North America,  Mexico,  Travel,  Food

Week 7 in Oaxaca

December 17, 2022 /

Since the last week of December, the sound of firecrackers has been going on all over the city. There were two days when the firecrackers were fired at three or four o'clock in the morning. Later, I learned that this month began to celebrate various religious festivals to worship the Virgin. The 8th celebrates Our Lady of Juquila, the 12th celebrates Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the 18th celebrates Our Lady of Soledad. The biggest celebration is Guadalupe on December 12th. There will be many pilgrims from small towns and small villages walking, cycling or taking trucks to churches in big cities to worship Our Lady. It is said that a grand religious ceremony will be held in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, and millions of believers at home and abroad will travel long distances to visit the statue of Our Lady. They will even sleep on the streets, confess, and pray in the streets and alleys of Mexico City. The festivities dedicated to the Virgin last for about a month. On the evening of the 12th, a friend who repaired watches from a large market I met took me to a feria celebration, similar to a county fair in the United States or a temple fair in China. In addition to all kinds of local street snacks and desserts, there are also small roller coasters, bumper cars, small Ferris wheels, throwing darts, and rings to win plush toys. It is very lively.

On Monday, I saw someone very familiar on a dating software, and then I looked at the name and profile, and found that this was not the best-selling book "Fluent in 3 Months" ("Fluent in 3 Months") about language learning that I read at the beginning of the epidemic ("Fluent in 3 Months"). Fluency") author! I was curious and sent him a message asking if I was free to meet up the next day, and he actually replied, saying that he was leaving for Mexico City the next night, and that he had to record a podcast at 10 in the morning, so if he wanted to meet up, he could only Went to have breakfast together at 8am. Such an opportunity could not be missed, so I went to meet him at a restaurant in the city center the next morning. When I saw him for the first time, I had to say: Time is a butcher's knife.

He is also a celebrity who is proficient in multiple languages, so here is the name directly. His name is Benny Lewis, he is Irish, and he studied electrical engineering at university. He had learned German and Irish in Irish high school, but it was just for exams, not practical at all. After graduating from university, he went to Spain to live and study Spanish, but after half a year, he still couldn't open his mouth, so he called himself a linguistic scumbag. After being frustrated, he watched various multilingual people introduce their methods and videos on learning foreign languages on the Internet, and then began to slowly work out his own method of learning foreign languages: starting to learn a new language every three months. Over the years he became proficient in Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese, and also reached a daily conversational level in some languages, such as: Chinese, Dutch, sign language, Irish and Esperanto (an artificial Esperanto). I discussed some teaching methods of second language acquisition with him, and wanted to know his views on comprehensible input. To be honest, I have some disagreements with some of his ideas, and some of his ideas are somewhat different, but his book and website introduce a lot of specific methods of learning languages, most of which will still be helpful, if you are interested Friends can search online, but the most important thing is to speak up without being afraid of making mistakes.

He gave a speech on Ted Talk and was named "Traveler of the Year" by National Geographic in 2013, because when he learns many new languages, he travels to countries that speak that language and learns new ones through a fully immersive environment. language. Talking about travel, I learned that he also uses sofa-surfing software, and is a sofa owner who has received more than 2,000 sofa-surfers in various countries. But he said that the software has changed too much in the past ten years, and it is not as good as the community atmosphere built before, so he has been useless for a long time. I suggested that I could practice Chinese with him, but he said that he hadn't used Chinese for a long time and had forgotten too much. This made me a little skeptical about his Chinese proficiency. After I got home, I searched the Internet for videos of him speaking Chinese and other people’s comments about his different language levels. I feel that some of his languages have not reached the so-called "fluency". degree. However, it is indeed not easy to maintain fluency in so many languages after so many years. He said that he plans to return to Asia next year to pick up his Chinese, Thai, etc., and maybe learn new Korean and Japanese. He will also start making more YouTube videos to record his experience of learning new languages. All in all an interesting guy.

My cooking class teacher friend invited me to a posada celebration hosted by his friend on Friday. Because Mexico is a traditional Catholic country, in order to celebrate Christmas, posada celebrations will start on December 16, nine days before Christmas every year, and last nine days until Christmas Eve. Families living in the same district take turns organizing posada celebrations at home one night. The word posada means inn or lodging, and posada is traditionally a reenactment and celebration of the biblical story of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph on their way to find lodging. Common celebrations include role-playing traditional costumes, knocking on the door to ask the host if they can stay overnight, singing songs, eating tamales, drinking ponche fruit drinks, and playing Christmas piñatas.

