Oaxaca City

22-24 de enero

I know this post is really late, but I finally have down time where I can feel productive so here we go.

Oaxaca City, Oaxaca is a beautiful city in the mountains of central Mexico.  

My friends and I stayed in a beautiful Airbnb where we each got our own room. They voted me into the master suite because I’d orchestrated all the travel and housing plans (MomFriend^TM). It was absolutely wonderful.

 

This is a picture of the view from our airbnb. Syd was lucky and got the room with the view, so she got to wake up to this every morning and go to sleep to the full moon every night.

Biggest downside was the mosquitos, but they were tame in Oaxaca compared to what I'd have to live through in Puebla in a week and a half.

Oaxaca is famous for its cheese, which I have pretty much formed an addiction too. My go-to snack is a quesadilla with some salsa and some Oaxaca cheese, because it’s melty and stringy like mozzarella but it tastes better.

Our first day there we got breakfast in a cute little restaurant near the city center. I had a delicious omelet de champiñones y espinaca and cafe de olla (at right), which means coffee of the pot because it’s brewed with a whole bunch of sweet spices in a giant clay pot, giving it a very unique flavor. I generally hate black coffee, but cafe de olla is sweet enough that I didn’t want to add anything.

Overall, the food in Oaxaca was amazing. For dinner our last night there Syd and I split a sample platter of different cheeses and sausages that featured quesadillas, guacamole and totopos, i.e. tortilla chips.

All through dinner we made friends with pigeons, some adorable dogs, and at the very end a father son duo brought up a marimba (its like a giant wooden xylophone) and played some adorable music. 

We also tried mezcal, which is a super strong alcohol that's made from the same plant as Tequila (i.e. agave) but it's fermented differently.

The city center was absolutely adorable. It was still very colonial, which I have some moral issues with but man is the architecture stunning. 

These pictures are of my two favorite places I found in Oaxaca. One is of a small courtyard near an open-air market with beautiful trees and crooked streets (above). The other is a tiny hidden alley/courtyard we found where all the businesses were therapists, spiritual healers and a tiny cooking school. I fell instantly in love and didn't want to leave (left).

We also made a trip out to Monte Alban, the ruins about a 30 min drive from Oaxaca City.

It's an old Zapotec city that's only partially excavated, so some of the pyramids aren't fully exposed (see the main pyramid to the left). There was so much exploring to do that we Hailey and I didn't get a chance to see the whole thing because we spent too much time exploring the first half and taking a ton of pictures. Travel Tip: don't spend 1/2 your time at a site in the first 1/4, because you end up rushing through the last half and missing some cool things. Oh well, Oaxaca is definitely on my list of places I need to see again. 

look at my cute friends

The trip was absolutely amazing. Best purchases were an absurd amount of Oaxacan chocolate, which makes the greatest hot chocolate I have ever eaten in my entire life, and a blanket. I have a problem where I buy a blanket in every country I go to because I am obsessed with them. I don't really consider it a major problem, because they keep me warm and can also double as beautiful wll hangings once I actually get my own place. This one is brightly colored and has a simple striped/geometric pattern on it. I love it a lot.

Bonus Photos:

Giant spider we found at Monte Alban. It was a little over an inch long and about an inch wide, including legs. You could see it from about 10 feet away, putzing its way through the dead, yellow grass. It was so beautiful, but I probably would die of fright if it had suddenly appeared on my body. No one else wanted to get anywhere near it, but I was down on my knees trying to get pictures.

Beautiful Tree with the background of an old church and an amazing system of roots that was breathtaking. Also this lighting was amazing and everything about this tree and this moment made me exceedingly happy. 

In front of the church doors there was a painter who was working on capturing the beauty of this area, and just past him, up the street, was an open air market with a whole bunch of blouses, jewelry and generally tourist-y souvenirs. It was super cool to wander around and look at everything though and the light filtering through the leaves around us was absolutely stunning.

I was pretty sunburned by the end of the day though.

Fun Fact: I'm actually getting tan?!?!?!

Keep in mind that I have always been as white as a piece of paper, so when I say "tan" what I actually mean is that my skin doesn't reflect sun and blind the people near me anymore. 

I'm still the whitest person in the LASP program.