I’d hoped the move to Mexico City (CDMX) would provide some meaningful context. Maybe it was a Oaxaca-specific problem, or maybe there was some wrinkle to the CDMX landscape that would shed light on things. Instead, if anything, my confusion deepened.

As I mentioned in the post on landing in CDMX, our particular chunk of the city, the Historic Centro, is segregated into retail districts: lighting, beads, sporting goods, plumbing, chicken, hardware… There’s even a snack district, which is very possibly the best thing ever invented. Businesses selling similar goods have clustered together in the same small areas.

The benefits of that arrangement aren’t hard to figure out. From the business side, I don’t have to market to attract specific customers. Anyone looking for lighting, for example, is going to come to the one area, and all I have to do is visually attract them once they’re on the street. Marketing becomes more about retail display than outreach, which is generally an easier nut to crack.

From the consumer side, I know that I can just go to one area to shop. I don’t have to qualify specific businesses or do any homework. I just show up and start shopping.

But the downsides seem just as apparent, and this is where the overlap with Oaxaca becomes clear: it’s about the mismatch between supply and demand. It’s hard to estimate with any precision, but there are literally hundreds of lighting shops in our neighborhood. Maybe 500? More? From the business side, the competition for customers is fierce, and relying on retail display to attract customers is hard, when every other business is doing the same thing.

As a customer, my problem is the obverse: how can I possibly figure out where to shop with all those options and all that noise? Choice is fine, until there are so many choices it becomes paralyzing.

Lighting seems to be the extreme example, just based on the scale (although the plumbing district comes close). But if, in a two block stretch, there are 30+ shops all selling what appear to be identical raw chickens (and there are), how do I choose as a customer and how do I survive as a business?

Here’s another wrinkle, which we’ve seen all over CDMX: the same businesses occupying storefronts right next to one another. We saw it a little in Oaxaca, with the Parisina fabric store having shops on opposite street corners, but it’s much more prevalent here.

Obviously, I don’t know the answer. But that’s never stopped me from putting forth a theory and treating it like a fact. Let’s start by looking at how people used to shop, before the introduction of supermarkets and malls, the kudzu of retail.

In the early to mid 1800s, the options in the US were small specialty shops, peddlers, or open air markets. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that grocery and dry goods stores, that stocked a wide range of items, became prevalent. The first self service grocery store, a Piggly Wiggly, opened in 1916 in Memphis. The first modern supermarket, a King Kullen, opened in Queens in 1930.

This transition ushered in a shift from depth to breadth that exists to this very day. If I visit a farmer’s market, there may be twenty vendors all selling tomatoes. That’s depth. If I go to a supermarket, there may be three kinds of tomatoes, but there’s unlikely to be multiple Romas to pick from. But I can get peanut butter and roach spray and boxed wine. That’s breadth. And a Date Night kit.

So my choice, as a modern consumer, is likely to be what supermarket or big box chain I prefer. One may have better prices, one may have more sales, another may have better overall selection of products. But once I visit my chosen store, I’m shopping the breadth, not the depth, of its offerings.

Contrast that to Olde Tyme shopping. There might have been a dozen butchers in my town. They may sell mostly the same cuts of meat, but collectively I have choices that don’t exist in a supermarket/big box context. Or there might be the aforementioned farmer’s market, with dozens of farms all selling lettuce they’ve grown. That’s depth, not breadth.

Consumers in that context had a familiarity with parsing depth that today in the US we’ve largely lost. There are vestiges of it, still. Most obviously, there’s the proliferation of farmer’s markets all over the country. Shoppers have lots of reasons to visit a farmer’s market: supporting local producers, easier access to organic products, reducing the carbon footprint of imported produce, cosplaying village life. But the depth of the selection of products is absolutely a key driver. Choosing the reddest, most beautiful tomatoes from amongst all the options scratches an atavistic hunter/gatherer itch that’s still there, no matter how much we shop at Krogers.

So how does that explain the retail landscape in Mexico? There are supermercados and big box stores here, after all. Oaxaca has a Home Depot, CDMX has an Ikea and multiple Walmarts. What’s the difference?

The difference is, that’s not all they have. While every neighborhood has a supermercado, there’s also a traditional mercado, which is much like a permanent, enclosed farmer’s market. Dozens of produce vendors, dozens of little restaurants, dozens of butchers… Mexican shoppers manage depth every time they shop.

Which explains the lighting district, and chicken district, and snack district (although the snack district can also be explained by the existence of God). While I’ve been baffled by how the lighting district can sustain itself, and how consumers can parse the dizzying array of choices, we’ve been making those distinctions every time we enter a mercado.

One of the mercados in Oaxaca had a hall of grilled meat. There were more than 30 carnicerias in that hall, all selling effectively identical products at exactly the same prices. Yet we always managed to choose. Maybe the meat was a little redder or fresher looking. Maybe the griller seemed more diligent. Maybe we just fucking guessed.

Mexico is a dessert culture, and there’s a huge number of panaderias and ice cream shops. I get ice cream at Santa Clara. Why? Because they’re all over, I stopped there once, and it was really good. Is it better than the ice cream at La Michoacana? I have no idea, because I keep going back to Santa Clara.

And therein, I believe, lies the answer. It doesn’t matter if the ice cream is objectively better at La Michoacana. What matters is that I like the ice cream at Santa Clara. It doesn’t matter if I find the exact specific light fixture of my dreams by visiting all 500+ lighting vendors. What matters is if I found something that fits my needs.

When confronted with what looks like a paralyzing level of choice, you don’t have to find the very best option. You only have to find what you want. And with so many choices, that’s not all that hard to do. The array of choices isn’t as big as it looks, because you can stop whenever you’re satisfied.

I think the reason this looked so weird to us at the outset is because it’s simply not a style of shopping that’s very prevalent in the US any longer. Outside of farmer’s markets, where else do you really see village-style shopping?

Mexico has found a delightful balance, with a smattering of supermercados and big box stores able to coexist peacefully with an older, more traditional style of commerce. Unlike the US, where the spread of those stores has been an extinction-level event for any other form of retail. The only choice we have left to us is between Costco and Sam’s Club.

This is why we left the US for world travel. It’s so easy to think of our culture as the apotheosis of human history, the ultimate expression of whatever it is we’re up to at the moment. It’s only by visiting other places, and staying long enough to notice, that you realize how untrue that is, how very many patterns and methods that have real, tangible value have been trampled to death by our particular approach to unfettered capitalism and the unqualified belief that new is always better than old.

