May 3-4th, 2016
Whoa! At first Oaxaca seems kind of boring, and then you realize that you don’t have enough time to see everything!
Things to See/Do
Our guide book and friends gave us so many tips of what to see and do in Oaxaca. While we didn’t do many of them, we still had a lovely couple of days off. Of the recommended sights we did check out the Church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán which reminds me somewhat of Notre Dame for it’s glistening features inside. We checked out Zocalo and the Cathedral of Oaxaca and took many pictures of the colourful buildings. We didn’t visit the recommended pyramids of Monte Alban or see the waterfalls at Hierve el Agua; can’t say why, we just didn’t feel like it. Nor did we try the fried grasshoppers that are apparently a local delicacy.
What happened…
Andrew writes: This feeling of being pressured for time reared it’s head again while we were enjoying our first day off the bikes in about a week. We hopped on the bus and took it downtown to walk around the city and see what it had to offer. It turns out quite a bit! First up, we spotted a Mexican Chinese restaurant and decided to give our first Chinese buffet a try. The price was reasonable ($70MX or $5CDN) and we could hardly move we were so stuffed by the end of it all. There was a Champions League soccer match on the TV which kept us quite entertained too. Thus we were locked and loaded to being our 5km walking tour of the city, using our guidebook as reference.
Along the way we passed churches and squares, plazas and parks, stores and cafes. Oaxaca seems to have something for everyone. I found myself being surprised. I hadn’t expected it to be so awesome. Amanda and I talked about either cycling to, or taking a bus to, or using a tour operator to visit the local Toltec ruins of Monte Alban….yet somehow that sounded exhausting after hiking around the city for a few hours. Instead we decided to do absolutely nothing on our second day.
Absolutely nothing in this case meant doing laundry, updating the blog, surfing Facebook, and hanging out with our new friends Jason and Dina, and their four dogs. Jason and Dina have each qualified for the Skyhoundz World Championships, with two of their four dogs being quite talented when it comes to catching frisbees out of the air. I got to spend an hour with them taking photos while they practiced with Trufe and Baconbits. Their other two dogs, Soya and Oreo are more snuggly and loveable, and I was ready to dognap Soya by the time we came to leave. Dina was nice enough to listen to Amanda, Jason and I make music for an hour or two. I was on the tin whistle, Jason was using a recorder or guitar, and Amanda was on her guitar. We just jammed along. Jason’s tenor recorder has me thinking that I want to get one – they just sound so cool. A lot less shrill than the tin whistle, he made it appear effortless to play alongside Amanda’s guitar. What a fun time we had in Oaxaca!
Amanda writes:
I loved walking around the city and seeing what there was to see almost as much as I enjoyed our rest day. Two different situations, and both suited us well at the time they happened. Our hosts were so gracious to include us in activities when we wanted inclusion and leave us alone when we wanted to rest. That’s what I love about warm showers hosts; they get it. They get you might just want to sit and do nothing and while we seem to harbour a bit of regret about not seeing everything there was to see, in reflection it was a great couple of days. Guess we’ll just have to come back to Mexico … won’t we.
Oh ya … note to self: your body does not like all you can buffets. Our Chinese buffet experience was only the second time in almost two years that we tried a buffet. Both times I’ve felt horrible. Don’t get me wrong, the food has been good but my eyes are bigger than my stomach and my body is not happy afterward. It always seems like such a good idea at the time. A hungry cyclist, yummy food, all you can eat; what could go wrong? Amanda; don’t do it!