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. We’ll be back there, the
food was really lovely. The area of town felt like it would be a
beautiful place to live, just outside the centre, but so quiet and
colourful and lovely and overlooked by hills. The aqueduct was also
splendid, though there was little water at the start of the rainy
season. Very green and lush, with tall yellow stone arches and a wide
pebbled stream bed. We continued walking and decided to go on to
Reforma, the next part of the city, which had a tea shop which was
reputed to sell loose leaf tea. Our supplies are currently critically
low and Oaxaca is not a place where one finds quality black tea.
Reforma was the sort of nicer, upper/upper middle class neighbourhood
that would not be out of place in Islamabad, Ho Chi Minh City,
Petaling Jaya, Beirut, and many, many other parts of the world. Wide
streets, a reasonable but not excessive number of trees, larger houses
with nondescript white architecture, many with gardens, interspersed
with respectable looking commercial zones containing restaurants that
were on the upper end but not too high: the sort of cuisine the locals
would not want to cook for themselves but which they could relax over.
One had the sense that the local schools were good. A very pleasant
sort of place to live, if not for me. Actually my own childhood home,
in Lahore, is in a not-dissimilar area.
The tea shop turned out to be nearly out of black tea though the
owner, a German, said he should get a new supply in the next week.
Encouragingly, he seemed rather sad that there was no interest in
quality black tea. Less encouragingly, he seemed to believe that
French and German tea was good. The French tea misconception is a
commonly held one and is complete nonsense, of course.
We came back to the flat where the internet is still down – Gmail,
google and a few other sites are working but most of the web is
inaccessible. My suspicion is that they have not paid thier bill and
have been bumped down to a more limited package.
In any event we then went out for coffee and discovered the delights
of cafe de olla, the local style of coffee made with cinnamon and
panela in a clay pot. After yesterday’s disappointing drip coffee,
this is now my preferred coffee. It started to pour then, so we dashed
to the city miuseum in the Santo Domingo monastery by the botanical
gardens. The museum was impressive – the building itself, a huge cool
space with frescos of sad eyed monks and divided up into courtyards,
one of which was planted with a thicket of frangipani. The pride of
the collection is Tomb 7 from Monte Alban, a Zapotec tomb taken over
by a Mixtec kingdom from which was found such treasures as a turqoise
encrusted skull representing the lord of the underworld, a gold image
of a warrior wearing a mask made of the flayed face of another person,
and an immense pure gold plaque simply incised with the image of a
heart shedding a fountain of blood, that was found in the dead centre
of the tomb. One sees why the tomb was found undisturbed, no tomb
robber with any wit would dare take such pieces.And of course there
was the reminder of how very different western hemisphere art is, and
I wondered how they perceived Spanish imagery when they first
encountered it. What it meant to them, if it seemed as demonic to them
as their own felt to the Spanish.
On our way back, once the rain had cleared, we encountered a sort of
open mike/ rap tournament going on with teenagers competing in pairs,
a ring of spectators, and three judges solemnly seated on the ground
to declare winners. Interesting also to see the stylised postures and
hand movements of both competitors and spectators. They were very much
what you see in African American hiphop, and not at all similar to
what these young people would use in their own lives, so it was
interesting to see how it had come as part of the whole package.
A quick google is giving enticing hints that Oaxacan rap is a big
thing, but sadly no way to investigate further till the internet is
fixed.