Eeurghaca
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
29
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
Oaxaca,
Mexico
Friday, December 7, 2007
A taxi to our hostel, and we checked in without incident, then chilled for a while, before vernturing out for food. We thought we'd treat ourselves, as the guidebook we had said Casa Oaxaca, not far at all from the hostel, was a fantastic place set around an alcoved semi-indoor courtyard with a pomegranate tree growing through the middle of it, with amazing food and a really romantic atmosphere.
Sounded good.
It wasn't there.
Well, a place called Casa Oaxaca, with opening hours published, was there, but we had to ring a doorbell, which was answered by a non-English speaker, who said "Restaurant?" as soon as we tried to make ourselves understood, and then started pointing up the street and giving almost understandable directions. We tapped the little panel on the door jamb which identified the building whose entrance he was barring as being the restaurant, but no, no, we were to go up the street, right, two streets over, etc. We still don't really know what was going on - maybe the place had moved and the little plaque was still there because visitors with out-of-date guidebooks were a large part of their clientele, or maybe the rapid-fire Spanish we couldn't quite understand involved the phrase "not for the likes of you".
We did find another premises called Casa Oaxaca, which was more open and had a menu outside, but which wasn't quite what the book had promised. Ordinarily it would have been really good, but after the build up, it was...well, nice. We had a sort of Oaxaca province introductory platter to start, with various bits of pork, beef, grasshopper, chicken, cheese, etc. at which to pick, with sauces and tortillas to accompany them.
Yes. Grasshoppers.
There is nothing special about grasshoppers really - well, not in a culinary sense anyway. You may be imagining great big chunky locust things that need biting in half, with antennae big enough to pick your teeth. Small grasshoppers, for that is what they were, heavily seasoned and fragmented due to protracted frying, look like a pile of rice. Were we not told they had formerly been grasshoppers, we wouldn't have known, but still, they were quite nice, in a salty, spicy, oniony, don't have much of a flavour of their own kind of way.
Main courses were nice piles of fried stuff with mole and tortillas, and a pretty respectable bottle of wine, which, much to Kirsty's delight, we were allowed to operate ourselves. One of Kirsty's pet hates is waiters seizing bottles of wine and topping up glasses without asking. One, she likes to be able to keep an eye on how many glasses she's had, and two, she tends to drink at a different rate from Jacob, and so likes to wait for glasses to be emptied before they are refilled, so he isn't given more than his share. We are adults, we are being trusted to cut our own food, the fact that we have food and wine on our table proves that we can ask for your services when we want them, so please, please, if it's not too much trouble, bugger off and let us decide when our own damn glasses need filling.
We wandered back to the hostel, pausing before bed to do some internetty stuff, during which Kirsty typed up the entire Vancouver TravelPod entry and Jacob lost it before she'd saved it, but he mercifully escaped the savage thrashing he was therefore due.
The next day, after breakfast and hanging about in the leafy zocalo (main square), was mostly spent pottering around Oaxaca, nosing in markets and buying bits of nibbly food from street vendors. Oaxaca is a nice, fairly small old town, with a pace much more relaxed than that of the hectic capital from where we had come. Benito Juarez was from a village around here, so it holds a special place in Mexican hearts.
Juarez was a Zapotec Indian, orphaned at age three, who worked as a shepherd until the age of twelve, when, illiterate and speaking no Spanish, he walked the 35 miles to the city to get an education. Qualified as a lawyer, he became president (no mean feat for a pure blood Indian) from 1858 till his sudden death by heart attack in 1872, working at his desk in the Presidential Palace. Amongst other achievements he defeated Napoleon III, defeated Maximilian von Habsburg of Austria whom Napoleon tried to install as Emperor of Mexico, had him shot and sent the body back to Europe, restored the Republic of Mexico, and, in his efforts to modernise the nation, promote equal rights and lessen the Roman Catholic stranglehold on Mexican politics, generally became recognised as the greatest leader Mexico has ever had.
Being in the home of chocolate, we decided to sample some of it. We found ourselves a local chocolate shop, where they process the cocoa beans with sugar and various flavourings into little pellety things. There were a few dishes of said pellets on the counter for the picking at, so we had a pick. It was extremely disappointing. A sort of gritty mess that tasted more of brown sugar than anything else...saved us buying any though. Chocolate was really used for making drinks as far as the classical Mexican cultures were concerned: the brown gritty stuff was boiled up and served in liquid form. It was the Europeans who refined it into the edible solid stuff we know today. Mexico, it seems, is still in the boiled grit era.
