I want this blog to help me be more accepting of myself and others. I want whatever I write to not be too constricted by a perceived need to have it be well-planned, thought out or brilliant. And as I enter the next stage of my life I want my writing to help me connect with guiding forces which will help me through the "tricky end game." It'd be nice if it was also entertaining, enlightening and inspiring.
We have now been in Oaxaca for 19 days. One of our favorite activities is simply walking the city streets. Although this is endlessly entertaining and interesting it can also be a tricky... It demands full attention not only while crossing busy streets but also while taking each step. These "sidewalk" pictures speak for themselves...
But the upside far outweighs these potential pitfalls. Here's some more pictures of street art we've seen this year.
It seems all walks end up sooner or later at the heart of the city...the zocalo. Here's a short video taken about 7 PM this past Wednesday. It will hopefully give you a sense of the vitality of this wonderful part of the city.
Okay, I'll stop with the Spanish. I realize it can be annoying to non-Spanish speakers. The fact is I love to speak and write Spanish and it's one of the great joys of being in Oaxaca. I'm not sure why it's so fun and satisfying but it is.
Each Saturday morning there is an "Intercambio" at the Oaxaca Lending Library which is next door to our hotel. This is a two hour language practice event where Mexicans who want to improve their English are randomly paired with people learning Spanish. The session involves one hour of English conversation and one hour of Spanish. I've attended two of these so far and there have been about fifty or sixty people each time.
At my first Intercambio session I was paired with a 29 y.o. woman from a village about an hour bus ride from the library. (I'll call her Rosa. I don't want to use her real name without her permission.) Rosa has a masters degree in business administration and teaches at a local university. Her goal is to get a PhD at a university in the US. She is the youngest in her family and all of her siblings, three brothers and three sisters are already in the states working. Rosa was raised in a Zapotec speaking village and she heard very little Spanish as a child. English is her third language and she's pretty good at it. Rosa said she would only see her father about one month a year when she was growing up because he was working in California but now he has a US work permit and comes back home six months a year. Rosa was bright, friendly, open and very focused on her goals. I found an hour long intense conversation in Spanish to be exhausting but a great chance to improve my skills and get a chance to have some in-depth communication with a local resident.
This past Saturday I was paired with a young man I'll call Pedro. Pedro was a twenty-one y.o. university student whose goal is to teach Spanish to English speakers. He currently is involved with his "national service." As I understand it this is a six month to one year obligation for all young Mexicans. Pedro's service involves work in an isolated Mixtec community in the Sierra mountains about three hours from Oaxaca. The primary language in the village is Mixtec. Travel to the village involves a two hour bus ride, then a half hour taxi ride and a twenty minute walk. He says the road into the village is so primitive that the taxi will not take him the last several miles. He spends five days a week in this community helping teen age students with their studies and comes back to his home in Oaxaca for the weekend. A British woman joined us for this session because there were more English speakers than Spanish. One of the most memorable moments for me was when the discussion turned to violence and gun control. Pedro brought up the mass killing of children at Sandy Hook in Connecticut and he and the woman became very passionate about how strongly they felt about this outrage and how utterly astounded and bewildered they were by this and other acts of violence in the US. I felt uncomfortable and ashamed. My attempts to explain the political realities around gun control legislation only made me more conscious of how morally bankrupt our national response has been to these tragedies.
This session with Pedro (and the Brit), like my time with Rosa, was richly rewarding. My biggest take away is a deeper appreciation and understanding of what is meant by the term "human family."
Maybe that's the core reason for my joy in learning Spanish.
Last week I started taking private language classes. My first class with Jacob was two hours. It was wonderful but way too long for a concentration challenged 68 year old. By the middle of the second hour my mind was shooting blanks. Today's one hour session was a big improvement. For our class together we meet in a cafe, drink capuccino, and chat in Spanish. When I make a mistake he writes it down but lets me finish my thought before offering me a correction. A nice technique. Jacob is very sincere, smart and open. I'm enjoying these sessions tremendously. Here's his picture.
Dorothy and I have been keeping track of the different license plates we've seen on this trip. It's been a fun diversion. At this point we've seen 45 US states and the District of Columbia. Missing states are North Dakota, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire. We hoping to pick them up on our trip back east in March although N. Dakota and Wyoming could be tricky. We also have 18 Mexican states and 6 Canadian provinces. Two of the most exciting plates were...
Of course traveling to some exotic locale doesn't mean escaping from life's harsh realities. Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in Mexico with about 78% of its population living below the poverty line. We often see poor families on the street, asking for money. The deep-rooted corruption in Mexico is probably at work in Oaxaca but as privileged tourists we are buffered from a direct impact - so far.
Violence is real. The two main local papers try to outdo each other with graphic photos of people injured or killed in accidents or assassinations. Very shocking to see public displays of such carnage. It seems that the option to be violent is somehow more likely here - the potential for violence seems closer to the surface (Since writing this Dorothy has noted that my perspective is limited to a basically white surburban reality and someone from the inner city in the US might have a very different take on this.)
Two days ago we were in the zocalo (town plaza) where a left-wing group was having a conference under a huge tent. Walking around the perimeter of this tent were men with "palos" (sticks) and machetes. One of the machete wielders gave me a hard glance that make it clear this was no game.
The following day's newspaper said that the group had "retained" six federal police officers who were photographing the event. There were pictures of the uniformed policemen being "escorted" to a location several blocks away from the event where they were released. The event's organizers were quoted as saying this was a deliberate attempt by the government to provoke a violent response.
