Author: Laughingnomad

What’s Up With Oaxaca Now?

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Blog
Marc Lacey, The New York Times, 28.12.06
December 28

Oaxaca: Painting Over Signs of Strife to Tidy Up for the Tourists
There is a new smell in the air here, competing with the aroma of mole sauce that routinely wafts through Oaxaca. It is the smell of paint fumes.

Work crews are everywhere, retouching the colonial facades that give Oaxaca its charm and draw tens of thousands of visitors a year. But in this politically charged city in southern Mexico, where protesting is as much a part of the culture as the distinctive cuisine, even the cleanup is causing arguments.

Just weeks ago, Oaxaca was a wreck. Graffiti marred its buildings. Burned-out vehicles blocked its roads. Angry protesters confronted riot-equipped police officers around the charming central square.

The protests, which began with teachers seeking a pay raise but grew to include an array of leftist groups and indigenous organizations, are continuing sporadically, but officials have begun trying to scrub away the evidence of what occurred.

Not everybody agrees on the best approach.
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Christmas Season

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The Christmas season begins with the celebration of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12 and continues until January 6…the Day of the Three Kings when presents are opened.

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe or Virgen de Guadalupe) commemorates the traditional account of her appearances to Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin on the hill of Tepeyac near Mexico City from December 9 through December 12, 1531. It is Mexico’s most popular religious and cultural image: Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote in 1974 that “the Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery!” On Guadalupe Feast Day people wait in line for hours to enter a church and kiss the foot of the Virgin. Little children are dressed up like the indigenous Indian children to whom the Virgin appeared.

During the Christmas season there is music, dancing and expositions of all kinds in the Zocalo and all around the Centro. One evening there were three music groups going all at once in the Zocalo including a Calenda with traditional indigenous dances in one corner in front of the Cathedral and a stage full of dancers demonstrating modern Mexican dance styles in another corner. A trio of flutes played indigenous folk music in the middle! And that’s not counting the guitarist and singer in one of the cafes and the poor roving singer with long black coat who sings a horrible loud version of “Oaxaca Oaxaca” and then expects you to give him money for your trouble!
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Village of Benito Juarez

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Last week Ana, Steve and their 3 year old Oscar and I drove to Tlacalula and then west on a winding road high in the Sierra del Norte to the tiny village of Benito Juarez. I parked the car near an intersection where a pick-up was parked in front of us on the road. Along comes a truck and smacks right into the back of the pickup…just didn’t stop! Broke the taillight and dented the pickup…but no one got angry…in fact they just chuckled and looked at the rear of the pickup and took off again. I was amazed how different this scene would have been in the States.

After walking around and taking pictures for awhile we ate freshly caught trucha (trout) stuffed with cheese and herbs at a small comedor…with hand made blue corn tortillas and bowls of hot coffee with a dash of Rompope. Then back home on a much better paved road than the one we drove up on. On the way down we picked up a child and a couple women with bags of flowers who were waiting for a bus to take them to a market at the bottom of the mountain. They gave us a beautiful flower and offered to pay for the ride. No way said Ana!

First Christmas In Oaxaca 2006

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The Zocalo is lovely now with Christmas events every night. Both the teachers and the police are out of the Zocalo now.

Last night the Canadian couple, Ana and Steve and their 3 year old son Oscar, and Joe from Chicago, in the other two apartments, and I “caroled” the manager’s family in the 4th apartment. Then we set up a table and chairs in the courtyard with Rampope (a kind of alcoholic eggnog with milk and almond flavoring made by the nuns here) and chocolate, cookies and Ana’s gingerbread house. We showed slides on Joe’s laptop computer of snowy northern America and wore scarves around our necks even though it was pretty warm out at 7pm. Our singing was pretty sick…there were so few of us and Joe had to print out the words to Christmas songs because we couldn’t remember them. I tried to get some video in the dark and sing too which was pretty ridiculous. Funniest part was that Joe lined up two rows of chairs facing each other…one row for them and one row for us. As only two of us spoke Spanish that was pretty ridiculous too. I had invited my friend Max along and bought him a Santa’s hat which, with his white beard and red shirt made him look almost like Santa. But he doesn’t speak Spanish either.
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Freedom Of Speech

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December 14, 2006
More Dispatches from the War against Journalists

Before he left office on December 1, Mexican president Vicente Fox lauded big strides against authoritarianism and intolerance during his 6-year administration. Besieged by murder, violence and intimidation, many Mexican journalists are wondering what country Fox was talking about in his homilies.

“We are up to our ears hearing how freedom of the press was one of the great accomplishments,” wrote Veracruz state’s Mundo de Cordoba newspaper in a recent editorial. “In reality, what was gained was to put us in the dishonorable first place position on the list of the most dangerous countries in the Americas to exercise journalism.” Nine Mexican and foreign journalists have been murdered in Mexico so far this year, six of them since October. Three other Mexican journalists have disappeared in 2006.

