blog

Two workshops

This afternoon we got a cab to San Martin Tilcajete, one of Oaxaca’s artisan villages, this one specialising in carving alejibres. These are fantastical brightly painted wooden animals – a relatively recent invention, less than a century old, but the village’s most famous and lucrative product. Tilcajete is about 40 minutes outside Oaxaca, set amidst […]

Boiling pots, abandoned cities

The morning brought bad news. I called home for Eid and learnt that a relative is very unwell, so that my father had to fly suddenly to Karachi. Very troubling indeed. KP had Eid yesterday, after multiple reports of a moon sighting, despite the astronomical evidence that only 0.2% of the moon would have been […]

Third day off

This morning we took a bus to Monte Alban, climbing up above the city to the hills surrounding it. The Central Valleys of Oaxaca were laid out below us, heavily inhabited but still very green, and it was a clear day with pockets of mist rising here and there. So very pretty, though it rained […]

Second day off

Today we decided to stroll up to the aqueduct. This is outside the Centro Historico, but through a very lovely, quiet neighbourhood crisscrossed by canals, green and full of trees. We stopped for lunch at a superb little place with an outdoor garden overlooking one of the (dry) canals and ringed by old stone arches. […]

First day off

Saturday late morning. We left to explore the town and saw, as we passed the entrance, that the botanical garden was open. This is inside the walled grounds of old Dominican monastery and we had heard both that it is very good and that it has limited timings, so we went in. It turned out […]

Oaxaca

We have arrived in Oaxaca. Yesterday, after breakfast and coffee we went off to the bus station and embarked on the 4 1/2 hour journey south and west. The landscape changed along the way, from the dry plateau of Puebla to become more hilly. Then the hills came closer to the road, and started varying […]

Chauri Chaura

Nearly twenty years ago, I took a course on South Asian history at a large university in the United States, as part of my undergraduate degree. It was a mid-sized lecture course and had weekly sections, smaller discussion groups. In my section I was the only one from Pakistan, the only Muslim. Most of the […]

Disentangling

The end of our second-last day in Cholula, and while the excitement about Oaxaca is building, so is sadness at leaving. One settles so easily into little routines and habits that then disappear entirely, from knowing exactly which point on the dial of the stove to prepare my tea in the morning, to the habit […]