Here's a picture I took last year of a group of men carrying "palos" confronting a motocyclist who was attempting to go down a street they were blockading.
I've been sick with a cold for the past few days and this is probably coloring the tone of this post. It's just that in retrospect all I've written about this trip so far seems so predictable and, frankly, boring. To me any way. I feel compelled to try to strip away some of the "niceness" and try to write about things that feel more real, compelling and challenging. We'll see.
Feeling a bit bettter today and Dorothy and I are on our way out the door to experience another day in this complex, beautiful city. Adelante!
We are now about to enter the fourth week of our escapade. We have just completed our first week in Oaxaca at the Las Mariposas hotel and plan to be here another three weeks. This is our fourth year in Oaxaca and it's magic and charm feel as strong as ever. Our days are filled with
Long walks through the always interesting city streets, markets and parks....
Our iphones keep track of our walking mileage and we're averaging between four and five miles a day. Crossing the street can be tricky but otherwise its interesting, fun and healthy. We haven't been to any of Oaxaca's top notch museums yet this year but we plan to soon.
During our morning walk we usually stop at a cafe for some snacks and some of Oaxaca's wonderful coffee.
Other activities include...
Art classes for Dorothy two days a week.
Spanish lessons. I'm starting private Spanish lessons on Thursday.
Swimming. I found a pool a few blocks away from the hotel.
Lectures. Our hotel is right next to the Oaxaca Lending Library which sponsors almost daily events geared toward English speaking visitors. Last night we went to a presentation about efforts to save the Mixtec language in the village of Totontepec,
Wild parties. Last Saturday night there was a birthday party for Teresa, the owner of our hotel, Las Mariposas. I was asked to play guitar and it worked out great. Here's some pics.
Dancing to La Bamba
I trust all of this is not to over stimulating for you and hope all is well wherever you are.
Caught an early morning Interjet flight from Hermosillo to Oaxaca via Mexico City. It seemed like there was almost twice as much leg room on these planes. Free top shelf booze was also notable. A big step up from US flights. Planes had video cameras attached to bottom of plane to show live take off and landing. Exciting.
90 degrees when we "touched down" in Oaxaca (not quite the right expression for our very hard landing.) Our return to Las Mariposas hotel was warm and comfortable. It is our fourth year staying at this wonderful place and the hugs, smiles and 'bienvenidos' from guests and staff made us feel immediately at home.
Late afternoon dinner of fish with mezcal and Margaritas topped off a full and satisfying day.
I'm now writing this on Wednesday, February 3, while sitting in the patio outside our room. In the middle of the patio there is a tall, stone wall that has water continually dripping down its side. It's covered with mosses, ferns and other plants and attracts all sorts of birds and other animals.
I sit here each morning drinking coffee and casually trying to identify the birds. Birds seen include Nashville, Virginia and Yellow-rumped warblers as well as many difficult to identify hummingbirds. Very peaceful place.
Not so peaceful was the very large political march that was going on in the street outside the hotel while I was luxuriating with the birds. Several thousand people filed by chanting and carrying flags. The most common flag was the red, hammer and sickle flag of the Communist Party. I saw a similar march downtown yesterday. No one I talked to seemed to know what the march was about.
Radical left wing politics appears to be alive, if not well, in southern Mexico. This is a picture of the tail end of the march.
Another sign of political vitality is the quality of the writing and cartoons in the local and national newspapers. The in-depth information and analysis seems significantly more sophisticated than in the US. Here's a cartoon that ran in yesterday's "Reforma."
Here a video of some Oaxaca street scenes that I put together with photos from last year's trip. The video's main focus is the street art one finds all over the city.The music in this video is Gracias A La Vida written by Violeta Parra and sung by Mercedes Sosa.
I'm not sure how often I'm going to be writing during the coming weeks. I find myself entering "vacation mode" - becoming very relaxed and rather indifferent about accomplishing anything. I think that's a good thing.
Easy, smooth trip in a Tufesa bus from Tucson to Hermosillo. At the border, driver was very helpful pointing us in right direction to get our "permiso" (tourist visa) from Mexican immigration. ($22/389 pesos each). City of Nogales, Mexico viewed from the bus was very uninviting. Bus had comfortable seats and the bathrooms. Drop down airplane type TVs blaring "Money Ball" with dubbed Spanish competing with driver's iphone Norteno music made the five hour trip sonically challenging. Earplugs would have been great. (This picure was taken while on I-19 south of Tucson where the road still had shoulders.)
Road (Route 15) south from Nogales is four lane freeway type road. Main difference with US appeared to be long stretches where there were very steep drop offs instead of shoulders. So steep that any car (or bus) going off the road would definitely tip over. This situation would get especially exciting when our bus was passing tractor trailers.
Taxi to hotel and then to a almost full carne asada restaurant with ten piece mariachi band no one seemed to be listening to and older man drunk came to table and was putting his arm on me, very uncomfortable. When we left man followed us to the parking lot where he continued to talk and stand too close as we waited for cab. He ended up giving taxi driver 100 pesos to pay for our ride. I told taxi driver about our experience with this man and he said, "Mexico."
Hotel was located directly next to the on ramp of Rte. 15, the main north/south highway. Very noisy as tractor trailers climbed the ramp throughout the night.
Despite the drunk guy and the noise on the bus and in the hotel room it felt wonderful to be back in Mexico.
We have now been in Oaxaca for 19 days. One of our favorite activities is simply walking the city streets. Although this is endlessly entertaining and interesting it can also be a tricky... It demands full attention not only while crossing busy streets but also while taking each step. These "sidewalk" pictures speak for themselves...
