Yesterday, Sandra and I split our time again for the first half of teh day. She took the cooking class offered by one of the sisters of the family that runs our B&B, and started off with a walk. I walked up the hill that houses a large, covered, outdoor theater, as well as a planetarium and an observatory. A long, broad series of stairs branched off to the left from the street I was on and went under a road circling the hill. I took a little detour to walk on a pedestrian way at the side of the road. It gave a panoramic view of Oaxaca. This is a large city from this vantage point, with all the environmental drawback of any city, along with some distinct, cultural advantages.
I went back to the detour point and climbed past the theater to the two astonomical buildings. It turns out that they both were outcomes of a “pueblo to pueblo” program between Oaxaca and Palo Alto. Small, but important to have, speaking as someone to whom astronomy was incredibly vivid and important as a boy.
I walked back down the hill and stopped off at the stamp museum. A lovely little building that also housed the Organ Institute of Oaxaca, which preserves colonial organs here and also organzies concerts. The museum featured some lovely commemorative stamps from around the world, an entire room dedicated to mushroom stamps, a learning room for kids to learn stamp collecting, an exhibit of the history of mail, and a store that featured Mexican stamps to start a collection. A few thoughts here: the US has the lousiest stamps in the world (to match the lousiest currency), there’s been some incdreibly lovely artwork done on stamps from different countires, and, an exhibit on the history of mail seems more immeidate (as well as poignant) these days, as the US Postal service creeps closer to bankruptcy and irrelevancy.
After a few other errands, I walked to the cooking class and joined Sandra and a dozen others for a meal that they had prepared. This was located in another lovely B&B of 3 rooms owned by the same family, with a large kitchen. The food was really quite good, and I enjoyed the little I was able to learn in the short time I had with the group and its chef.
After our afternoon rest, Sandra & I headed back to the zocalo, stopping akong the way to get a gelato, and then joined many others in watching and eventually dancing at a “Danzon,” a weekly outdoor dance hosted for free by the citiy. Lots of Oaxacans, older, up and dancing to older-sounding music played by a local orchestra of brass and strings. Seattle could stand to have something like this much more regularly than the few summer dances it has at the sculpture park.
We then joined a family and another dancing couple from our B&B for dinner. The father is an Iraqi Jew from Baghdad, just like Zamir, and we’ve enjoyed our encounters with him, his wife and his kids. They live in Newton, not far from my sister.
This morning, Sandra & I had to change rooms for our last night due to scheduling problems here (we knew about them before we came). Then we went to the ethnobotanical garden for a tour. I was completely incorrect about what and where the garden was in an earlier post. That was a different park, this was the real thing. The tour was led by a woman clearly from NYC who had lived in Oaxaca for 10 years. A ton of information about the 2 hours, about Oaxaca’s incredible biological diversity, about how older societies used different plants, about some of the cultural and anthropological history, etc. The time went by very quickly; I really enjoyed it.
We had lunch with another family we’ve met here, shared ideas about places to go on our next visit. talked about how we’ve changed as a result of this trip, and shared contact info. This is one of the nicer aspects to using a B&B instead of a hotel, and a number of people we’ve met here we’d be happy to see outside of this context.
What’s left: shopping for chocolate, mole, and other things, one more meal, then a taxi to the airport after breakfast tomorrow and a long trip home. This has really been a fabulous trip and vacation in the best sense of the latter. I do hope we can come back, and I do hope we keep up our Spanish. As confusing and mixed up with Greek as I’ve been, I’ve enjoyed my times attempting to speak, and enjoyed it when I could understand what was being said. I think there’s a good chance all the above could happen.
