North America,  Mexico,  Travel

Oaxaca Week 3 Daily

November 20, 2022 /

After meeting the girl from Tianjin on Saturday, she took me and her Spanish teacher to a nearby town, Tlacolula, on Sunday to watch their Sunday market, which is said to be the largest market in central Oaxaca. We gathered at the bus station at about 9:30 in the morning. We arrived on time and waited for her teacher for a long time. Her teacher is from Puebla, another state, and only moved here half a year ago, so she is also a tourist. Although the two of us look less like locals, her teacher is often even more touristy than us: she buys things without haggling. After buying things, I think about why it is so expensive. When I asked the proprietress when I was eating, she said, "You With two foreigners, they will charge you the price of foreigners." Hey, it's both of us to blame. She sold fried meat worms, so follow her and try one, but it's nothing special. We had goat barbacoa broth and taco for lunch. The Tianjin girl tore up the corn cakes and soaked them in broth, which reminded us of the mutton steamed buns.

This market is really not that big. It sells everything, including live chickens. Walked around for almost two hours. Fortunately, I came early, and when I was about to leave, it was already overcrowded. In the market, I saw a small cart selling Chinese fast food. The fried rice and fried noodles in it looked terrible. Afterwards, several locals asked us if we were Japanese, because Japanese animation culture is everywhere in Mexico, and they even think that Japan is bigger than China. When passing by the downtown park, I also saw a taekwondo competition of children. I had seen a lot of taekwondo gyms before, so I realized that taekwondo is also very popular in Mexico, and often wins gold medals in international competitions such as the Olympic Games.

Went to see the Lucha Libre Mexican freestyle wrestling show with Tianjin girl and one of her previous couch owners on Sunday night. I saw the poster of this performance on the street before, and I heard that lucha is very famous in Mexico, so I wanted to go and see it. I wanted to go to see it with a local friend, but I asked several local friends, and they all felt that it was a bit expensive ($17) for them, because they said that there are local small ones that are cheaper. I happened to be talking about this with a girl from Tianjin. She and her friend had already bought tickets, so I quickly went online and bought the seats next to them.

The large Lucha Libre performs once a year, but smaller ones are held every weekend. This Mexican friend said that this is actually not a so-called wrestling match, but a dramatic performance event. The small one he went to before can be watched at a closer distance, and the wrestling is more exciting. Outside the venue, you can see many stalls selling colorful masks. The image of lucha wearing a mask often appears in comic books and film and television works. Unlike previous pro wrestling events seen, this one features multiple wrestlers trying to knock out their opponents for three seconds over the course of three rounds. At the end of the game, the losers must remove their masks, revealing their identities. Friends say the stories and stunts of each race are carefully choreographed.

Entrance at 5:30 p.m. and start at 6:00 p.m. In performances, luchador wrestlers often do backflips and leg locks. Sure enough, as my friend said, I feel that winning and losing are all arranged and designed in advance. The most basic routine is that one of the teams (a team of two or three people) was beaten badly in the first round, and sometimes they didn't even fight back, but in the second round, they suddenly reversed and showed their prowess, which was very dramatic. The first few scenes felt quite entertaining, and one of them also had a dwarf wrestler (Figure 1-3), which seemed a bit of an entertaining comedy. Even though the wrestlers were fighting for real, they felt pain from the looks of it, but it wasn't to the point where they couldn't stand it. At the beginning of the fourth game, there was a scene of female wrestlers, some wearing masks and some not wearing masks. Each team has three wrestlers. The two members of one of the teams are super heavyweights, at least 200 catties. Compared with them, the other team is not a heavyweight. In the second round, the so-called referee on the stage somehow helped the heavyweight team fight the other team. Having said that, it was all arranged in advance. In the last round, all kinds of kicking, face-slapping, and hair-pulling intensified. The weak team that had been beaten badly before turned around. After knocking down the three women from the other team, they finally beat up the referee together (pictured) 2-2).

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After that, the new match was also 3v3. The wrestlers in this match looked more robust and more like professional wrestlers. The fights got harder and harder, and at the end of the second round you could see blood on the backs of the wrestlers, and you could see one guy's teeth flying out, and that probably wasn't fake. At the beginning of the third round, I couldn't stand it any longer. I went to the toilet, but when I was in the toilet, I heard a sudden boiling outside. When I went out, I saw that the whole audience stood up. Then I saw some wrestlers being beaten in the auditorium, the big iron railing blocking the audience in the front row was lifted up and thrown at the opponent, and there was a big wooden stick thrown at the opponent's back from nowhere. Swinging his back, and someone throwing an iron folding chair at the opponent, these are all props for performance. Knowing that this was all planned in advance, I was getting more and more worried when I finally saw the medical staff take a wrestler off on a stretcher. After six o'clock, I saw nine o'clock. It seemed that there was the last show. The Tianjin girl and I couldn't stand it anymore and decided to go home. If we don't propose to leave early, her friend should continue to watch it.

