Oaxaca!

For the past four days, we have been traveling around.  We left on Thursday (Feb 16) and drove up into the mountains to a town called San Jose del Pacifico.  The mountains were gorgeous - big pines, and we felt like we were in the pacific northwest.  We spent the night at a place with little cabins.  The cabin had a fireplace and we needed it - be9ing that far up it was cold!  Luckily we thought far enough ahead and did bring sweaters - being too cold is something I have not worried about in ages.  The little town was interesting and it's claim to fame was mushrooms.  Not just any mushrooms, though, butmagic mushrooms.  We even met this guy running a store who guided people though trips on muchroom.  It involved sweat lodge type stuff and special cleansing teas and things like that.  It was not mushroom season though - that begins in July.  So no trips for us this time around!

Oaxaca is an incredible city.  I could go on forever.  The only bummer note onthis trip is that we lost our camera somewhere in a market - must have set it down while looking at something - and we couldn't find it again.  So our friends have agreed to share the pictures they took, and I will post them when we get them.  Mike wanted a new, better camera anyway, so this is a good excuse to get one.

The art down here is unimaginable.  They specialize in textiles and carvings, as well as this pottery called Barra Negra.  We got some examples of everything we could - of course the problem is where do we put anything on a boat?  We started thinking we needed a house as a reposetory for all the wonderful things down here.  The architecture is all Spanish Colonial, and there is a church just as ornate as the finest cathedrals in Europe.  We saw a wedding that began with a parade down the main street with dancers and huge puppets on sticks representing the bride and groom.  The women dancers wore colorful full skirts and blouses with long ribbons braided into their hair, and the male dancers were wearing sort of clown-y looking costumes with big hats and lots of streamers.  The parade was led by a guy setting off expolsive fireworks.  At the end of the parade came the bride and her father, then all the wedding guests. 

We also went to a museum that held antiquities that were removed from a ruins called Monte Alban, located here.  Again, it was incredible to see what these people were doing over1500 years BCE.  There was intricate metelwork, pottery, and stonework, including carvings of jade and quartz crystal.  Both of those are extremely hard to work with stones, and the fact that they were done with stonetools is further evidence this was an extremely advanced society.  It is a Zapotec ruin, and the Zapotecs were never really "conquered" by anyone, even Cortes or the Aztecs.  They have continued to flex their muscles even into the current day. 

Today we are going to spend some more time wandering around the city, and I plan to hit some markets and see what I find that I can't live without.  That shouldn't be too difficult here!

"What, me worry?"  Alfred E. Newman