I started confused, but I’m ending up invigorated by what I’ve figured out by tugging at this particular knot. As we continue to travel, each place we visit will have something about how it functions that won’t make sense, on the surface. Teasing out the why underneath those disconnects will be one of the highlights of our adventure.

When this journey ends and we finally return, we’ll come back with a deeper, more nuanced appreciation for the very special ways in which the US is fucked up. Thanks, world!

Weaving is such a deep, ingrained part of the Oaxacan culture that they’ll weave with anything: palm leaves, plastic, wire, wool, thread, slow moving tourists. Anything.

I really wanted to write something culturally significant about Oaxacan weaving: this pattern is Zapotec, that style is from the coast, that type of weaving is from a treadle loom (which the Spaniards gifted, along with dysentery).

I had hoped it would be like our experience in Guatemala. Each highland village has such a specific weaving style that it doesn’t take long to be able to pick out everyone’s home base. Kind of like New Jersey hair. “Oh, you’re Exit 67, aren’t you?”

But it hasn’t been like that here, and I’m not sure why. It may be that the stylistic differences here are more subtle and harder to tease out than in Guatemala. It may be that the drive to modernize traditional forms has blurred what were once clearer lines. And it may be that there’s been more borrowing over the years and the differences aren’t as distinct as they once might have been.

Whatever the reason, I don’t know enough to decode the weaving influences here. And ChatGPT won’t take images as prompts (yet – snapshot in time), so no ghostwriting this post. On the other hand, the Oaxacan weaving is so amazing that not sharing what we’ve seen just because I can’t break it down into a culturally significant taxonomy seems wrong.

What I am smart enough to do (just barely – Dorothy obviously helped) is at least break the weavings down by material. Every example here is just beautiful. Enjoy.

Textiles & Rugs

Palm

Plastic

Wire

With my sister, Nef, coming to visit, Dorothy scheduled a two day class for them in February. I thought of joining them, despite the cost (over $250/person), because I like sharing experiences with Dorothy. I did the woodcut and alebrije classes with her after all, and those were pretty close to only fun for me because we did them together. I would certainly have never done them alone.

Dorothy explained that while the other classes were primarily for amusement, she was taking this class as a practitioner (Dorothy is an experienced dyer/painter from her time as a costumer), and while I was welcome to attend, I would be dead to her.

That didn’t sound like much of a shared experience, especially for the money, so I bowed out. Plus, truthfully, two consecutive five hour days of hardcore science didn’t sound like nearly as much fun as writing. Which is what I did while they scienced. What they did, in addition to all that learning, was take pictures and notes. Which is how this post happened. “As told to…”

Clockwise from top left: Pomegranate rind, indigo, brazilwood, and cochineal. Cochineal comes from Oaxaca and nearby areas, and is pretty much the same whatever its origin. Indigo, on the other hand, comes from many places, and varies based on the source. For example, Oaxacan indigo is bluer than Japanese indigo, which tends towards navy. We made sure to get some of the local indigo before we left Oaxaca.

The wool had already been spun into thread, but Dorothy and Nef had to wrap 18 skeins each to prepare the wool for the different dyes they’d be creating. The pink at the top right is a sample of cochineal dyed cotton.

The mordant is used to prepare the fiber so it will accept dye. Here, the wool is being soaked in a bath so the mordant permeates the fibers. Different mordants are used for different fibers, with plant and animal fibers requiring very different mordants. For the wool, which is an animal fiber, they made a mordant that was 10% of the weight of the wool in alum, 5% of the weight of the wool in Cream of Tartar.

Elsa referred Dorothy and Nef to Maiwa for supplies, but they also have a wealth of detailed technical information on how to use different dyes.

Once the mordant has set, the fiber is ready to dye. The left pot is wild marigold, which creates a golden yellow color. The right pot is dried pomegranate rinds, which creates a green yellow color. These are two of the primary base colors used to create other colors by overdying.

Next up was creating the indigo solution. Indigo is a pigment, not a dye, the difference being that dyes are soluble and pigments aren’t. Some extra work is necessary to get wool to take the indigo.The first step involves…

Oxygen in the indigo solution reduces the pigment saturation, which is why you dip material into the indigo, rather than stirring it, which oxygenates the solution. So a key part of the solution is to use an oxygen reducing agent, such as fructose. That makes sure that the indigo is as saturated as possible. That matters because indigo is an expensive material, and you have to get the most from it.

What better source of fructose than overripe bananas? I suppose commercially produced fructose would be pretty good, because it’s a measurable, known substance. One teaspoon of fructose will deliver exactly the same dose as any other teaspoon of fructose. How much fructose is in a hand of bananas? Why is a raven like a writing desk? Imponderables. But you use what you have, and in this case, that’s bananas.

Limestone is used to create a base environment, which is necessary for the fructose to activate. Because science. The crushed limestone will be added to the indigo vat with the banana fructose & water to create the indigo solution, ready for wool.

Indigo is activated by exposure to air. You don’t leave it in longer to get a deeper color, you dip it multiple times. The wool gets dipped, the excess pigment is squeezed out (so it stays in the pot and is reusable), it’s exposed to air, which activates the color, and then it gets rinsed. It can then be dipped again to deepen the color, or overdyed in a different color to get a completely different result.

Dorothy and Nef also created cochineal and brazilwood dyes, but I think they were blinded by the chemistry by that point. No photos. But here’s the full spectrum of the two days effort, all 18 colors.

After ten hours of grinding and dye vats and whiteboard formulas, Dorothy and Nef were more dazzled than dazed. They were energized, pingponging ideas back and forth on how to put this new knowledge into use. It was a beautiful thing to behold, and I can’t wait to see what they produce.

Early in our time together, Dorothy and I thought it would be swell to tour the entire Mission system in California, starting at Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá and driving up the coast to finish at San Francisco Solano. I can’t recall whether we genuinely planned on visiting all 21 Missions, or how long we’d planned to take. Because the wheels fell off at the very next Mission up the coast, San Luis Rey de Francia.

Two turned out to be plenty. Maybe it’s better now, but back then the historical info at each Mission managed to artlessly gloss over the fact that the Missions were built with slave labor. Which seemed like a significant fact in its own right, but the Happy Natives narrative that was offered in its place was horrific. As if a German World War II memorial had chosen to focus on extolling the economic miracle of the Reich’s industrial output. Nice factory, Volkswagen.

Oaxaca is chock full of stunning Colonial buildings. Sadly, there’s nothing to do but suppress the cognitive dissonance and try to take them at face value. It’s probably easiest to do that at Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, if for no other reason than the way it’s used today. The church is the Church, and has its own crimes to answer for, but the Museo and the Jardín are inspiring examples of how a people can repurpose their painful past to tell their own stories.

Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán

The complex at Santo Domingo de Guzmán is broken up into three parts. The actual building is split between the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán and the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, Santo Domingo. The balance of the grounds is taken up by the Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca.

Built by the Dominicans as a convent, the original construction dates to 1608, although the structure wasn’t completed until 1724, when the construction of Chapel del Rosario began. Today, the Catholic Church still uses Chapel del Rosario to conduct services, while the convent side of the structure houses the Museo.

As you’d expect, this is no Wee Kirk o’ the Heather. It’s a gaudy, extravagant testament to the power of… the other hand. It’s the Liberace of churches, and is spectacular in every sense, both good and bad.

Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, Santo Domingo

The Museo occupies the rest of the structure, and is less gaudy than the Chapel, but only because the bar has been set so high. It’s still plenty fucking Baroque, especially given that it was built for nuns. No vows of poverty and austerity for these nuns, no sir. These are no Little Sisters of the Poor, these here are your Dominican nuns. Your fancy nuns. I’m sure a lovely chocolate got placed on each one’s pillow every night.

But what makes the Museo special isn’t what it was, it’s what it’s become. What had been a convent now houses a museum telling the full story of the Oaxacan peoples, from long before the Spaniards showed up. What had been, in many ways, the hub of an occupying force became an opportunity to celebrate both the rich histories of the peoples the Spaniards were trying to conquer and the efforts of the Oaxaqueños to resist Spanish rule. I can’t tell you how thrilling it was to walk into a colonial building and get treated to a history of the Resistance.

There’s more than that, as there are exhibits focusing on the art and culture of the region. Most notably, there’s an incredible exhibit on the artifacts unearthed from Tomb 7 at Monte Alban, just half a dozen miles west of Oaxaca de Juárez. We didn’t take any pictures, but if we had you’d be able to see this:

By the way, we were unsurprised to learn that famed Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo had his hands all over the Guzmán. He was instrumental in founding the Museo as well as the Jardín. He also founded the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, right across the street from the Guzmán, as well as the Centro de las Artes de San Agustín and Taller Arte Papel Oaxaca, both in Etla. That man got around.

More than that, Toledo understood something that no one else did at the time: the connection between culture and commerce. Oaxaca is a Unesco World Heritage site and a major tourist attraction because of the centrality of traditional culture, not despite it. A hotel and convention center wouldn’t have made that true, but literally everything Toledo touched and influenced supported the indigenous peoples and their traditional art forms in ways that drove economic development for all participants.

It’s not a cookbook that can be repeated everywhere. You need a pretty strong cultural bedrock, like Oaxaca’s, to make it work. But Toledo’s work, and Oaxaca itself, are proof that you don’t have to choose between art and commerce. Done right, you can have both.

Francisco Toledo, thank you.

Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca

As delightful as the Museo is, representing the traditional Oaxacan fuck you to propriety and authority, the Jardín is all that and more. The convent was nationalized in 1859 by Oaxacan hero Benito Juárez when he was President. The structure was turned over to the military for use as barracks, and the open area that became the Jardín, which had originally been the convent’s orchard, was used as their parade grounds.

In the late 1990s, the Mexican government proposed turning the Guzmán into a convention center and luxury hotel, with the grounds slated for a parking lot. In response, Francisco Toledo, concerned about the impact to a historic location, proposed creating a cultural museum and ethnobotanical garden. He garnered enough public support that the government backed down and adopted his plan wholesale. So very on brand for Oaxaca. The Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca opened in 1998.

The key to the Jardín is the Etno of Etnobotánico. It isn’t merely a botanical garden, showing off the native flora. It’s a carefully curated exhibit, showcasing the relationship between the native peoples and the incredibly diverse plant life found in the state. For the most part, plants aren’t there because they’re pretty, they’re there because they have a history of utility and meaning to Oaxaqueños.

The Jardín is also unlike a traditional botanical garden in the sense that you can’t just walk through it. As lovely as it would be to stroll through and maybe have a picnic, that’s not permitted. The potential for damage to the specimens is high, and the experience is meant to be docented and educational. For example, there is no signage anywhere in the Jardín, as they don’t want signs mucking up the view (although they’re discussing QR codes for the future). Which makes it pretty impenetrable without a guide.

Spanish tours run all day long, but there’s a single tour in English every day, from 11:00 – 1:00. They take 25 people on each tour, and not a person more. We know this because we arrived at 10:50 and found they were sold out. We came at 10:30 the next day, to find they were sold out. We were finally able to get in on our third try, by getting there at 10:00, securing our spot, and waiting an hour.

When the tour finally started, it was clear they weren’t fooling around. Our tour guide was one of their PhD researchers. The Jardín is divided into distinct biomes, and he walked us through all of them. There are plants represented from across Oaxaca’s rich pageant: tropical rainforests, tropical dry forests, cloud forests, desert and semi-desert biomes, and Alpine biomes.

As the most recent use of the Jardín’s space was as a military parade ground, there were no plants there when work began. Every specimen in the Jardín was planted as part of the overall design. There are currently examples of over 1,000 species, with the goal being a total of 1,300 species. Which, incredibly, would be only 10% of the plants native to Oaxaca.

All of which is to completely undersell the Jardín’s eye-bleeding beauty. Here are some views from the balconies of the Museo, and one from the grounds.

Maize

The tour itself started where it should have, with maize.

This is no ordinary maize. This is the OG, the abuela, the source. There are over 35 strains of domesticated maize cultivated in Oaxaca, and they all stem from this plant. Cultivars of Granmama have been grown as far back as six to seven thousand years.

The ears are tiny, maybe two inches long, and there’s no cob, just some minuscule corn seeds. Kind of like the inside of a pea. As fertile as she has been in spawning domestic cultivars, Granmama herself doesn’t provide any food.

Agave

Unsurprisingly, agave plants are strongly represented in the Jardín. There are over 200 distinct agave species in Oaxaca, but only about thirty of them are used in making mezcal. The rest are used in construction and textiles.

Kapok (Pochote)

Kapok trees are also important in the history of Oaxaca. Mayans used the kapok, or pochote, fibers in weaving, and worshipped the trees as foundational to their world myths. Our guide shared an origin myth that god had split the tree in two and produced the first peoples. Mayans considered the pochote a world tree, connecting the underworld, middle world, and upper world. It’s distinctive spikes protect it from animals attempting to eat its thin bark.

None of the kapok seeds were in bloom while we were there, but this is what they look like.