After lots of wandering in markets full of pretty things, Jacob eventually bought a fancy looking Guatemalan shirt, and we wandered back to the hostel for a bit before heading out for ice cream. Our guidebook spoke of a sort of 'ice cream district': next to the basilica just along from our hostel, there is a plethora of neverias (ice cream stalls), of which, the book helpfully pointed out, the Neveria Niagara (?) was "hands down winner". It also spoke of the unusual local speciality flavour of leche quemada (literally 'burnt milk'), something of an acquired taste. Imagining the rich, almost cheese-like creaminess of milk which has boiled for slightly too long, Kirsty thought she'd give this a go, and discovered it tasted like...well, burnt milk. It tasted both of milk and of burnt smokiness at the same time. Not nice exactly, but sort of intriguing. She also had tuna sorbet, which turned out to be prickly pear. Jacob had peanut ice cream and mango sorbet, neither of which were anything to write home about...we wondered what the other places were like if this was easily the best, but elected not to find out.
That evening, we went out for food at a restaurant on the zocalo, Jacob ordering tamales and Kirsty, a bit off colour, just ordering some tortilla chips and refried beans. For those who don't know, tamales are corn dough, stuffed with bits and pieces, wrapped in banana leaves (or sometimes corn husks) and steamed. In Jacob's defence, when eating Greek dolmades (vine leaves stuffed with rice and such), he has found the leaves to be edible, and furthermore, when served anything involving steamed leaves, he has always found them to be edible. A couple of minutes into the chewing the fibrous mass which constituted his first forkful, the waitress very kindly came over, and without even a hint of a snigger, provided him with a side plate on which she unwrapped one of his tamales, cut off a mouthful sized piece of the filling, apologised for not having provided the plate before, and left him to it.
To Kirsty's sniggers and pointing out that he had seen her banana plant at home and should have known what the leaves are like, he says cobblers. He has seen potatoes and rice and wouldn't eat either of those in their natural states, but when steamed...
It's experiences like that, where the waiting staff really deserve their gratuities, which bear out what we said in the San Francisco entry about constant tipping rendering real tipping worthless: we left a tip to thank the waitress for her help, but because we were white tourists, she probably has absolutely no idea that that is what we meant.
That night, Kirsty's aforementioned feeling off colour worsened, and she legged it to the bog to explode violently from both ends, an activity of which she appeared not to tire for quite a while. It seems that the Fodor's Mexico Guide, as well as being a bit too much like a storybook for our tastes, is riddled with inaccuracy: not only was their number one restaurant in town not there, but their number one ice-cream place in town appears to sell poisoned burnt milk. Although we had been thinking about taking a tour to a local ruined temple just outside town, it seemed wise to spend the day closer to toilet facilities. Notice how the previous entry is peppered with references to how happy our bellies would be in Mexico? Kirsty wrote that.
There were admin things to be done in town, so the lack of trip to the temple wasn't a total washout. We found an English language bookshop and got ourselves a Peru guidebook, and as we had decided that the following day we were due to head to the coast, we found the office of a company who operate a minibus service down to Pochutla. The trip takes about six or seven hours, but this does knock hours off the time taken by the intercity coaches.
Buses organised, we hung out in the zocalo, watching the hundreds of shoe-shiners at work. It seems this is big business in Oaxaca, with the zocalo rammed full of fairly ritzy shoe-shine stands, with decent seats, sun canopies and newspapers for the shinees to read. It's strangely compelling, and very easy to spend a long time watching them.
Eventually, resigned to a lazy afternoon, Kirsty dozed in the hostel whilst Jacob went out for a sandwich and caught up with e-mail. We went out for a bite to eat that evening, Jacob in the mood to try a steak at a place the guide reckoned was basic, popular with the locals, and in the habit of serving really decent grilled meat. Not having learned Kirsty's lesson (i.e. the guidebook's culinary advice is utter bollocks), he ordered what promised to be a typical Oaxacan steak, but which seemed to be a piece of burnt leather. Kirsty, a little recovered by this point, had most of a bowl of soup, and we retired to the hostel to pack for the following day's trip to the coast...
