Hotel Villa Ana Maria Oaxaca

... young population.
Met Elias at the hostel (Hi !) who was very kind and showed me around. Too bad I was too tired to really enjoy the nightclubs...

Next day, my plane for Bogota took off at 3:50pm. I accidentally broke a piece inside the -cheap-plane, and was kindly asked to not destroy it during the flight ^^.

... us by doing some performing of their own. We watched an opera singer, a guitarist, and a pianist who composed his own music. So awesome! Then, half of the choir sang for us while the other half asked everyone from Up With People to dance!

Then we performed our mini-show! The screams were deafening! It felt so great to perform for students who were so appreciative of our music and message.

That, and I'm pretty sure that all of the girls had ...

... pyramids were fascinating, it was just a shame you could see a wall mart when admiring the view from the top.
At the pyramids was a cactus bush bearing fruit. I thought of Balloo the Bear from the jungle book and the prickly pears he had eaten. Balloo was a cool baer so I thought I would try his advice and eat the prickly pear. It was nice, but I ended up getting tiny prickles all over my hands and worse, in my mouth. I couldn’t get them out of my ...

... masks were so lifelike (they had porcelain eyes above slits that their inhabitants could peer out of) that it was hard to stare directly at them.  A few of them took a liking to Jurni and came right over to her at their first chance.  Jurni was understandably stand-offish, but it was clear she appreciated the attention.  They let her feel their (goatskin?) pants, and she then danced a bit with them in the parade.

 

I’m not entirely sure what it was we were ...

... go.

The last night of our 3 days in Oaxaca was spent chilling in the town centre with the locals watching the world go by as yet another local fiesta cranked into life. I thought Spain had the crown for this but it seems that Mexico can give them a good run for their pesos as at the drop of a hat a large crowd can be bought together compete with band (standard practice in these parts), traditional dancing galore, a plethora of street vendors selling every thing that you could ...

... that look onto the square, we were greeted if that's what you can call a point in the general direction of the tables with fag in hand) by the owner of the place, who was a Mexican Joan Crawford, I loved her instantly. Our waitress Dolores was adorable, I wanted to bring her back to the UK and take her to Harrods and show her around and eventually start calling her Mum...ANYWAY, there was grasshopper with Guacamole ...

... dead, whereupon food and flowers were placed on the graves. When that was prohibited the Indians started building altars on top of the graves. It is a HUGE all-Mexico celebration here and while I am well aware of the young people already wearing their Halloween costumes, the older people are making special foods for the celebration and cemeteries are alive with late night parties - which usually include mescal! We noticed some girls ...

... spot but without success. We headed back to get the coach only to discover in our fustration we hadn't paid attention to the streets we took and went up,down and around many corners before we abandoned the car at the Park and on foot found the Coach. Next was to wind through the narrow streets and see if we could make the turn into the Park. With some tight juggling Ken got it inside and ...

... meet and so many things to see - museums, cathedrals (the Spanish conqistadors built it on the top of the ancient temple - Templo Mayor, which represented the beginning of the Mexico City :-/), the famous Diego Riviera's murals... The days flew by and it was soon time to move on. For the farewel we visited the 3rd highest building in Mexico, Mirador, and admired the city in all its greatness. We couldn't see the end of it! Spectacular!

... who drowned in the river. A little disturbing. After this Edith takes us back to Coyacan, by which point she is looking very ill with a headache. Both K and i think she says she´s off for a tequila to help... since she has just told us she can´t see much and she is driving us around we are a little concerned! However chucking the keys to the parking attendant to park her car she insists we won´t go back yet so we let her recover in a cafe ...