A couple of disappointments when I went in to Spanish today. For one, I had completely forgotten everything learned the previous week. More importantly (as I think it will come back to me), my teacher had been changed. The new one is very nice and capable, but somehow I didn’t quite click with her, and […]
To market
Sunday morning and we went to the market. This is the big Sunday market at Tlacolula, a small town about half and hour from Oaxaca. We took a colectivo with surprising success and arrived at around 11 when it was still relatively cool and there were few people around. It is a very large market, […]
Hamster wheel
A slightly overwhelming week. My classes are for three hours in the mornings, then it takes me about two hours to be finished with clearing the brain and having lunch, then work, work, work, which is falling behind. I will catch up this weekend but will have to consider how best to manage it all. […]
Back to school, redux
Woke early, had a leisurely breakfast and then walked the 2 minutes to my Spanish lesson. It is on the same street, conveniently close by, and is located in a small house overseen by a rather flustered but kindly woman and a handful of teachers. There were three other students at the school, luckily all […]
Last day off
Today, Sunday, was our last day off. Tomorrow we both return to work and my Spanish classes begin. We had a late start to the morning, lingering over tea and the news (for me) and exercise and calls home (for the GF). I was very pleased as last night, before realising that I was felled […]
Head case
The second day was less pleasant than the first. The first part of the walk was very easy indeed: first a steep walk down to the floor of the narrow valley with a small yellow silted river (I would call it a stream really) running down in, and then along the stream for about four […]
Cloud forests
Early in the morning we were collected and taken up into the Sierra Norte for the first of our two days of walking. This was arranged by a community project, one of the oldest in Mexico, and very impressive. It’s a collective of several villages that runs an eco-tourism initiative with obligatory community service for […]
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 […]