Our Place In Oaxaca

We have rented an apartment here. Since we’ll be here for a while, I’ll spend a little bit of time describing it. We approach our place a little cobbled alleyway (a callejon) that cars can’t get into, because of the stairs. At the end of our alley is a little café that I suspect will become a haunt of ours. They have live music playing outside some nights.

Like most places we’ve stayed in Mexico, the front yard of our apartment is walled. To get in, we enter through the gate in the wall facing the callejon. Our courtyard feels like a jungle and has tall fruit trees and potted plants (the mandarin orange tree has fruit on it we can pick!). The walls of the courtyard are red. From the gate one must immediately walk up stairs to a flat bricked area and eventually to our door. Our landlady, Taide, lives above us.

The house is shaped sort of like a giant “L”—with our room in the bottom line. The “L” curves around our patio. We all really like this style of architecture, with the house organized around the enclosed patio/garden. We also really like the abundance of soft lines and bright colors. It all works really well in a hot climate where you are more worried about being cool and shady than cozy. The one problem with our apartment’s location is the mosquitoes. They are devilishly fast and leave long lasting, maddening bites. Also, when I kill one, two more appear, like the heads on the monsters in Greek mythology.

The inside of our place is light and airy, which is augmented by the white tiles that cover the floor in all the rooms. Our dining table is covered in a rainbow tablecloth. There are large windows, the size of the wall, looking out onto the patio. In the morning the sun streams in through the windows and curtains, creating beautiful patterns on the floor.

There is a half wall dividing the kitchen from the dining room. The top of the wall is flat, so we keep our baskets of fresh fruit there. We have one bowl full to the top—and past—of limes. We use lots of limes. Another bowl is filled with avocadoes. We make guacamole every day, that uses up the limes, and also three or more avocadoes. We manage to do without avocadoes in Vancouver, but here where they are local and cheap, we have no inhibitions about gorging ourselves on them. The markets are full of beautiful fresh, local flowers and we always have them in the house.

Georgie and I share a large bedroom. My bed is a queen, Georgie’s is a single. We have a sliding glass door in our bedroom that leads out onto the patio. I think our room is the nicest.

One block away from our apartment is the internet café we use to sign on to the internet. On block up from that is “our” local mercado. We do all most of our food shopping there. We are five blocks away from the main zocalo. However, there are at least three churches between here and there, and each church has a plaza. On one such plaza is an outdoor artisans market. One vendor told us that they are there every single day of the year. In the daytime, there are booths selling purses, bags, pottery and carpets. In the nighttime however, only the clothing stalls are left. Each stall has piles and piles of handmade woven goods. In most cases the seller or one of their family members made them. Most of the clothing is for women, but not all. The shirts that are made here are absolutely covered in an intricate design of flowers and color. The rebosas (scarves) came in every shape, size, and color. One can buy warm scarves, thin scarves, scarves meant to be warn as belts and scarves that would keep you warm in a blizzard.

We have settled in quite well here. Our days usually begin with homework and shopping for fresh tortillas and avocadoes at the local market. My favorite thing to make is a quesadilla. I make a scrambled egg, and then sandwich it between two fresh corn tortillas. And stop picturing the tortillas like the ones we get in Canada. Theses tortillas are not white and flabby, but yellow or purple rounds made by hand that actually have a distinct flavor, not just of dough. The tortillas here are a breed apart. Along with the egg I add half an avocado, heaps and heaps of black beans (we made them into a stew a couple days before), the specialty Oaxaqueno cheese (delicious string cheese) and of course the salsa. We make fresh salsa whenever it looks like the previous batch might run out, which is often. Our favorite so far has been made with purple tomatillos, a relative of the tomato. At the mercado, we stood in front of the bins of 15 different kinds of dried peppers and asked about the best ones for salsa. We settled on Chipotle (my dad’s favorite), another dried one that they assured us was full of flavor and not too hot, and fresh poblano peppers. We’re working on calibrating just how many of each to use in a batch of salsa so its hot, but doesn’t burn holes in our tongue! Its hard because the peppers vary in how spicy they are—some are mild and others are … incandescent. The woman at the market admitted that when she cooks for her family, she carefully removes all the seeds, so we are too.

Yesterday, the 7^th, we went to the organic food market. Unlike most of the mercados in town, it is only on Friday and Saturday. Many of the people shopping there were tourists, but that didn’t bother us, not when the produce was so beautiful. There were piles and piles of fresh greens (beans, bok choy, lettuce, radishes, spinach and other greens we had never heard of, like huanzotle, what my folks refer to as a “Chenopod”). There was a booth that sold Mexican drinks too (and I’m not talking about tequila or meszal, though someone was selling that too—organic mescal!). There was a frothy off-white drink made with some type of seed. And a rice drink with cactus fruit (tunas). To make the rice drink they rub rice grains together and the “rice milk” that is produced is drunk—with a fair bit of sugar. With the tuna pulp, the rice milk turns a lovely pink color. Another place sold fresh organic baking. Surprisingly, sushi was one of the items. But it was vegetarian sushi, with vegetables like beets, carrots, and so on.

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Based on some of the feedback I’ve been getting, there has been some slight confusion as to who has been taking the wonderful pictures posted on my blog. Unless I specifically state otherwise, all the pictures have been taken by my father. I am sorry for any misinterpretation of my photographic abilities this may have caused! I have been however, sorting through the hundreds of pictures available for me to post. So the choice of image is mine, while the actual photo was taken by my father.