, small bits of lettuce or cabbage, thin slices of tomato, meat(s), and long pulls of stringy cheese. I quickly googled "how do you eat a tlayuda" (thank heavens for technology!) and learned that you break up the shell and just eat it like nachos, essentially. We saw people tearing the meat apart with their fingers, so we started doing that. It was so, so good, and we ate way too much and didn't want dinner that last night. We should have shared one.
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| nine tacos at Expendio Tradicion |
We mostly found good food, although there were a couple of misses. We rely on TripAdvisor and other review sites, and we spend a good bit of time reading the good and bad reviews, trying to get a sense of whether the place would suit
us. The first night we ate at the best place of them all, Expendio Tradicion. We shared a big plate of nine tacos, three shrimp, three fish, and three octopus. One thing that always surprises us in Mexico is how very little (like, usually
no) English is spoken. Fine, yes, we are in their country and it's arrogant to expect English -- and we don't; it's just that Oaxaca, for example, is a popular place for tourism, and probably largely American tourists since Mexico is our neighbor, so we'd think that in places like hotels and big restaurants with excellent tourist reputations, there would be a small bit of English. NOPE! Almost never any English. We have also found a bewildering response to English, compared to other places we travel. We find no effort to try to find common ground, just a faster and more voluminous response in Spanish. Our first night at this restaurant, a table of young people sitting next to us must have seen us and figured us out right away, and the young man next to me offered to help us order. Personally, even though I wish we were able to communicate, I always feel a kind of political vindication -- like screw you Americans, you who don't even try to speak our language (though I do try!!), you who cause our country so much damage, you're in my place now.
Anyway, we returned to Expendio Tradicion twice after that -- for a lunch and a dinner -- and were just so happy with every bite. Our waiter had a few words of English, and I have a few of Spanish, so we were able to make it work, but you know, if you aren't fluent you are left like a child, unable to ask questions of subtlety. I might know how to ask a question but there is no way I can understand the response, or ask questions of the response. It's always OK with me, me with my "well, oh well" attitude; this is just fine, I'm glad with however it turns out, but I know Marc would like to ask more questions and find a way to ask for more exactly what he wants, or how he wants something prepared.
We had one really stinker of a dinner at Casa Taviche (actually, Marc's was almost inedible -- yesterday's leftover meat, as he described it, at room temperature and thickly sliced, with some kind of room temp mole poured over it), and one dinner that was serviceable, at Don Juanito. We had a lovely meal at Zandunga, although Marc's enchiladas were supposed to be served (we thought) with two different moles, a red and chocolate, and were instead swimming in only chocolate...fine, but it becomes a lot. My dinner was fabulous, but it was the corn tamal that nearly made me cry, it was so wonderful. The space was beautiful -- small tables in a large, open courtyard with the night sky above, and strings of lights. It felt to me very Mexico.
Because of the pandemic, all the music that used to exist in the zocalo is gone. When we were there last, there was almost always a band playing, sometimes in two different spots in the zocalo. There were people dancing, and lots of people selling stuff, but in an exuberant way. I remember a couple of men dressed like Aztecs, not in a crummy way but in a dazzling way. Now, no music and lots of people who are clearly poor trying to sell whatever they can. One young woman approached me and I kind of noticed her little daughter standing next to her; as the woman walked away, her little daughter, maybe 3yo, stepped forward holding a little basket and she held out a piece of gum, wanting to sell it to me. We did buy a few things -- Marc got mole in the mercado (of course), and I bought a shawl, a bag, and from one young woman in the zocalo two pecan pralines and I wish I'd bought a dozen, they were so good.
One of the days we were in Oaxaca, there was some kind of political event. Their elections took place in June, so I was unclear what it was about, but there were dozens of large buses and big groups of different people, each group holding their own signs and dressed alike. There were also very large banners hung all around the zocalo with different women's faces, and the dates they disappeared. This has been a big problem in Mexico, with
almost 100,000 ordinary Mexicans being "disappeared," including a group of school children. They are just never seen or heard from again, and they are not in any way part of the drug trade. I walked around the square that morning, looking at all those women's faces, the signs saying "never forgive, never forgotten," and just felt crushed. Crushed for their families, crushed for the global insignificance of women, and crushed imagining what happened to them.
A thing I like about Oaxaca is the kind of renegade spirit of the place, evident in their strong, rebellious political identities and in their graffiti. As a strongly Catholic country, this bit of graffiti felt very loud to me -- loud even in my own anti-woman country. "My uterus did not ask your opinion," shaped in rosary beads. I have a sticker on my laptop at home where the uterus is shaped with snakes in that "Don't tread on me" image. If only.
One day we suddenly wondered about the weaving village -- had the pandemic affected them, surely yes, right? We learned that the pandemic had, in fact, ruined them. All the weavers had to become farmers in order to survive. So at the very last minute, we canceled that trip and stayed in Oaxaca, for a total of six nights. It was a bitter disappointment for me, and Marc felt sad about it because he knew how much I'd wanted to go. Our second-floor room at Parador San Miguel in Oaxaca was just so, so lovely, with two giant windows that opened out into the courtyard, so unlike most rooms at the hotel, ours was filled with light. It was a large room with a great bathroom, so spacious and comfortable, and staying there two extra nights was kind of lovely; the room options in Teotitlan del Valle (the weaving village) were grim, so at least there was that consolation. Our first night in the hotel, our room was dark, without those large windows, so the next morning Marc asked for a different room, which he frequently does for us even though it's not his favorite thing, and so we ended up with a glorious, beautiful room that was as much a part of our pleasure in Oaxaca as Oaxaca itself.
birds in cages in the courtyard, and music in the evenings from the restaurant below
I'll save the story of getting to our next location, San Agustinillo on the coast, for that post. Even though it wasn't the most eventful, memory-filled place we've ever stayed, I close with this, and mean it:
Best memory: I believe one of the things I'll remember most about Oaxaca are the kapok trees (ceiba trees) with their strange, even sometimes scary roots. Not only did I love photographing them and wanting to draw them, I also really loved that my niece Rachel was familiar with them and told me their name in a post I made about them on Instagram. She said she believes the Maya considered them to be the tree of life.
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Just super creepy -- the ends of them look like fingers, hands, extending
out of the dirt, reaching out to grab you. Less visible in that way in this
photo, but this shows the extent and nature of them. |
I'll also remember the big cathedral in the zocalo, the Catedral Metropolitana de Oaxaca. It's magnificent in that colonized way, and the bells clang in such a weird way. Five bell clangs at 11:24. Two at 11:55. Same throughout the day, so random.
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| I hate the bad angle -- I can't straighten it until I get home. |
Best thing we ate: Marc loved the "giant overflowing shrimp with passion fruit and habanero sauce" he ordered at Expendio Tradicion, and they were amazing. They each sat on a little pile of guacamole, and the sauce was complex and wonderful. For me, it was that corn tamal at Zandunga. It was just so subtle, so very CORN, and a mouthful of it felt like you were tasting the very essential corn-ness of corn. I loved everything we ate at Expendio Tradicion, for sure, and learned that my favorite craft beer so far is Santa Helodia, but it's that corn tamal that will linger.
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| THAT SAUCE, the shrimp perfectly cooked, each bite fantastic |
