Back to School

Early yesterday (Sunday) morning, Emily and I arrived in Oaxaca, our second three-week destination. We missed our ride because our bus was two hours late, so we caught a cab to our new temporary home and met our host family. And we couldn't be more pleased with our luck.

First, the family: our host parents are named Toño and Viky (funny to have a host mom with the same name as one of our actual moms), and they have a 10-year-old daughter named Fani (short for Estéfani). They have all been incredibly warm and welcoming. They've already offered to teach us how to cook, to help fix a finger injury I've been nursing for months with some herbs their neighbor grows (no, not that herb), to drive us out of town to visit some local sites, etc. Emily's going walking tomorrow morning with Viky. I can't say enough about how happy we are to have been assigned to such nice hosts.

Then there's our apartment, emphasis on the our. We're actually living in an apartment above our host family: we have our own living room, bedroom, bathroom, and even a little patio area. There's no kitchen, but we have a fridge and we've been welcomed to come use the kitchen downstairs for cooking (we already eat breakfast and lunch with the host family, so we won't need to do a lot in the way of cooking anyway). So, it's perfect. Emily and I have our little private living space for three weeks, we get two well-cooked meals with our host family--it's the best of all worlds.

So, we got settled in Sunday and went on a short exploration of the city to orient ourselves, find the school, see the zócalo (the town center), etc. We had lunch in the zócalo to the background of music from a live orchestra that plays every Sunday. And then we came back for a second lunch with our host family and several of their friends who were over to visit (we hadn't been expecting lunch with them, but it had been a few hours since our first lunch, so we dug in to the delicious, surprisingly vegetable-oriented meal).

Today was our first day of classes, and Emily and I are both pleased with our new teachers. We're still not in class together, but Emily's nearing the end of the course book, and I expect that we may end up together once she's done with that. We also did some more exploring today, heading down to the main market and wandering around with the goal of sampling the local chocolate (used mostly for drinking), for which Oaxaca is famous. We also stopped at a barbershop so I could get a haircut, which was just about the experience I would expect from a barbershop in the States, except for the toilet paper wrapped around my neck, but even that's close enough to the tissue paper I'm used to.

All in all, we're looking forward to the next few weeks exploring Oaxaca and its surroundings, with the comfort of our excellent new home base.

One other, completely unrelated note: I mentioned in an earlier post the apparent inability of Mexican waiters to describe foods on their menus. I graciously suggested that it might be a problem in how we've been asking questions about the food. I now take back that suggestion. On Sunday night, Emily and I went to dinner with the Slovenian couple and Basque couple from Jose's Cabañas before we all got on our late night buses. At the restaurant, there was on the menu a dish called pechuga rellena: stuffed chicken breast. I asked our waitress what the chicken was stuffed with. She told me potatoes and vegetables. Excellent. Imagine my surprise when I cut into the chicken breast and found inside not potatoes and vegetables, but a hot dog wrapped in ham. Not even close.

And today, just for icing on the cake, so to speak, Emily and I were at an ice cream place, where we were getting popsicles. They had some popsicles covered in chocolate, and Emily and I asked whether the inside was vanilla ice cream (a pretty common combination both at home and here in Mexico). The woman working there said yes, it was. As it turned out (not badly, mind you), the inside was a strawberry popsicle. I think we've proved our point: Mexican waiters just do not know the contents of the dishes they serve.