On Friday, I went to my friend’s house to help him make tamales, the tamales. The raw materials include quesillo cheese, refried beans, chepil leaves, and zucchini flowers. I made a bunch of vegetarian ones with various cold and cold combinations, and I also made pork chili sauce stuffing. Fifty or sixty tamales were made in two hours, and the entire big steamer was filled. It was half-cooked, and his friend B brought her son to pick us up in a car, and the two of them carried the big pot and put it in his friend's car. When I arrived at his friend M's house, I steamed it again. His friend M lives in Tlacochahuaya, a small town 50 minutes drive from Oaxaca City. His friend B opened this local food tour company three years ago and hired him, M and another friend O as tour guides, so this posada is organized by the four of them. When we arrived at M's house, we put the big steamer full of tamales on the stove and continued steaming. M has already cooked a large pot of ponche, a hot Christmas drink filled with seasonal fruit (she puts apples, guava, grapes, plums, etc.), cinnamon bark, roselle, etc. If adults drink it, some will add some mezcal, the local tequila. His friend M is originally a girl from a big city in Mexico City, but she likes the countryside, so after living in Oaxaca for several years, she decided to move to this small village a few months ago, and adopted 8 dogs and a family on the street. cat.

After the few of us had almost eaten, twenty or thirty neighbors from the village came, and they brought many children. I help my friends as a host, serving them tamales and hot ponche. After everyone finished eating, they started preparing for Christmas piñata. A piñata is a colorful, hollow container pasted in a cardboard shell, filled with candy, peanuts, and more. When it is hung, people will hit it hard with sticks while blindfolded. When hitting, the crowd will sing rhythmic songs together, until the things inside fall down after breaking. But the Christmas piñata is usually a large ball with seven cones forming a star-shaped piñata. These seven cones represent the seven deadly sins in Catholicism, so hitting the piñata in this shape is to hope to break the seven deadly sins. The children made a small Santa-shaped piñata first, and then it was the adults' turn to make a big star-shaped piñata. I've only watched other people fight before, this is the first time I've played in person. Blindfolded really can only fight around. The big piñata was so strong that the adults took turns beating it for half an hour before breaking it, and only knocked out seven cones. So the blindfold was removed for the second round, and in the end it was my friend who beat me hard and broke it. Everyone picked up candy and peanuts from the ground. After 12 o'clock, everyone held a small firework (I don't know what it's called), which was beautiful after being lit. Afterwards, the neighbors all went home, and a group of us sat outside drinking and chatting. When I got sleepy at one o'clock, I went upstairs to sleep. I heard that they didn't go to bed until three or four o'clock the next day. The next morning, I ate the chileajo bread brought by a neighbor last night. It was boiled with potatoes, green beans, and guajillo peppers. It was the first time I ate it. After that, we help clean up the garbage inside and outside the room together. Very interesting experience.

The cooking class teacher and friend are also very interested in Chinese food. Since they met me, they have asked me several times when I can cook a meal for him to try. He initially planned to make braised pork more than a month ago. He bought Lee Kum Kee's soy sauce and dark soy sauce online in two days, but he didn't have time to make it until this week. As a result, we went to buy pork belly a week ago. We went to several different local butcher shops, but none of them sold pork belly. I was told that when they came in from the farm, the skin and fat had already been cut off from the meat. If you have to order pork belly, you need to order it from the meat farm in advance, and it is impossible to order it if it only sells one kilogram. Buy at least five kilograms. Now that I think about it, San Cristóbal in the previous city was actually the same. If it weren’t for the proprietress of the Chinese noodle restaurant who ordered a lot of pork belly at that butcher shop, I wouldn’t be able to buy it, and I would have been caught by her. If you can't buy pork belly, you can't use the authentic soy sauce he bought, so you can make other braised dishes instead, so I made braised pork ribs, which was well received again. It is estimated that there is no one who does not like braised pork.

A few days ago, the strap of the sports watch broke again. I went to repair it once before, but I was told last time that it might break again. So I went to the big market to find my friend who sells watches, and he said the same thing after reading it, so I asked him to stick the strap on with super glue. Although I can’t change the strap of another color, it’s better than It broke suddenly and dropped the entire bracelet. When he was asked to pay him, he refused to accept it, saying that the super glue cost nothing.

No matter how many times you come to Latin America, you can always find fruits that you have never eaten before. I have eaten chico zapote (Figure 7) before, but recently I saw a green-skinned round fruit called zapote negro (Figure 8) in the market. It is obviously green-skinned, why is it called black zapote? When I went home and tasted it, the pulp inside was black, and the flesh was very soft, similar to boiled jam, slightly sweet. One day when I went to the supermarket, I saw a small cake called pan chino (Picture 9) - Chinese bread. I bought it curiously and tasted it, and my childhood memories came back instantly. Isn't this the taste of the flower-shaped egg cake that I ate when I was a child! Later, I asked a friend, and he said that if there is a small bakery in a Chinese restaurant, they will usually sell this kind of cake. After eating four or four types of mole, I tried the fifth type of mole rojo (Figure 12), which was a bit spicy.

guanábana
molote
entomatada
BBQ pulled pork sandwich
zapote chico
zapote negro
pan chino
tamal dulce
mole rojo

The 18th is another festival to celebrate the Virgin Mary. There is another feria temple fair on several streets in front of the Soledad Cathedral not far from my home. The scale is very large, and the bus routes have been changed.

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