¡Hola Mexico!

Our trip so far has been more like a holiday than backpacking in foreign lands, but that changed as soon as we left USA. We arrived into Mexico City late in the evening. We weren’t even sure where we were gonna go next but were not keen on staying in the kidnapping capital of the world. So we immediately found a bus station and for reasons unknown, decided to go to Oaxaca, about 6 hours south.


When we arrived in Oaxaca, we originally thought it was a bit of a ghost town, but to be fair, it was only 7 o’clock in the morning. A few hours later, the town was buzzing with life. It appears the global credit crunch hasn’t quite hit Oaxaca as the large markets in the centre of the town were bustling with activity. There were plenty of useful and useless things to be bought with people constantly coming up to us trying to sell us earrings / hats / blankets / nuts / dresses / fruit / chillies / weird things made from straw and more (we’ll get to that).

It turned out to be a very colourful and entertaining place and you could just sit around the central plaza and watch people for hours.....there were those traditional Mexican musicians (you know those ones with the hats and guitars, like in the movies), a mime act (which Kadi got dragged into), bad saxophone players, singers and a band playing on stage. There was always something going on.




Oaxaca is known for two particular culinary specialties....chocolate and grasshoppers (not together)! Their local chocolate is very popular and you can go into a number of different shops and see them make it, and you can then buy different types in various quantities. They eat it in pure form, they drink it, and they mix it into their local sauce (Mole) along with various other spices to go with meat – an interesting taste. As for the grasshoppers (they didn’t look delicious enough for us to try them).

We were very happy to have stumbled across Oaxaca. It turned out to be a very traditional Mexican town without too many (other) tourists around. When we were leaving, there was a free open-air concert kicking off in the park near the bus station and we would have liked to stay for another night but our schedule in Mexico is fairly tight.

Oh yeah...while we're on the topic of food, here's a picture of a mother changing a baby's nappy on top of a fruit and veg stall :)