Goodbye Oaxaca; Hello Puebla

Before I go into the details of our last few days, I would like to share some good news with all of you: I passed the Arizona Bar. 2 down, 48 to go.

And now, about Mexico...let's start back on Friday, our last full day in Oaxaca. After our last class with our school in Oaxaca, Emily and I caught a (fiery red, pimped-out) bus to El Tule, the site of an enormous, 2000-year-old tree that is the pride of the town. And justifiably so. We arrived and walked into the small town, which is surprisingly lovely, and we saw in the distance the town's church, which is dominated on one side by the enormous tree, and on the other side by the son of El Tule, which is only 1000 years old and, though not as big as his daddy (or is it mommy?) impressively large. I lament right now that we don't have the cord to upload some photos to give you an idea of how amazing El Tule is. The base of the tree could easily be carved into a liveable (though small) house. Walking around the tree is a bit like cloud spotting, seeking out shapes in the gnarly trunks and twisting, interweaving branches. We'll upload photos soon, because I can't possibly do it justice. Frankly, even photos don't do it full justice. It's incredible.

Friday night we went out to dinner with our friend Melissa, her housemate Ana (who we'd met briefly at Solexico), and her host brother Luis, who is a chef and who had promised to show us what good Oaxacan cuisine was all about. Before going to the restaurant, we stopped at an internet place to check my bar results (I had been checking all day, but they didn't come out until that night--and it was a pain to find them even then, as we had to try 3 internet places before finding one with a PDF reader). After getting the good news and a great deal of relief, we headed to a place called Casa Oaxaca, one of the finer restaurants in town. We found, for the second time, that expensive food does not necessarily equal good food. The ambience was lovely, and we had a great time with our new friends, but Emily and I have decided that we're going to avoid the ritzier restaurants, as none of them really seem to be worth it, and there's plenty of great food available for much less. Oh, well--food prices aside, it was a nice send-off for us as we got ready to leave town.

Saturday morning, after saying adios to our lovely host family, we boarded a bus on our way to Puebla, about 4.5 hours from Oaxaca. The bus ride itself was actually stunningly beautiful. When we could pull our attention away from the movies, we were treated to breathtaking views of tall mountains with sharp cliffs off in the distance, and then we spent a great deal of time driving through what looked like a cactus forest, filled with tall thin cactus reminiscent of saguaros. We can't actually decide what type of ecosystem we're in here. It seems that the environment in this part of Mexico has bred not only evergreens but also a great deal of cactus that seem out of place.

We arrived in Puebla in the afternoon and set about exploring the city. Puebla, with about 2 million residents, is a much larger city than any we've visited so far this trip, and it lacks some of the more villagy welcomingness (where did those words come from?) of Oaxaca or San Cristobal. Instead of being lined with cafes and craft shops, for example, the streets are lined with boring commercial chains. Walking around Puebla is a bit like walking through a tremendous mall.

After a stop for lunch, we headed to the Casa de la Cultura, which was a disappointment. They have a variety of displays upstairs, including a beautiful library, but when we bought a ticket at what seemed to be the only ticket place around, we were only permitted to see the library. The other exhibits each required separate tickets, and there was no sign of anywhere else to purchase them. We were very frustrated, too, by the simple demand that we pay more money each time we wanted to enter a new room in the place. We did at least see the library, which is filled to the brim with ancient books, and which exactly 5 antique medical books on display. The library apparently has an incredible collection of rare books in its stacks; I wish they had a few more on display, but so it goes.

Our next visit was to the Casa de las Muñecas, which houses one of the coolest museums we've seen this trip. We asked at the front desk what was on display, and we were told that there was some art from the 16th and 17th century and a mummy. You had us at mummy. And the collection was definitely understated. We walked upstairs and started off with a series of rooms reliving some of the drama from October 1968, when the Mexican government violently quashed a teacher/student protest in Tlatelolco in Mexico City. We had actually seen a documentary on the incident while we were in San Cristóbal, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see a bit more about the event over the coming week around Mexico City, as this is the 40th anniversary. For more information, check out this link. One of the rooms of the museum was set up to replicate an apartment with a dead person hunched over the table in the middle of the room (the display was actually funnier than I assume it was meant to be). The next group of rooms were filled with various antique scientific equipment, only some of which was actually understood by whomever made the labels. A number of labels simply said "Scientific Apparatus" without any further explanation. Following the equipment were two rooms with a variety of dead, stuffed animals, the significance of which remains unclear. And the highlight was the final room, which apparently was dedicated to medicine, but which also included an exhumed mummy holding a tiny baby in her arms, as well as a shrunken head from some Amazonian tribe. Again, wait 'til you see some photos. It's classic, and brought to mind the sort of old, eclectic, throw-in-whatever-you-find museums that have mostly disappeared from our country in modern, more organized times.

After a fruitless visit to the IMAX theater outside of town, which was done showing movies by our 6ish pm arrival, we found a regular movie theater and saw a beautiful, deeply moving Israeli film called The Bubble (at least, I think that's what it is in English--in Spanish, it was called Todos Contra el Mundo. The movie deals frankly with homosexuality and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it deftly interweaves the two issues in its plot. No less than 10 people walked out of the film, most likely because of the open depiction of homosexuality, which is unfortunately still not a comfortable subject here in Mexico.

That brings us to Saturday night, which is where I'll have to stop, because we need to go find something to eat. We'll be in Puebla until tomorrow, when we head northeast to Xalapa. And check back for an update of this post with photos.