Our Oaxaca portion of our trip was both great and frustrating—in ways we never would have expected beforehand. It made for a super jam-packed month dealing with both these highs and lows.
Let’s start with the frustrating:
Frustrating
Infrastructure. I’ve been to Mexico before. A lot. I’ll guess that, all combined, I’ve spent about 9 months of my life there across various trips and towns. So, I felt pretty prepared for going there. Let’s just say I was wrong.
So, we arrive mid-December and immediately the garbage men, bus drivers and others start protesting. They stop picking up trash (so it gets piled up in sidewalks and parking lots) and then use their trucks and busses to block the streets. It seems that the mayor was set to leave office at the end of the year and skipped off with all of their end-of-year bonus monies (about 2 months of salary per person) that is agreed to in their employment contracts. Strikes, trash, and blockades all over.
Our guest house had water that was not-so-warm when we took our first showers. This is one thing we did consider as an option, as not every place has scalding hot showers. But, after our first week we asked the owner to look at it and the hot water heater had stopped working! So, after that we had super hot showers all the time.
What we also did not expect was how horrible the internet could be at our guest house. So, now we’re both working a bit and the internet in our place is completely unreliable. The fix is easy enough—we signed up for a very nice co-working space. Even though there were closer ones, the one we chose was the most quiet and professional and a 15 minute walk across town. The bummer was that our schedules around the holidays were fairly erratic, so we would walk across town for one or two calls and then walk back home—potentially to do it again later that day for another call. If you didn’t hear from us much in Oaxaca, its not because we don’t love you…just that walking across town all the time was getting a bit much.
Humorously, when I told all of this to my Spanish teacher from the Baja, she just laughed knowingly and said “yep, that’s Oaxaca”. It seems all of Mexico sees them as the train wreck part of the country.
So, now you are wondering what could make cold showers, bad internet and piles of trash worthwhile? Food and friends.
But worth it…
Oaxaca is well known for being a foodie paradise. With produce that grows only in this region, a passion for their heritage foods and tons of chefs that flock there to put their skills on display—it truly is amazing. Tlayuda (a super huge, very thin tortilla) either served open-faced like a pizza, or folded like a quesadilla. Memela (one of my favorites) is a medium-thick masa cake usually from blue corn, cooked on a comal (flat top) and spread with a layer of pork fat before all the real toppings go on it. Tetela, a corn triangle stuffed with all sorts of filling options. Add in ingredients like amazing local tomatoes, tons of squash blossoms (which are so expensive in the US, but practically free this time of year in Oaxaca) and so so so many avocados and you have delicious food. It doesn’t matter if its street food or high end, all of the food was dynamite.
And for those of you who read my concerns about being alone for the holidays, in addition to long video calls with our families, we were able to connect with an amazing group of international travelers also in need of holiday company. As a group from the US, UK, Mexico and Guyana we called ourselves the International Group of Misfit Toys.
Our group went out for a nice dinner to celebrate Christmas, and then our guest house owner invited us to her family’s New Years Eve party. We celebrated by eating a lot, singing traditional NYE songs from our various countries, and blowing up fireworks.
Beyond just the holidays, our group of friends kept us super busy going out for various dinners, seeing opera, doing art classes, going on tours of the area, and taking Spanish classes. Between that and running across town for internet, the whole visit just flew by!