Random Descriptions of My Travel Adventures

Nothing of great importance to mention at the moment, actually I just forgot my notebook and therefore can’t complete an entry of cultural substance so I will engage in some toilet humor, literally. Our last night in Puerto Escondido was considerably more mellow than the first, however it lingered with me long after I had left the coastal town. We dined at a seaside cafe/restaurant on Sunday evening and I decided to order shrimp. The little voice in the back of my head, or actually the voice in my stomach, was protesting this decision but I decided to dive in anyway! Well, the next morning I was diving to the restroom because the camarones had come back to haunt me. This would have been incovenient no matter where I was in Mexico, or the United States for that matter, but Monday morning was our scheduled departure and I would have to sit in a van for 5-7 hours on an extremely windy road. Windy does not in fact do this road justice. Highway 131 from the coast of Oaxaca to Oaxaca City ...

I'm in Puerto Escondido for the weekend hanging out on the beach. This is a great little surfing town on the Pacific with monster waves (had to use a little surfing lingo) and surfers from all over the world. They were recently hit with some 8 meter waves which destroyed a lot of the palapas that line the beach and serve frosty beverages but luckily I'm still able to find cold beer. So it is after surveying all the damage from big waves that I have decided to take a surfing lesson! Clearly the heat and humidity have fried my brain. More later on the surfing, the bus ride down here from Oaxaca and other adventures. I will however offer a closing piece of advice: drinking mezcal while on a bus traveling down windy roads at a fast clip is a very bad idea. It is an even worse idea to attempt to use the bathroom on said bus.

Feeling a bit under the weather today so this will be brief. There was an organized march in support of the government today, a sort of counter protest to the teacher movement or a peaceful march to show solidarity with the governor, however you want to look at it. Things are getting complicated because the demonstrations in the zocalo are no longer just about teachers' wages, now other groups have joined them and are demanding the ouster of the governor who belongs to the PRI party and is good friends with the PRI presidential candidate. Despite the potential for violence (our school was closed today and we had class at the instructors house), everything was peaceful, about 10k people were brought in from areas outside of Oaxaca to march. The teachers had actually cut off all the major arteries into the city to prevent the march from occurring with any substantial participation but they still managed to produce about 10k. I believe I mentioned in an earlier post that one of th...

Tianguis: A traveling market that sets up shop on a particular street in the city on a particular day of the week. Tuesday on one street, Wednesday on another etc. What does this market sell? What doesn't this market sell! Produce, meat, cheese, fish, many illegal CDs and DVDs (sometimes the vendors are raided by the police and their product confiscated) and a bunch of crap that you will probably pay too much for and will break the third time you use it. For example: hair clips, assorted plastic shoes and dishware. According to some of the vendors we talked to as part of a Spanish class exercise, this mobile market has a few advantages over the stationary market in south of the Centro. Fewer taxes and a bigger customer base.

Saturday me and some of my fellow compañeros in the study abroad program decided to go to Hierve del Agua (means boiling water or something like that anyway) which is a bit outside of town for a day of bathing in some natural springs. Incidentally the water isn’t hot at all but bubbles up from an underground spring, hence the name. The spring is about two hours out of town, one hour to the town of Mitla then another in a collectiva (van taxi basically) to the spring in the mountains on a windy road. We got up very early as our information packet provided by the school informed us that the bus left at 8am and that was our only chance to get to the spring that day. Saturday morning we woke up and met at 7:30am to find the bus station with plenty of time to spare. It was a good thing we did have time to spare because we walked all over looking for the bus station and finally discovered that we were not looking for a station at all but rather a stop on a corner. Around 8:05 or so we were ...

The violence in the town center has reportedly died down, I say reportedly because I have not been down there myself and am receiving information from many different sources. The teachers camping in the zocalo were moved out on Wednesday, the place was cleaned up and then they took it over again. Nice of the government to clean it up for them wasn't it! Today there is a huge protest march, 100k to 150k people expected, from outside of the city to the zocalo. Apparently these protests are no longer about the teachers but about removing the currrent governer from power. The aftermath of the July 2nd presidential election should be an interesting time. The reports of people dying during the initial unrest are unconfirmed. Some say the police took the bodies and basically the people are "disappeared" and others say the deaths never happened. On another note, we had a guest speaker yesterday, Gustavo Esteva, who spoke about the Zapatista movement. It was interesting but their...

Okay, so continuation of the city tour experience starts now! Historic center: We drove from San Felipe back down the hill and through the center on our way to the squatter settlement. So while we didn’t stop here, the traffic was horrible and the teacher protest makes it a bit prohibitive, I have been down there a few times. This portion of the city is the one you see in all the pictures, Spanish colonial architecture, the center square, impressive church etc. This is where the “old money” resides I guess and real estate in this portion of the city is very expensive for some obvious reasons but also because it has basic services. Oliver informed us that most residences consist of three courtyards. You walk in the door that borders the street into the first courtyard which was essentially where you used to entertain guests but now many have turned this portion of the home into a business. The second courtyard was where the family lived but again this is today not always the case as man...

Before I continue to talk about our city tour I need to write about the manifestaciones de los maestros, or basically the teacher protest that is going on in the historic center of town (centro) in the zocalo. Apparently each summer for the past 32 years the Oaxacan teachers union, which encompasses the whole state and includes about 70,000 individuals, camps out in the zocalo for weeks or months to demand a number of things but mostly more compensation. They currently make about $600 dollars a month which is much less than teachers in other areas of Mexico and they aren't happy about it! More on the pay issue in a minute. Now when I say camp out I literally mean camp out. There are tents, tarps, sleeping bags, grills radios, etc. all over the central square and surrounding streets. These encampments have completely obscured the zocalo (should be an accent on that but I haven't figured out how to do that yet) and the facades of buildings on neighboring streets. When I arrived a...

Yesterday we took a city tour of Oaxaca with the program coordinator (Oliver) in a big red, and thankfully air conditioned van. Before embarking on the tour Oliver produced a map of the city and explained the places we would be seeing over the next few hours. Government housing, rich neighborhood, middle class neighborhood, the historic center of town, lower income neighborhood, a squatter settlement and to top the tour off we were to visit the river where the city dumps all their sewage! Mmmmmm....I just love the smell of raw sewage, don't you? Here is a description of each locale.... Government housing: Apparently the system of government housing in Mexico is quite a bit different from ours. Within the Mexican system you actually own the unit you are assigned. There is a list which determines priority, single women with children at the top and those without etc. lower on the list . Of course like any prioritized list there are ways to bump yourself up, wink, wink. The housing we...

This is simply a test to see if I can actually post to my new Blog! If I'm not completely retarded and can figure out this technology (keep in mind I just learned how to record on my VCR while I'm away) then this will become a place to read about my random adventures and observations while I travel! First stop, Oaxaca for two months.