Mexico City and Oaxaca
I´ve come to the end of my first week in Mexico and it´s been fantastic. I started off in Mexico City where I saw lots of fabulous things during the day including Frida Kahlo´s house where there were many of her and Diego Rivera´s paintings on display, the Palacio Nacional where I saw some of Rivera´s famous murals. I also saw the fabulous anthropology museum where there´s far too much info to absorb in one day but I got a lot out of it anyway.
One day while wandering around the main square I met a local guy, Cesar, who was trying to figure out what the enormous tent in front of us was for and whether we could go in... I was wondering the same thing, so after asking the right people we discovered it was a dinosaur exhibition and that we could go in, so we did. After we´d seen the exhibition he invited me to a friend of his place where he and some friends would be doing ¨performance¨ - a type of dance.
The fun continued at night I ended up going with a couple of other girls from the hostel where I was staying. We drank beer (Mexican beer being remarkably palatable) and watched them pàint each others bodies and then stay motionless while different coloured lights were shone around them. This was captured on camera with a single shot with about 1 minute exposure time. It created quite a spectacular effect. They said they´ll send me a link to youtube once they´ve put it to music and got it all ready.
The next night I went out again with Cesar and his friends to one of their friend´s art exhibitions which consisted of striped/brightly coloured stockings stretched all over the room. By the end of the night we were all drinking beer, dancing to electronica music within the web of stockings so that we were all connected to everyone elses movements as we danced. Very fun and even more so when we made a strong stocking net that meant we could go "stocking surfing"
On the third night I went out to a goth club that played music from 80s - present with a Chilean girl from the hostel. Despite my light coloured clothing, we had a great time. We went out the next night with some more girls from the hostel and a local guy we met to Garibaldi where marachi bands play for you and you dance to their music. We were too wimpy to do this, but did go dancing at a salsa club next door which was heaps of fun!
Just out of Mexico City is Teotihuacan, an archaeological site with a Sun and Moon pyramid that I climbed as well as lots of other beautiful structures.
I then headed to the city of Oaxaca, where I am now. This is a beautiful place with lots of markets surrounded by mountains, a beautiful church, Santa Domingo, with a ridiculous amount of gold in it and many religious figures portrayed as indigenous Mexican´s, including one wearing a Mexican hat. Nextdoor is a fantastic museum housed in the monastery which has lots of info about the local cultures and how they were affected by the arrival of the Spanish as well as the treasure from ¨Tomba 7¨which is a tomb from the archaeological site, Monte Alban with lots of beautiful gold, silver, turquoise and other artefacts.
I´ve since been to Monte Alban which was spectacular and remarkably un-touristed and the town of Mitla (a more recent site built around 300 years ago) which had lots of beautiful mosaic type decorations and architecture designed to withstand earthquakes. I saw el Tule where there is apparently the biggest tree in the world - which was enormous but was a bit too much of a tourist spectacle for my liking.
Today I went climbing near Oaxaca City at San Sebastian. This was volcanic rock and there were fabulous climbs as well as lovely views. Unfortunately walking to the climbing spot I lost balance at one stage and grabbed on to the neares thing which happened to be a cactus... Bad move. I spent the next half hour trying to extract cactus spikes from my hand with help from the others I was climbing with using a swiss army knife pair of tweezers, pin and scissors with eventual success - at least most of it seems to be out now so hopefully it won´t get infected.
I´ve also been to lots of galleries both public and commercial and lots of markets while in Oaxaca.
I´m heading to San Cristobal on an overnight bus tonight where I´ll hopefully get some sleep.
Hopefully I´ll manage to write more frequent shorter posts from now on, but I guess I´ll just see how I go - thanks for persisting if you´ve read til here!