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About Me

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Backpacked The Hippie Trail In The 60’s? If Not It’s Not Too Late!

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Taking the kids to Mexico, the grandparents to Hawaii and ourselves to Central Asia in the mid 1990’s on an 18 day trek in the Atlas Mountains had pretty much been the extent of our international travel together. Bob had climbed Mt. Rainier and Mt. Kilomanjaro and some of the lesser mountains in Nepal and Tibet but he thinks climbing mountains is a thing of the past for him. “Crossing borders and boundaries…climbing cultural mountains much less painful and ultimately more rewarding,” he says.

So in 2002, after Bob retired from 35 years as a pediatrician in Salem Oregon and I retired as an educational administrator and after raising our three sons, Greg now 41, Doug 39 and Josh 35, we rented our house and set off for a year around the world with only our backpacks. But we didn’t honestly do the “Hippie Trail.” Landing in high-rent London in February, we forged our own trail and moved quickly through France, Spain and Portugal. Looking for warm weather we finally found it in Morocco.

Then back to Southern France, Spain and Italy before moving on to Athens, the islands of Sifnos and Santorini in Greece, Cairo and Luxor in Egypt and finally to Nairobi Kenya where we took an overland truck with about 15 twenty and thirty-somethings from England, Australia and New Zealand for a month and a half through East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Botswana) and across to Namibia on the Atlantic and down to South Africa where we, desperate to be in one place for awhile, rented an apartment for a month in the beautiful Cape Malay district of Capetown.

After a few days in a bed and breakfast in Soweto, the Black township near Johannesburg, we flew to Mumbai, India…in hot July…which, after Rajistan and New Delhi, made Bangkok Thailand feel luxurious! After backpacking through Thailand, Burma, Laos and Vietnam and Cambodia we spent two months in a cold wintery China with no central heating and gratefully ended the year on a beach in the Philippines.

A year eventually became four years. A few months after we returned home, Bob took off for Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.

When Bob returned home, and with our then unmarried sons living in Las Vegas, Thailand and New York, we found ourselves ready to hit the road again. So in July 2004 we rented the house again, flew to Frankfurt Germany, traveled across Eastern Europe including my maternal ancestral home, Poland, and on to home stays in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Then we took the Trans-Siberian Railway across Asian Russia and through Mongolia to Beijing…spending two more months in China before going on to Southeast Asia again (Burma, Viet Nam, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos). After a month driving around the island of Bali we returned to Thailand.

In the meantime, our son, Doug married his Thai girlfriend so we spent several weeks in Krabi Province visiting them…Doug and Luk having barely escaped the tsunami with their lives the day before we arrived! They now live in a little Thai-style bungalow on the island of Koh Samui and welcome visitors.
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We emailed our renters to not pack up anytime soon, however, and we sublet a furnished apartment from September 2005 to January 2006 in Brooklyn so we could be near our son Joshua who was a chef at the Tocqueville Restaurant near Union Square in Manhattan at the time. Upon arrival Josh and Amy, who was getting her PhD in history and was teaching at Rutgers University, surprised us with wedding plans that would take place at the Brooklyn courthouse in two days!
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Our oldest son Greg who is an anesthesiologist in Las Vegas, visited us later in New York.
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January 2006 saw us in Thailand again…I spent a month in Bangkok getting dental and medical work completed and then to Koh Samui Thailand to spend a month with Doug and Luk while Bob disappeared somewhere in the Thai environs. After Bangkok I went to Chiang Mai in Thailand for a month and on to Laos for the rain festival in April.

With the renters out of the house by this time, Bob flew back to Salem on March 29, 2006. I flew back to Bangkok to catch a flight to the States at the end of April. I visited my son Greg in Las Vegas before continuing on to Salem to pack up my stuff for my move to Oaxaca Mexico June 1 2006. Bob rented the house in Salem for two more years and returned to Thailand with a year-long visa in August 2006.

Josh and Amy and about a dozen friends celebrated their “real” wedding on Poipu Beach Kauai Hawaii in July. Josh then took a position as Chef de Cuisine of the new “One East On Third” restaurant at the Hilton Hotel in Beijing China. Amy followed at the end of her term teaching at Rutgers in September 2006. She taught history at an international school in Beijing.

A year became 6 years. I obtained a one-year Mexican visa to live in an apartment in Oaxaca City. Oaxacan teachers were striking and had been camped out in the Centro for a month when I arrived June 1 2006…at once educational and harrowing. They have been striking every year for the last 26 years. They were finally driven out of the city on November 25 2006 by Federal Riot Control Police using tear gas and arrested and beat scores of people…many were innocent bystanders.

I drove nearly 4000 miles from Oaxaca to Salem, Oregon in August 2007. Being in my house in Oregon felt like I was on vacation.

I returned to Asia in February of 2008 for Chinese New Year and visited Josh and Amy in Beijing China for 12 days. It was unearthly cold so I went south to Kunming and then Jinghong China.  Next was Bangkok Thailand in March for unending dental/medical care. In May Doug, Luk and I flew to Kuala Lumpur Malaysia to renew our visas.