It’s still used commercially, primarily as stuffing, but it’s largely been replaced by synthetics. When we were kids, the most common way to have come across kapok was as life jacket filling. But why use a natural product when you can use PVC instead?

Incredibly Useful Plants

Many of Oaxaca’s plants are useful all over the world, and many of those are rainforest plants.

The greenhouse held two of the most useful plants, from a medical and commercial perspective. Unfortunately, the greenhouse can also be a hothouse…

Minus the Instagram Shaving Mirror filter, they look more like this:

That’s better.

The plant on the left is a Vanilla Orchid, and the one on the right is a Cabaza de Negro, or Mexican Yam. The Oaxacan Vanilla Orchid is a wild strain which has been domesticated, and is the primary genus from which commercial vanilla is harvested. It is found throughout Mexico, but our docent claimed it was first cultivated in Oaxaca. He has a PhD and I don’t, so there you go.

The Mexican Yam is even more interesting, and more influential. It contains diosgenin, a steroid that was used as the precursor for the synthesis of progesterone and cortisone. We all owe quite a bit to the humble Mexican Yam.

While Vanilla Orchids and Mexican Yams have had impact all over the world, perhaps no plant has been more influential in Mexico’s history than the Opuntia, or Prickly Pear Cactus.

It’s not the plant itself that’s special, although its edible fruit (called Tuna, which is super confusing at ice cream stalls) is quite a popular snack. Rather, it’s a little parasite called Cochineal that makes Opuntia exceptional.

Left to their own devices, the insects will kill their host, so Opuntia farmers have to wipe them off to preserve their harvest. In a happy accident, the female Cochineal produces Carminic Acid. Which, when crushed, produces the most amazing natural red dye. We got lessons in Cochineal when we visited a weaving studio in Teotitlán del Valle, and again when Dorothy and my sister Nef took a class on natural dye techniques.

Prior to the Spanish Conquest, Aztecs and Mayans used Cochineal both for dying textiles and coloring manuscripts. When the Spanish showed up and discovered Cochineal, they did what colonists do: they exploited the fuck out of it, with only silver beating it as an export commodity. In fact, the Guzmán convent was built with the funds provided by Cochineal export. Thankfully, the conquistadores were immune to irony.

For the statisticians amongst you, it takes five million bugs to extract 32 pounds of carminic acid. These days you’ll find it in food coloring, lipstick, and Campari. Rub some crushed bugs on your lips and drink up!

Remains of the Archaeological Day

The monks who built the Guzmán left behind some of their works, beyond the building itself.

The monks burnt limestone in these kilns to make mortar, and used the mortar to build the Guzmán.

There was also a laundry on premises. It was in a forbidden zone (another reason letting people wander loose is a bad idea), but we were able to get a glimpse.

Soap trees would have been planted nearby, which is what the Jardín has done.

Our guide referred to this as a Pipé or Pipay tree, but I can’t find any information on it. I also can’t recall exactly how soap was extracted from this tree, but my notes indicate that a PhD said it was true, so shut up.

Crazy Fucking Plants

Sure, the Etno part of Etnobotánico is fascinating, rich, and culturally resonant. All the reasons you read this blog. But the truth is there are just acres and acres of insane, otherworldly specimens at the Jardín. I’m always willing to pander to my readers, so please enjoy some Crazy Fucking Plants.

Alebrijes are dream creatures that originated with famed Mexican cartonero (papier-mâché artist) and legend, Pedro Linares. Linares already had an established career as a master cartonero, specializing in large public installations, when he fell ill and hallucinated wild hybrid animals shouting “Alebrijes!” When his fever broke, he set to work. Because when I have a dream, the first thing I do on waking up is try to make it real. So other people can see it, too.

Later, a Oaxacan wood carver named Manuel Jimenez picked up on the idea, and thus was born the Oaxacan tradition of fantastical carved wooden creatures, still known as alebrijes. For some obscure (to us, at least) reason, the village of San Martin Tilcajete, about an hour south of Oaxaca de Juarez, has become the center of Oaxacan alebrije production.

Before we got around to making our alebrijes, all of this background, and even more cultural context, was shared by our teacher. As it happens, none of it was necessary. We own two Pedro Linares pieces, a fact that surprised the staff at Tlayudona. Our very first folk art purchase was years ago at a shop in Manhattan, the day after a pretty serious bender. We saw this crazy imaginary creature, looked at each other and said, “Do you see that, too? I guess we’d better take it home.”

We named him Santa Tequila, the Patron Saint of Roaring Hangovers, and he has been with us ever since. More importantly, he set us on a lifelong journey of exploring art from all over the world. In some way, I suppose, he planted the seed for our current adventure.

He is, obviously, socked away in storage, and this blown up, blown out picture is the only one I could find of him.

These last two are also from our 2019 trip. They represent the work of Jorge Mendez, scion of a well established family of alebrije makers, whose commitment to adding a modern gloss to the traditional art form caught our eye. We came within a whisker of purchasing the deer, but couldn’t quite believe that it would arrive unbroken, despite assurances. Plus, it was hella expensive. That’s how we wound up with the porcupine, which was from a different workshop.

The class itself was most entertaining. It had a low-key, let’s-just-have-fun vibe that mostly got me over the tension I feel whenever I have to do something even vaguely artistic. Dorothy can imagine an outcome or effect and her hands will make it happen. I have trouble with the imagining part from get go, and I have the eye/hand coordination of a man twice my age. I tend to avoid activities like this, to keep my fragile self esteem intact, but on this adventure I’m trying to embrace the moment. Even if that moment involves making something so primitive, well, it just had to be intentional, right?

They had little pre-carved animals to choose from. Dorothy chose a fox and I chose a rooster. I chose the rooster because it was the largest option. On the one hand, more to paint. On the other, no tight little spaces that required fine detail. My style of ham-fisted sloppy needs room to breathe.

The teacher and staff were delightful, and I’m sure that wasn’t enhanced in any way by the mezcal they kept pouring. I’ll go on record here that the marijuana-infused mezcal had nothing to do with the warm feelings that suffused me, almost as if I was lit from inside.

Fox and Rooster (curiously, best of friends) in hand, we bade our teachers goodbye. But on returning home with our new companions, Dorothy decided that she wanted another go at it. She’d felt constrained by the time limitations (whereas I was just grateful it had ended), and wanted to repaint her fox with more time for both thinking and doing. I went along, not because I believed that what I needed was more time to nail my vision, but because I didn’t think I could make it any worse by starting over.

Et voilà! Dorothy has, as usual, rescued me.

