An Old Friend Visits
My friend Barbara and I hitch-hiked Europe the summer of 1965. Then I didn’t see her for thirty years. Then I found her on google about ten years ago…living 30 minutes from my house in Oregon. She has been here four days.
Today she, Mica, the kids and I drove to the Tlacalula market to pick up some hippy headbands for Charly to sell in Canada. Barbara had her first chivo (goat) barbecoa con consumme which she loved. The goat is cooked underground under hot rocks overnight.
Walked by the colorful indigenous vendors from all over the mountains who come down on sundays for the market, bought some more alebrijes, surveyed the live pavo (turkeys) lying on the ground with feet tied together and picked up some fruit and flores (flowers.) It was hot so we dragged ourselves back to the car early in the afternoon to take off for Huayapam where we ate again…delicious caldo de res, (beef bone soup) that Bardo had waiting for us. A man that Bardo sells coffee to was there…owns a coffee finca (farm) in Pluma Hildalgo, south of here. Pluma Hildalgo is considered the primo coffee of Mexico. Bardo’s nephew was there too…from Teotitlan del Camino. Then a mescal vendor from Miahuatlan came by with plastic barrels of pechuga (chicken breast) mescal. We bought five liters to fill Bardo’s mescal barrel.
Thursday we had Juevos Oaxaqueno con coloradito sauce for desayuno (breakfast) at Isabel’s Comida Corrida, explored the Benito Juarez market where Barb had her first tejate (drink), walked through the cathedral and then up to Santo Domingo church where entire gold interiors blew Barbara away…that’s the colonial Spanish for you…while the pobres live without water, sanitation and decent streets…and back down to the zocalo. Went back to Benito Juarez for chili rellenos and tlayudas. Then back to a zocalo cafe where I bought a table runner from one of my favorite sweet vendors…Effemia. Of course the raboso vendor, Jorge, came by for a few laughs…and the horrid saxaphone player…and the even more horrid guy who lip-synchs to opera music.
Friday we ate the best pork tacos in the world at the small local crowded Conzatti Market where I found a patch and cd for the Mexican band, Zoe, so naturally I bought both…now that my nickname is Zoe. Then up to the tranquilo Pachote Market to visit with my Swiss friend Willy over a cup of coffee…bought dumplings and Italian pesto sauce from a Korean vendor, homemade sausage and saurkraut from a German expat vendor and walked back down to the zocalo. Then we met Bardo at the apartment and drove out to Pueblo Nuevo so I could take some photos and video of some weavers that Bardo is working with on a project. I bought a lovely bedspread that had “Remember Oaxaca” woven in the middle.
Yesterday we sat in a zocalo cafe from noon to midnight talking with various lunatic expats…Max who drank about 20 cervesas (beers) and amazingly was still coherent at the end of the evening, Alan who sold me the latest copy of his glossy expat magazine and Jason who bought us roses and tiny sweet smelling gardenias that remind me of San Francisco in the old days. Great calendas (fancifully dressed dancers on stilts) and the wedding party paraded through on it’s way to a boda (wedding), a marimba band, the ubiquitous Peruvian flute players…and the state band…sometimes all at once. We definitely need a down day…but tomorrow we go to the Monte Alban ruins.
So far the drivers are blowing Barbara away and she says she feels like she’s been in Mexico a year already!
Tags: Mexico, Oaxaca
Zoe
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