Vast In Scale
Mexico City has a lot going on visually, but not necessarily in the same way as Oaxaca. Oaxaca’s culture fells like it’s happening on the street and you just get to walk through it. CDMX,…
Museo Anahuacalli
I thought I was done writing about Mexico City, and then we squoze in one more epic experience worth sharing. Museo Anahuacalli is also known as the Diego Rivera Museum. Or one of them. That designation…
Big Box, Small Box
I found the retail landscape in Oaxaca confounding. At its core, my confusion was about the apparent mismatch between supply and demand. There were so many shops and so much merchandise, and so much of…
Palacio de Bellas Artes
As I mentioned in the post on landing in Mexico City, the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes is a great hulking Oreo of a building, with a crunchy Art Nouveau exterior and creamy Art…
The Ghost Of Xochimilco Past
When I was 13, my parents took me out of school for a year to traverse North America in a travel trailer. My father had had a health scare, so to reduce the stress level…
Landing in Mexico City
Boy, is Mexico City (CDMX) not Oaxaca, in a whiplash-inducing sort of way. In fact, CDMX has more in common with New York City than it does with Oaxaca. It’s as if Jackson Heights was…
Oaxacan Weaving
Weaving is one of the oldest and richest of the Oaxacan traditions. They’ve been weaving for over 2,000 years just in the village of Teotitlán del Valle, which we visited for a tour of a…
Curl Up & Dye
One of the lovely, and unexpected, side effects of visiting Fe y Lola‘s rug weaving workshop in Teotitlán del Valle was meeting Elsa, another family member. Like Omar, who conducted our tour, Elsa is devoted…
Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán
I’ll confess to a fraught relationship with colonial architecture. On the one hand, there are plenty of breathtaking, soaring monuments to… the other hand. Early in our time together, Dorothy and I thought it would…
Making Alebrijes
After our mostly successful foray into making woodcuts, we thought we’d try our hand at making another of the classic Oaxacan arts, alebrijes. We chose a class at Tlayudona, a local business that specializes in…