Our favorite example of this in Oaxacan pottery is the work of Mateo Hernández and his studio, Alfarería Rufi. We first came across his work on our visit to Oaxaca in 2019. Alfarería Rufi had a stall in the Christmas artisan’s popup, and we came home with four beautiful tumblers that became an everyday part of our lives. They were back at the same popup this Christmas and I picked up a shot glass. What better way to enjoy Mezcal than in a Oaxacan shot glass?

As it turns out, their studio is just 10 minutes north of Oaxaca de Juarez, in Santa Rosa. We’d only seen bits and pieces of the work, in the Christmas popups and in scattered shops around town, and were looking forward to seeing the full spectrum of shapes and colors, so we arranged a tour. We have an endless appetite for factory and production tours. I’d tour a toilet seat factory. I love seeing how things are made.

What surprised us on the tour was the complexity of their process. The pieces are beautiful, but we didn’t understand that they’re beautiful because they’re hard. Mateo has been perfecting his craft for over fifty years, and the depth of his knowledge is clearly what allows these pieces to exist at all. It’s especially clear in the shops in town, as several other potters have tried to copy his two-color signature look without replicating his technique. The results are, frankly, crude in comparison.

It starts, as it should, with the clay, which is locally sourced from their neighborhood. Santa Rosa is hard by Santa María Atzompa, which is famous for the red clay used for their traditional green pottery.

Each piece is hand thrown on a wheel by a potter trained by Mateo personally. The potter in the pictures below has been there two years to work up to cups. The young lady who guided us through the studio (until Mateo joined us to add his perspective) had only been there a year, so she was only trained for plates, a much simpler shape.

The scraps you see around the wheel below all get recycled, by the way, as do any pieces that aren’t quite up to snuff. Those get tossed into buckets of water to be slaked (melted) back into clay and reworked. They pride themselves on being completely sustainable.

The next step is air drying. Each piece sits on an open air shelf to cure in preparation for the first application of pigment, after which it will be buffed and fired.

The next part is where the magic happens. Each piece has a lead-free enamel glaze carefully painted on the inside and is fired a second time. The pigment on the outside kisses the lip of each piece with the high gloss porcelainized enamel on the interior. The combination of the contrast in textures and colors on inside and outside, created by the double firing process and the precise application of the interior glaze, is what gives Mateo’s work its distinctive look.

But our pottery adventures, or misadventures, weren’t over after our tour of Alfarería Rufi. We’d been to a shop in town, Andares del Arte Popular, which features art that perfectly represents the intersection of tradition and innovation that’s our sweet spot. Honestly, we could have closed our eyes and randomly picked anything there and left winners. Of course they carried work from Alfarería Rufi, but what I bought was a tiny, delicate mezcal cup with an inside glaze that looks like fireworks. Not unlike the effect of the mezcal itself.

We’d failed to ask where the cup had come from, but we were able to identify the maker by searching the Andares site: Taller Artesanal Pitao Copycha, in Santa María Atzompa.

This would not be our first visit to Santa María Atzompa. We’d found a list of all of the market days for the villages around Oaxaca, and Santa María Atzompa’s was the day after our visit to Hierve el Agua, when we still had the car. As it turns out, either our intel was incorrect or we could never locate the central mercado. Despite our failure, we decided to give Atzompa one more chance.

Finding Pitao Copycha wasn’t hard from the GPS perspective. But from the common sense perspective, we couldn’t possibly have been going the right way. Our taxi took us up into the hills, onto multiple dirt roads, and far away from anything that looked like commerce. We finally turned a dirt road corner and beheld a workroom whose exterior was heavily decorated with pottery, with a sign that identified it as Pitao Copycha. We’d found it!

Given that we were far away from anything, we asked our taxi to wait while we toured the studio and shopped. When we entered we found a space crowded with both work and workers. There were multiple rooms with shelves full of pottery, and at least a dozen people working on different pieces at long, common tables.

What we didn’t find was anything that looked even vaguely like my mezcal cup. The shapes were less refined and the glazes less sparkly and more natural. There was nothing wrong with it, per se, but we couldn’t figure out how the studio that made my cup had nothing like it in their workroom.

We left after a few minutes, which I’m sure baffled them. No one walks in there by accident. I doubt honestly that many people show up at all. So to go to the trouble to get there and then just walk out a few minutes after arriving must have seemed… like typically crazy gringo behavior.

We made it back home safely, and went back to Andares to ask where the cup had come from. Not Pitao Copycha, as it turns out. We’d gotten it wrong. Instead it was made by a potter named Isabel Refugio, a member of the famous Martínez Alarzón family of craftsmen.

In Santa María Atzompa.

But we’d vowed never to return to Atzompa. The city clearly didn’t care for us. We wouldn’t risk a third failure.

But we were able to take a virtual tour of their studio, thanks to the Nomad Cook Youtube channel. Here you go.

Or just visit Hierve el Agua (the water boils, in Spanish), located about two hours east of Oaxaca de Juárez. No need to imagine.

A fresh water spring courses through the marble-lined interior of the mountain, leaching minerals on its way to the open air. As the mineral-rich water runs down the mountain side, it leaves behind calcium carbonate and other deposits, which, over thousands of years, have slowly built up into spectacular stone waterfalls, cascading hundreds of feet to the valley floor below.

There are two primary falls: the Cascada Chica and the Cascada Grande. The picture at the top of this post is of Grande, taken from Chica. You can hike over to the top of Grande, which is supposed to be quite the view. And quite the hike. I’m not prone to scraping images off the internet, but we didn’t take the hike to Grande. If we had taken that hike, this is what Chica looks like from Grande.

But let’s back up and start at the beginning.

Mezcal

We’d visited Hierve el Agua on our previous Oaxaca trip in 2019, right before lockdown. We knew two things: that the site itself was magical, and that the best mezcal we’ve ever had came from a roadside mezcalero on the way. With my sister, Nef, coming for a visit, it seemed like a return trip would kill two birds and several livers.

We’d done the full taste testing in 2019, so I knew to zero in on the tepextate. The tepextate agave takes the longest to mature of all the agaves, as long as 35 years before it can be harvested. The result is a complex, funky, smoky miracle that blossoms on the tongue for what seems like eternity. As if bottles of Glenfiddich and Rum Fire had cheated on their spouses and kept the baby.

We picked up four liters (some is heading back to the States as gifts) at $15 each (up from $11/liter in 2019) and hit the road for the last leg to Hierve el Agua. The ostensible purpose of the trip, after all.

The Vista

Hierve al Agua is basically cliffs (Grande and Chica) rising up from the valley floor. But the entire area is pretty much cliffs rising above the valley floor, just without the calcium carbonate. Once you’re up at cliff height, the panoramic view is wondrous.