Josh and Amy since moved to Hong Kong in August 2008  where Josh is the Executive Chef at the American Club and Amy taught school at the HK campus of the same school where she taught in Beijing.

Bob and I separated in 2005 and he is living in Thailand in Jomptien, south of Pattaya. He returned to the States in May 2008 to visit our oldest son Greg in Las Vegas and his mother in Portland, Oregon and take care of some business.

I returned to Oregon in June 2008 to spend the summer and fall of 2008 in Oregon.  I rented out the house in Salem and  returned to Oaxaca Mexico on November 1, 2008 where I live in a beautiful apartment in the Centro with a veranda overlooking Conzati Park.  I returned to Salem on December 17th, in the middle of an ice storm, to pack up some kitchen and personal belongings on December 29…via Las Vegas where I spent Christmas with my son Greg. After returning to Oaxaca, I then took a short journey through mountain villages in Guatemala for two weeks…returning to Oaxaca through San Cristobal Chiapas.

The end of September 2009 I joined Greg’s father in Las Vegas and then up to Salem Oregon for a month to see son Doug, some friends and Bob’s 93 year old mother. Then Bob flew back to his home in Jomptien Thailand and I flew to Hong Kong to see son Josh, (newly divorced) then Thailand for 5 months…a good amount of dental work…and a month on Koh Samui with my daughter-in-law and her mother to help them set up the new beach restaurant that my son rented. Watched the demonstrators rally but left before the burning of Bangkok. Then back to Hong Kong for a week before flying back to Oregon for a couple weeks and home to Oaxaca via Las Vegas. Whew! I didn’t care if I saw another airport again!

However, I missed having a car to visit mountain villages in Oaxaca, so in September 2010 I flew to Oregon where I spent a month with my son Doug who was visiting there from Thailand, negotiated the purchase of a Nissan Xterra, and drove to Las Vegas where I spent 3 weeks with my son Greg. Then picked up a Oaxaca expat friend near Palm Springs and drove across the border at Nogales…no searches…no stops! 🙂 On to Guadalajara, Guanajuato and then Queretaro to see an old expat friend. Then took the new toll road from just south of Queretaro straight across to Puebla and down to Oaxaca.

You can view pictures and videos I made of our travel by clicking on the links under “My Links” on the right side of the screen if you scroll down a ways.

With kids scattered all over the world, thank goodness for Video Skype.

Eunice “Zoe” Goetz

Oh, I forgot. I hitch-hiked through Europe with a friend the summer of 1965.

Max’s Day

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Since I spoke to you last, I have spend one king-hell of a strange day. The morning was spent exchanging e-mails with one of the Mexican nationals who works for the sinisterly named ‘Citizen’s Benefits Office’ at our embassy in Mexico City. As you know I’ve been trying to straighten out my seriously screwed up Social Security account for the last four or five months.

Now, Eunice, before I moved down here I would have laughed out loud at anybody who told me there was any more hide-bound, ineffective, opaque, inefficient or surreal organization on the face of god’s green earth than the U.S. Federal bureaucracy. That was before I learned the Mexican ways of conducting business. They are simply incomprehensible to anyone not born and raised here. The first rule to remember is that Mañana means only one thing: “Not today.” Staffing a Federal bureaucratic department with Mexican Nationals was a strategic blunder exceeded in our lifetimes only by Bush’s Iraqi war.

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Sights & Sounds Of Oaxaca

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It is very quiet in Oaxaca now
For some people.
Others are in hiding.

There are only fireworks at night.
It is the Christmas season.
There is a big tree with lights in the Zocalo.
The pain of the people is buried under
Tree bark and red Chrysanthemums in the gardens.

It is very quiet in Oaxaca now.
The PFP are camped in the plaza
In the front of the Cathedral…
Sleeping, reading the papers…like the teachers
But they have big guns on their laps.

It is very quiet in Oaxaca now
For some people.
Others are watching and listening.
And waiting.

Like the Tlacuache.

San Andreas Huayapam Fiesta

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Last week, with friends, I attended the annual San Andreas Huayapam Fiesta about 25 minutes northeast of Oaxaca City. Very well organized with a lot of people for such a small pueblo. There was a local band that played music during the fireworks that scared the heck out of me and kept me well back from the action. Men ran up and down with with fireworks shooting out of structures built like bulls and castles. Once in awhile small boys would chase after a wheel that would spin off into the crowd.

Then a huge structure was lit with continuous fireworks shooting up and down and up into the night sky. Young men walked around giving out free copas of mescal and cigarettes. Food stands and carnival rides for the kids surrounded the band stands and dance area. I understand that each family was assessed $30 for the fiesta…a very large amount for most people. By the end of the night no one had ended up in jail as is often the case. When the fireworks were finished a great band played for the dance that began at 1am. The band played until 5am with no break.