Although I know this is one of the traditions and popular culture in Mexico and even Latin America, I try to understand this event, but it is too violent. The most unbearable thing is that there is no age limit for watching Lucha Libre. Many parents brought their children to watch. When the fight was the most violent, there were children cheering and cheering there. This is simply the live version of the R-rated restricted Movies, all I can think of is the negative effect on kids of watching such violence. I talked about this with my Spanish teacher later, and he said that many wrestlers have short careers due to injuries, but they don’t make a lot of money. He is very similar to my idea of watching games as a child. He said that after he and his brother went to watch the lucha game for the first time when they were young, they started to fight violently when they came home the next day. This should be the only Mexican culture that I don't like and understand so far.

I went to a nearby library recommended by a friend on Monday. When I entered, the librarian at the front desk only answered my questions in English. A room full of old American men and women were discussing the matter of returning to the United States to reunite with their families on Thanksgiving and Christmas. son crossed. Most of the books in this library are English books. There are tables and chairs on the rooftop on the second floor. Many foreigners work online here. The environment is very good and it is a good place. It is said that there are two hours of language exchange activities every Saturday, so you can take a look at that time.

The sofa owner's mother suddenly said last week that she has friends who will be staying at her house, so I have to find another place. It happened that I also wanted to change the place. Although it is very comfortable here, it is the most downtown place when I go out, but after two weeks, I feel that I see tourists when I go out every day, which is too commercial. I just found a local house 20 minutes’ walk west of the city center on the Internet. Only locals live in this area, and there are no tourists. It’s only a ten-minute walk from the two local markets I’ve been to before. The prices of the vegetable market and restaurants are also much cheaper than those in the city center. The house is in a small alley, and the surrounding area is quite quiet. The landlord is a 28-year-old girl with a three-month-old son who is very cute. There is also an old grandfather who has bad legs, feet, and ears. Besides them, there were two other tenants. I rented a single room on the second floor. Except for the cabin of the two bulldogs, which is also on the second floor, no one is next to each other, and there is plenty of sunshine every day. Although the room is quite small, I don't need a big place anyway, a bed, table and chairs are enough. Anyway, I only have a backpack, and the wooden shelves on the wall are enough to store my clothes, so I asked the landlord to move out the unnecessary wardrobes, so that the room looks bigger. One day I chatted with the landlord and learned that she seldom cooks here, because her grandmother lives in the same alley, and basically takes the children to her grandmother's house for dinner every day. Her mother went to work in the United States when she was 10 years old, injured her leg, remarried there, had a child, and never came back. Her mother was already a single mother before she left, so she was brought up by her grandmother and her brother. She cared for her disabled wheelchair-bound grandfather for three years, who died last year. Her older sister studied media at the University of Mexico, and now goes to graduate school near Los Angeles, with her mother. She will take her son to Los Angeles to study languages for two months in January. She and her mother have not seen each other for 18 years, and they have started to meet via video in recent years. It sounds so sad.

In the past few days, I saw bows hanging on the door of several of her neighbors, and asked her what she meant. She said that hanging bows in front of the door meant that someone in the family died. Dirty, indicating that it has been hung for several years. Different colored bows indicate the age of the person who died (white means the child died) or marital status (blue or black means married or single, forget that). On the second morning after moving here, I went to a gym that was just a five-minute walk away. The equipment was very complete, and fingerprints were used to enter the door. It was much cheaper than the gym in the city center I asked before.

I met a new local friend on Tuesday. He had worked as a software engineer in Seattle for three years, but he didn’t like the working environment, so he resigned in 2017 and traveled to South America for a year. After returning four years ago, he combined several of his hobbies: photography, programming, website building, food, cooking, and travel, and opened his own private cooking studio to teach foreign tourists how to cook local Mexican dishes. His cooking class takes five or six hours in total, including taking students to the vegetable market early in the morning to buy fresh ingredients, explaining the history and culture of the ingredients and the dishes to be made, cooking and eating together at the end. Each cooking class generally does not exceed 5 people. In addition to this, he sometimes leads food groups to taste various local delicacies. Knowing that I'm a foodie and know a lot about Mexican food, he invited me to attend one of his cooking classes for free on Thursdays. Unfortunately, I have to work and my schedule is tight, so I can't participate in a full day of cooking classes. He said that it would be good for them to come and eat after the cooking class. He rented a very spacious space with all kinds of kitchen utensils and condiments, in addition to Mexican ingredients, there are also Asian and African food ingredients. We made tortillas now, made quesadilla and ate them with different salsa left over from cooking class, vegetable soup and cactus salad, I was too embarrassed to eat it for nothing, so I brought a Small desserts, all delicious. Learned something new about cooking Mexican food while eating. It feels like a coincidence that you can meet cook friends who also love food everywhere.