The Living Mountain

The process by which the stone waterfalls were created is still going on. Water spills out of the rock face and into pools before making its way down the mountain, creating crazy patterns and geometric shapes, somehow organic and structured at the same time.

Pools

There are natural spots at the top of Chica that collect water, but there are also a couple of pools created specifically for swimming that fill with the mineral rich water as it tumbles off the mountain. On a hot day, which is most of them, families come to Hierve el Agua for the swimming.

Hierve el Agua feels timeless, not in the sense of being unchanging, but in the sense that its existence proves our inability to grasp the concept of time. Yet its future is being built moment by moment, molecule by molecule, which can somehow be witnessed as it’s occurring. You stand with one foot in real time and one foot in geological time, straddling eons.

A Completely Magical Day

Somehow the day continued to deliver. After getting back to Oaxaca de Juárez, we enjoyed what we all agreed was one of the finest meals of our lives at Casa Oaxaca, followed by winding down with shots of the day’s tepextate, providing a smoky, ethereal offramp to a perfect day.

The Road Goes On Forever And The Party Never Ends

As it happens, the next day was more thematically linked to Hierve el Agua than we’d planned or imagined. We’d rented a car to make the Hierve el Agua trek (mostly because I knew a tour or bus wouldn’t stop at the mezcalero) and kept it for an extra day.

We spent that day around the various iterations of Etla just 30 minutes north of Oaxaca de Juarez. There’s San Agustin Etla, Villa de Etla, San Miguel Etla, and more. We had three stops in mind: Taller Arte Papel Oaxaca, which makes both custom papers and crazy things out of paper that shouldn’t be possible (and which we just discovered weeks after going had also been founded by Francisco Toledo); El Castillo de los Duendes, a multi-story castle filled with installations of, and I swear I’m not making this up, Keebler elves and sexy fairies, which unsurprisingly warrants its own post; and Centro de las Artes de San Agustín.

Centro is housed in an abandoned factory built in 1883. It was acquired by famed Mexican artist Francisco Toledo in 2000, and opened to the public in 2006. The facility, with its renovated exhibition spaces, myriad educational programs, and beautiful grounds, was meant to amplify the work Toledo had done in establishing Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca in Oaxaca de Juárez.

We had no idea what was currently on exhibit. We went for no reason more profound than that it was supposed to be a beautiful space. One of the exhibits was a collaboration featuring the work of Macrina Mateo, a potter famous for honoring the tradition of red clay pottery from her village of San Marcos Tlapazola while modernizing the shapes and forms. Her collaboration with Gustavo Perez featured daring biomorphic forms that were somehow simultaneously futuristic and grounded in tradition.

The Main Attraction

As amazing as the pottery was, the main exhibition hall was the treat. It was El poeta y el artista: Seamus Heaney & Jan Hendrix en Yagul. Francisco Toledo had brought Heaney to Oaxaca and introduced him to Hendrix, a Dutch artist. Hendrix had been deeply influenced by visits to Yagul, a Zapotec archaeological site, and Hierve el Agua, nearby, and took Heaney there to share the experience.

The result was the collaboration on display: The Poet and the Artist. We had marinated in Hierve el Agua just the day before, and now, on the completely opposite side of Oaxaca de Juarez, we had stumbled on a collaboration between artists of the first rank, driven by the same experience, representing where we’d just been. Minds utterly blown by the sincronicidad.

The works themselves were truly epic. Each weaving was over eight feet tall and twenty feet wide, and there were perhaps ten of them total. The exhibition space was similarly grand, and completely up to the task of presenting the pieces at their best.

What an amazing two day stretch of filling our heads with wonder. Clearly, not a sustainable pace. Some downtime has been earned.

First, there is shockingly little factual information about El Castillo available. How a castle built on a major street in a town just 30 minutes from Oaxaca can be shrouded in mystery is… a mystery. It didn’t just appear. Maybe no one who’s written about it wants to spoil the effect with facts, and I can respect that. But the lack of information is kind of shocking.

Second, words can’t truly do justice to the experience. It’s like if Henry Darger had been a general contractor and you could tour the results. Or what the dictionary would have as a definition of WTF. Like our experience at Hierve de Agua the previous day, it was clear, standing inside El Castillo, that we were in one of the world’s genuinely unique sites.

Even getting in was special. The gate was padlocked, and there was a sign with the number to call for entrance. We called, and someone came right out to let us in and then lock back up. So we had the place to ourselves and a one-on-one docent. At 50 pesos each to get in (about $2.50), we most certainly got our money’s worth.

It’s hard to know where to start, because there is just so much weird at work. First off, the primary translation of duende is goblin, but duende can also be translated as leprechaun, which is clearly correct. If nothing else, the repeating Pots Of Gold motif is a dead giveaway. But they’re leprechauns with a pretty specific and unambiguous Keebler elf look. There is no mention of this anywhere online. Literally no one who’s written about El Castillo has pointed out that its inhabitants are Keebler elf knockoffs. Mindboggling.

Dorothy suggested that maybe El Castillo came first, and the Keebler elves were based on the El Castillo leprechauns, but I don’t think so. The Keebler elves debuted in 1968, and while there’s no official date of construction that I can find, our docent said El Castillo was 50 years old. So, elves before leprechauns. As the prophecy foretold…

Then there’s the whole psychosexual drama with the leprechauns and the fairies. And the pig and the gnome. Oh, sweet Jesus, the pig and the gnome. Truly, words are inadequate to the task. Let’s just take a look.

Outside

The Prince & Princess

Here’s the meat of the backstory for Il Castillo. There’s Prince Hilario and his one true love, Princess Juanita. Truthfully that’s all we were able to take away. But somehow the entire installation orbits around the two of them and their struggle. Which is real. I guess.

Inside

Mushrooms Everwhere

Sexy Leprechauns & Fairies

These images speak for themselves. Because no one else will.

Yo Soy… GADU?

The first banners seem to say “I am a Mason.” The second banner says GADU, with another Masonic symbol. GADU stands for “Gran arquitecta del universo,” which is the Spanish translation of the Masonic conception of god, the Great Architect of the Universe. So the builder was both a wack job and a Mason. I’m sure the two halves of that Venn diagram barely touch.

The Banquet Hall

There is a banquet hall, because of course there is. I want to get married again, just to be able to rent the hall. I’d invite you all, of course.

Under Construction

There are still a few spots that were framed out for the concrete pour and never completed. Obviously left behind whenever the mothership came back to pick up the builder. But they’re an interesting view of the process.

