Market day in Oaxaca

In the market in Oaxaca City, Erik made his first Mexico purchase: roasted grasshoppers. They tasted a lot like anchovies. And were actually pretty good. More pictures of our first days in Mexico are up here.

We spent the first two days in Queretaro, Mexico´s fastest growing city, with former K-O Spanish teacher Rachel Josephs and her boyfriend Sebastian. Sebastian, who is our age, is an architect in the process of having his first house built (picture of them below). We are wandering around for a year. We were very impressed. Also in Qro we tasted our first Mexican fruit, a pineapple, which was as sweet as only the canned ones are in the states. Since then we´ve feasted on mango, papaya, banana, avocado, and coconut, along with tacos by the dozen (if you haven´t been to Mexico, as I hadn´t until four days ago, you may not realize that tacos here look nothing like tacos in the U.S.; they´re little tortillas that can be filled with any number of yummy things and covered in lime juice and salsas). And we watched Kyslowski´s `White´, practicing our Polish as well as Spanish and French.

The bus ride from Qro to Oaxaca was uneventful, and would even have been pleasant, if not for the unavoidable, surround-sound showing of two of the worst movies ever to go straight to video. Seeing Double was the moving story of a British pop band, S Club, which awoke one morning to find their manager kidnapped and clones of themselves on a runaway world tour. After escaping from a Barcelona prison by conducting their dance routine with all of the prisoners and guards, our heroes move on to Los Angeles, where they befriended their clones, infiltrated the castle where the evil professor manufactured them, and freed the hundreds of others who were kept there. Then, Today You Die was the moving story of a big-hearted drug pusher, who escapes from prison, kills 40 or so bad guys while swearing copiously, then donates the $20 million he had been hiding to a children´s hospital. Aww.

But now we´re happily ensconced in a friendly hostel with parrots in the jungly courtyard. We spent the morning in the market-- picture a New York City block filled with stands containing, variously, shoes, ceramics, plucked chickens with huge feet, overflowing baskets of teeny shrimps, long strips of cow intestine (or something), radishes, chiles, mangoes, oranges, etc. Somehow, within this maze, we bumped into a friend from Hartford, Maureen. She guided us back to her apartment, where she and her girlfriend Hannah fed us on avocado and fresh string cheese, and, crucially, taught us how to use our blog. Anything you see here is thanks to them.