I didn’t want to join a one-day group, so I posted a trip to Mitla and Hierve el Agua, a small town more than an hour away from Oaxaca, on the couch software. There were two people who wanted to join me, but in the end only one of the Brazilian brothers decided to come with me go. We met at the bus stop at 7 o'clock on Friday morning. He didn't have Mexican pesos on him, only US dollars. Fortunately, he found a guy who sold hamburgers and exchanged $100 for him. He said that his English is better than Spanish, although sometimes he can't understand his Spanish, but because Portuguese and Spanish are very similar, we basically communicated in Spanish that day. He said that he had stayed at his sister's house near Boston for more than half a year in the United States, and had been learning English for free in the community library, so his English gradually improved. Although he studied archeology in college, he is now a freelance social media promotion, helping his clients manage their social media accounts and post informational ads. And also love photography.

The two of us took the bus to the small town of Mitla. I heard that the historical sites here did not open until 10 o'clock, so we decided to change the bus to Hierve el Agua. Many tourists who came by the same bus took one or two small convertibles, and only 12 people could drive together. There were 3 people in the front, and 9 people squeezed behind us: four Canadians, me and my Brazilian brother, an Italian girl, a Spanish uncle and a big brother from Mexico City who was squeezed on a small bench in the middle.

We finally arrived at Hierve el Agua after a bumpy half-hour winding mountain road. Hierve el Agua literally means "the water boils", and although you can see the water bubbling in some pools, the water is cooler and not boiling. After walking in from the entrance, I saw several natural swimming pools, and some tourists were already soaking in them. A spectacular "waterfall" can be seen in the distance, but it is actually a petrified, frozen waterfall, frozen to resemble an arctic ice waterfall. It is said that the natural rock formations of Shihua Waterfall are formed by freshwater mountain springs full of calcium carbonate and other minerals. When the water flows over the cliff, the minerals are deposited to form a solid waterfall called Shihua Waterfall. From here, you can see the agave tequila on the terraces from a distance, and there are many tequila mezcal production and processing factories here.

It took us more than an hour to walk from the top of the big waterfall to the small waterfall at the bottom of the valley under the scorching sun, and then back to the big waterfall. The terrain is rough along the way, passing through cacti, sparse bushes and semi-desert vegetation. Black Mexican vultures can also be seen circling the valley floor. When we arrived at the steep slope under the Great Falls, the Spanish uncle climbed halfway down before us. Because it was relatively steep, he decided to go back the same way. The two of us saw someone climbing directly from the Great Falls, so we decided to do the same. The little brother from Brazil climbed ahead, and some of the ground was really steep. He used his hands and feet along the way, and slowly climbed to the top, and he was about to go up. In the end, the last big rock was almost vertical in front of us. The little brother from Brazil Half way up the boulder, he couldn't get up, when a large plastic bottle full of drinks that he was pressing on his left arm cracked, and all the drinks in it flowed down the side where he was sitting, and he couldn't hold on anymore. He stopped and slid down the boulder. His clothes and pants were all wet and muddy, and he was extremely embarrassed. So we found another way. What makes us laugh and cry is that after walking two or three steps to the left, we found that there is actually a mountain road going up the big rock, but because there are too many bushes, we didn't see it before, which made the Brazilian brother very depressed. . After going up, there are more people in the natural swimming pool now.

From the Hierve el Agua petrified waterfall, you have to take a convertible car back to the town, but you have to wait until it is full. Only the Spanish uncle and us, most of the tourists come with a group, who knows when we have to wait. So my Brazilian brother and I went to ask a taxi driver. When we walked back to the convertible, we saw that the driver of the convertible had just delivered a car of tourists and told us that I would take you back. The Spanish uncle whispered to me next to him: He saw that you went to ask for a taxi, and he was afraid that we would leave without taking the convertible, and it was no wonder that we had to wait until the car was full. When we went back, the driver just sent us to the historic site in the north of Mitla town. It is much smaller than the Monte Albán ruins that I went to last Friday, but what is unique is some of the lines on the ruins, which have not been seen elsewhere. Many small town centers in Mexico have town names made up of colorful letters, and there are three of them here.

After visiting the ruins, I saw many beautiful murals on the way to the city center. We both ate something and went to wait for the bus. At the end of the day, my Brazilian brother asked me several times what some Spanish words meant. I was curious and wanted to know how much Portuguese accounted for in his Spanish, but he couldn’t tell, so I asked him to speak in Portuguese. Talk to me a few words in Chinese, and it turns out that it is not much different from what I have heard all day. The co-author, he spends most of the day speaking Portuguese to me, I can't laugh or cry. We waited for about 40 minutes for the bus and the bus didn’t come. Many people were impatient. We asked for a taxi, which was so cheap. So we got on the bus with the Polish couple who had been waiting for a long time. Thinking that after the four of us got up, a big mom would appear and squeeze me into the passenger seat. It seems normal for a taxi here to squeeze five passengers. On the way, my aunt got off the bus in a small town. Not long after I felt comfortable, another young man came up and sat next to me. Back in the city, it rained for the first time in three weeks.

enfrijolada
marquesita
quesadilla de huitlacoche
mole estofada
garnachas
tamal amarillo

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