So… sure.

How hard can it be to write about food? Eat, take pretty pictures, write a few words about how delicious it is, lather, rinse, repeat.

It turns out, at least for me, that it’s hard to talk about food divorced from the cultural context in which that food is produced and consumed. It may be easier to ignore this in other places, but Oaxaca forces you to acknowledge context.

The state of Oaxaca has an incredible diversity in climate and biome, driving a wider range of crops than would be expected based on size alone. That pairs with an incredible cultural diversity. It’s estimated than more than 50% of all of Mexico’s population that speaks indigenous languages is in Oaxaca state, representing 16 officially recognized indigenous peoples. Unsurprisingly, that agricultural and cultural diversity makes for some truly outstanding, and very specific, cuisine. Oaxacan food is positively marinated in terroir.

Oaxaca’s mercados, especially Central de Abasto, offer a dizzying range of locally grown produce and ingredients specific to the region, from moles to chiles, spices, and vegetables. That makes for great homecooked meals. At the other end of the spectrum, Oaxaca boasts world class restaurants with chefs devoted to honoring tradition while pushing the boundaries, such as Criollo and Origen. In between is a thick stew of street food and more modest sit down and takeout restaurants. As eating towns go, Manhattan has more diversity, but Oaxaca is every bit as dense. And that’s saying something.

So there’s the context in which Oaxacan food is produced. The context in which it’s consumed, though, has much to do with the consumer. Like us, for example. Our relationship to la cocina tipica Oaxaqueña is by definition different than a local’s.

Curiously, the context that’s been most thoroughly deconstructed for us in Oaxaca is that of the United States. Sometimes you have to step outside your environment to see it clearly. We expected this adventure to teach us about the places we haven’t been, not the place we came from. Go figure.

Diversity and Monocultures

We all talk about the value of diversity, but I don’t know how much we think about how that diversity manifests itself in our day to day lives. OK, I haven’t. I’m sure you’re all much better people than I am.

Honestly, I’d never even thought to define the value of diversity in concrete terms until we came to Oaxaca. It was an almost entirely abstract value. Diversity good. Monoculture bad. What’s true for your yard is true for your community.

But Oaxaca is not a diverse environment, at least not in the sense that we tend to use the term. Yes, it has its 16 discrete indigenous populations, and each of those peoples has contributed something specific to the Oaxacan culture at large. Given enough time and knowledge, you could decode the contributions to cuisine and art back to the peoples who contributed those ingredients. This part is Zapotec, this part Mixtec, this part Mazateco…

But as an outsider, Oaxaca reads like a monoculture. Different flavors, in both food and art, may bubble up and provide a distinctive top note traceable to a specific group, but the cultural stew itself has become its own specific mélange.

Part of this has to do with the unique physical structure of the state of Oaxaca. Much of it is rugged terrain (only 9% of the land is arable), leading to isolated communities. That isolation made it harder for the Spanish to consolidate top down control, letting the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca maintain much more of their cultural identity than other parts of Mexico were able to under Spanish rule. Over time, these separate strands have been woven together into a tapestry that is distinctly Oaxacan.

I know there’s a ton of nuance here that I’m not just glossing over, but am actually incapable of seeing. But my point here isn’t actually about Oaxaca. OK, maybe it’s a little about Oaxaca. While we can celebrate the diversity that the region’s indigenous peoples have brought to the local culture, there isn’t a lot of diversity here across racial and geographic dimensions.

Case in point, a local chain called Tlayudas el Negro. Their logo is so appalling, even I won’t share it. Google it if you must, but that’s on you. I wondered how they could possibly get away with something so blatantly racist, and then realized that in the three months we’ve been here I’ve seen precisely two Black people. And they were both clearly tourists.

Which takes us back to the US, and to the dimensions of diversity that we’ve taken for granted, because they’re such an ingrained part of the environment. Even in a podunk little town like St. Louis (which we love, while recognizing that it lacks the richness of a New York or Chicago), you can walk down a street and see a Jamaican restaurant next to a Brazilian restaurant, next to an Ethiopian restaurant, next to a Greek restaurant, next to a Thai restaurant, next to a Bosnian restaurant, next to… the rest of the UN.

If it sounds like what we miss is international dining, that’s not wrong, and it’s what led to this topic. But it’s more than just the food. Because that Thai restaurant is run by Thai people who live in the community. As are the Greek, Jamaican, Brazilian, Bosnian, and Ethiopian restaurants, and all the others. Every American city is flavored and enriched by the transplants who’ve moved there.

And we didn’t just benefit from those expats when we went out to dinner. When we had a shop on Cherokee Street in St. Louis, members of those communities walked through our doors and were customers, bringing us their own particular perspective on what dressing well meant. We could hold very still and filter feed, and the whole world came to us.

That’s so much the norm, in every city we’ve lived in, that it seems unremarkable. But it’s not. It may seem like wallpaper, but having that wallpaper stripped away has made us super conscious of its absence, and the ridiculous value of its presence.

It’s hard to pick a favorite Zora Neale Hurston quote, but one that’s stuck with me over the years is, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” We’re all defined, in many ways, by contrasts. For all that much of this adventure is about fleeing the US and some of its less pleasant aspects, being in Oaxaca has made me feel more American than I thought possible.

But you came here for food pictures.

Fine Dining

Casa Oaxaca

To cap off our day at Hierve el Agua, we decided to treat ourselves to a fine dining experience. Casa Oaxaca had come highly recommended, but we had no idea what was in store for us. This was not merely the best meal we’ve had in Oaxaca, we all agreed that it was one of the best meals we’ve had in our lives. For real.

We were so full after two appetizers each that we couldn’t do dessert. But after what they did with the food, we have to go back and see how they create magic with sugar.

Tierra del Sol

Our anniversary dinner on December 17th was derailed by poor planning, so we made up for it, in style, on the 19th at Tierra del Sol. The rooftop terrace was beautiful, and the food was amazing. It didn’t hurt that the bill, including two delicious cocktails and tip, came to $58.

Terraza Istmo

The rooftop restaurant/bar is a feature of Oaxacan dining, and Terraza Istmo’s is lovely. Nothing better on a warm evening than dinner and drinks al fresco. Terrazzo Istmo did not disappoint.

Boulenc

Boulenc is both a bakery and a cafe. There are a ton of bakeries in Oaxaca, but the local style of bread is really… white. It may look like a crunchy baguette, but it’s just a different shape of white bread. Boulenc makes a beautiful multigrain loaf, traditional sourdough baguettes, and really excellent pastries. Their sister shop next door, Suculenta, also specializes in non-local foods. They offer Greek yogurt, crunchy peanut butter (with nothing but peanuts), mango jams, bresaola, and all manner of delicacies. It’s an islet of other in a sea of tipico.

Boulenc’s cafe also specializes in non-Oaxacan cuisine. I’ve never really grasped the concept of comfort food before, but I ordered a ribeye cheeseburger and Dorothy had lasagne. It was yet another lovely rooftop setting, and food that genuinely comforted.

Zandunga

I just love saying Zandunga. It sounds like one of those mystical board games that captures unsuspecting children in kid movies. Truthfully, we ate there because of the name. For the same reason we make a cocktail called the Chupacabra.

As it happens, it’s a lovely courtyard restaurant serving up delicious takes on classic cocina tipica. That’s shrimp ceviche on the left, and a mixed platter that we shared on the right. Tamales, empanadas, garnachas, molotes… Every one a treat.

Oaxaca Te Amo

We’d sought out most of the restaurants above based on articles and reviews, but we just wandered into Oaxaca Te Amo because we were hungry and it looked quiet. The food here was beautifully plated and subtle, and very much a delicious surprise.

Street Food

If we didn’t have to occasionally sit down to eat someplace other than a curb or planter, I might only eat street food here. It’s axiomatic that in most places the street food is great (not looking at you, Sabrett), and we’re just at the beginning of the journey… But Jesus the street food in Oaxaca is amazing. I’m sure I’ll eat these words, happily, but it’s going to be hard to top.

Hamburguesas

The street cart hamburguesas are so amazing, and so particular, they require their own section. I’ll just come out and say it: best hamburgers I’ve ever had. They have to be. They have everything. We ordered them con todo, but without the hot dog. Curiously, the todo includes a hot dog. Truthfully, better without. Otherwise, perfection. Come see one built, a layer at a time on the grill.

Elotes & Esquites

Elotes and esquites also warrant their own place of honor in the street food pantheon. Elotes are ears of corn grilled and slathered in Cotija cheese or queso fresco, mayonesa, chile, and lime. Esquites are pretty much the same, except the corn has been removed from the cob and it’s all mixed together and served in a cup. Which is why it’s also known as elote en vaso. Or, as they were referred to more simply on Cherokee Street, our St. Louis Mexican neighborhood, vaso elote. Extra toppings can include various salsas and spices, as well as all the chapulines you can eat. Which in our case is none. My favorite sentence in Spanish? “Sin chapulines, por favor.”

Like hamburguesas and tlayuda, elotes y esquites are quintessential Oaxacan street food. And orders of magnitude better than a simple recitation of their ingredients makes them sound.

Tlayudas

Rounding out the street food trifecta is the humble Tlayuda. Reduced to its component parts, a tlayuda is just a Oaxacan tostada. It’s an exceptionally large tortilla, crisped on a traditional comal, a large flat griddle. Toppings vary, but the common denominators are asiento (settled pork fat), refried beans, quesillo (Oaxacan string cheese), and lettuce. You can add your meat of choice, which for us is usually tasajo (flank or skirt steak that’s pounded super thin and then cured in salt before grilling) or the local chorizo, which is spectacular. Sometimes served flat, sometimes folded, it is so much more than a mere tostada.

Foreign Food

A few years back we spent the holiday season in Cajun country. We went to this back country bayou roadhouse for New Years, having been tipped by a local that the music would be hopping. We went expecting a killer Cajun band, and found a Top 40 cover band instead. They do the zydeco every day. On a special occasion, they want something different.

The same holds true in Oaxaca. When they’re not in the mood for the usual, they love their pizza, fried chicken, and Chinese food.

Pizza

When we lived on the Upper East Side in New York there was a Mexican restaurant on the corner. We used to joke that the kitchen was full of Chinese cooks and photographs of Mexican food, because the food came out plated to perfection and tasting nothing at all like Mexican food. If you could get over your mouth expecting it to taste like it looked, it was fine. It just wasn’t Mexican food in any sense but visually.

And so it is with Oaxacan pizza (or, for that matter, St. Louis pizza). Pizza seems to be Oaxaca’s most popular food that isn’t traditional cocina, and it certainly looks the part. But it isn’t pizza.

There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m a thin crust guy, and this is a little Chicago-ier than I like it, but that’s just a personal preference. And the ingredients can be interesting, although I’d never have picked hot dog as a pizza topping. But the biggest gap is that there’s no tomato sauce. It’s basically an open-faced toasted flatbread sandwich. There’s an array of salsas available to squirt on top, which definitely makes for a better open-faced toasted flatbread sandwich. Just so long as you don’t expect it to taste like pizza just because it looks like pizza.

Pollo Kentucky

The Central de Abasto mercado near us has several vendors that make the most amazing roasted chicken. We had a craving the other day but didn’t feel like braving the Abasto, so we tried the Pollos Broaster a few blocks away, promising Pollo Kentucky. Roasted, broasted… How different could they be?

So. The pizza, kind of meh. We had takeout Chinese on Christmas Day (Tradition!) that was perfectly plausible. But the Pollos Kentucky? We’ve finally had our first (and likely only) actually bad meal here. Gray is not a food color and grease is not a flavor. Only look at the last picture in this slideshow if you have a strong stomach. Or have made a New Year’s resolution to never eat fried chicken again.

Here’s a perfect example. This is a large park called El Llano. It looks very green on the map, and it’s one of the larger parks in the city. But it’s so paved that it supports this business model, which wouldn’t make sense in a park that was mostly park.

Our visit to Panteón General, the local cemetery, was another attempt to spend some time in a green space, but that didn’t work out quite as planned. American cemeteries often feel like parks with some bonus dead people, but Panteón General was dead people with some bonus trees.

Our search for green continued, and led us to Parque Ciudad de las Canteras (Park of the City of Quarries), where we finally hit pay dirt. True to its name, it had been an abandoned quarry before being turned into a park. In Spanish times Oaxaca was known as Verde Antequera for the distinctive green stones that were used to build the colonial structures, which came from here. You can still see that green stone showing through the walls of the quarry.

In addition to the lakes that fill the quarry, there are picnic and exercise areas (the charmingly named Bosque del Deporte: The Forest of Sport), a merry-go-round, an open air library, and an amazing performance space, Muñoz Cota, carved out of the stone.

The park seems to be under constant development, so there were areas we couldn’t access on our visit, but what was available was beautiful and serene. We finally got the park experience we were craving, in a locale that wasn’t just lovely, but also represented a particular slice of Oaxacan history.