Category Archives: Mexico
Wedding Day in Oaxaca
It’s Sunday morning, Feb. 7, and members of the wedding party are straggling in slowly to sit around the pool in the sun and recover from the 12-hour wedding extravaganza yesterday. Will is splashing happily in the pool, and Rick is sipping water in the shade.
The wedding day began yesterday with Will cementing his new friendships with Max and Fred, the 5- and 7-year-old sons of the “best boy,” as they called their father, a university friend of Rob the Groom. Will and the boys ran wildly through a huge empty room in the hotel/nunnery, perhaps once a chapel, now a performance area. Fred and Max fascinated Will with stories of their school uniforms in London, where they wear a tie everyday to school and a “jumper.” Seemed totally wild to him.
We then dressed for the wedding, which began at noon in the ornate 16th century Temple of Santo Domingo. The elaborate cathedral was nearly entirely gilded inside, even its fluted columns glinting with gold. Popes, cupids, angels and early church fathers covered the arching ceiling. As it is a major tourist destination, tourists wearing shorts and sporting cameras rather rudely wandered up and down the aisles during the ceremony.
The ceremony was entirely in Spanish, with Rob even speaking his parts in flawless Spanish. The bride Elizabeth was gorgeous, in a classy, form-fitting silk gown. Since bride and groom are both journalists (Elizabeth a photographer for AP in Beijing, the groom a TV producer for Aljazeera based in London) the place was bristling with top news photographers from around the world – Agence France Presse, AP, Getty – all scrambling like paparazzi to photograph their friends’ wedding. It was a wonderful scene.
After the mass, which Will weathered beautifully in his little pinstriped blazer that Rick said made him look like a rock star trying to dress nicely – we left the church to find a Mexican band and huge, 8-foot-tall dancing puppets depicting the bride and groom. Women in colorful Mexican costumes handed out tiny green pottery cups and poured mescal for guests in the blazing sun. The square swarmed with trinket sellers, beggars, tourists, the wedding party and tourists snapping photos – it was quite a scene. Eventually led by the band and the bride and groom, those of us wearing high heels tottered our way down the cobbled streets back to the hotel, where we gathered for the civil ceremony in one of the hotel’s grassy courtyards.
After that champagne, followed by “mescalitis” or margaritas made with mescal, a multicourse meal featuring Oaxacan specialities such as mole, another live mariachi band, tequila, toasts, dancing to everything from raggaeton “Gasoline” to old Madonna standards. There was even a reporter and photographer from the local press doing a story on the acclaimed Mexican journalist (Elizabeth) getting married in town. Will alternatively danced and chased his friends – all of them wearing Lucha Libre Mexican wrestling masks and swinging small rubber chickens – gifts from the bride and groom. Helen, Mike, Rick and I sipped tequila and took in the scene.
Will logged more than 30,000 steps on his pedometer. Finally, about 9:30, he couldn’t take it any more and asked to go to bed. Since our room was right next to the action, he bathed to the sound of the now-returned mariachi band and wrote three pages in his journal before falling asleep with the music still blaring.
This morning, Will declared it was the best wedding ever.
Exploring Oaxaca and Monte Alban
Today we slept in, for a total of 11 hours! We got up and had a leisurely breakfast in the bouganvilla courtyard, where there is an amazing buffet. Will had French toast and papaya (so good, he says), while the adults tasted the tamales and local cheeses.
We then hired Arnold, a local guide, who drove Helen, Mike and us up to Monte Alban, at 6,500 feet in elevation a full 1,500 above the city on a hill the ancient Zapotecs flattened to build a vast ceremonial city. It was amazing. We descended into a tomb, saw the ruins of domestic homes under whose floors the families buried the bones of their family members, and a ceremonial ball court that Arnold said had to do with fertility. We think Arnold had his favorite theories about things, not necessarily based on archaeology, since it didn’t always jive with what we read in our guidebooks or on the explanatory signs along the route, but who knows?
We walked among the remains of huge temple platforms once used for sacrifice and other ceremonies and the vast grounds that had amazing acoustics so the priests could address the assembled masses. The day was clear and the views of the valley were amazing. Arnold, who is 82, also told us about the mathematical and astronomical sophistication of the Zapotec people, who lived in the areas some 3,000 years ago, according to his reckoning, which we are not sure of. The ruins date from 500 B.C, so around the time of classical Greece, the Parthenon and Greek tragedy. We saw the glyphic writing, along with carvings in stone of contorted human figures called “Los Danzantes,” or the Dancers — though modern archeologists speculate they may be sacrifice victims or defeated kings. It was hot, and Will started to droop, but gutted it out for the full proverbial three-hour tour. Will also found a carving on a stair, which was his first major archaeological find!
We ended up back in town by 2:30, nearly the local time to have the main meal of the day. We ate at a lovely, relaxing restaurant called, appropriately, “Los Danzantes.” It was a beautiful indoor courtyard, surrounded by soaring architectural stone walls that echoed the ruins we had just seen. Will insisted we sit near the large pool surrounded by artistically arranged mortars and pestles. We had good food – coconut shrimp for Will, which he snarfed – a few Coronas and wandered back to the hotel to relax before the first official event of the wedding, a cocktail party on a rooftop terrace overlooking the Cathedral of Santo Domingo and the sunset on the distant hills.
We met many of Elizabeth and Rob’s family and friends, and Will made two new buddies, 5- and 7-year-old brothers who are sons of the best man from London. Courtenay freaked that they would catapult off the terrace (there were no rails whatever) or plunge into a cactus or crash into the open fires where chefs were cooking tortillas. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Then home to our hotel, a block away, for baths and cuddles and the sound of guitar music from some evening party we hope ends soon! Good night all!
Greetings from Oaxaca, Mexico!
It’s Thursday evening, Feb. 5, and we’ve had our first full day in Oaxaca after flying in Wednesday evening. Our flights from Portland to Houston and from there into Oaxaca were uneventful – Will was a peach, despite a 6-hour layover in Houston. We met our good friends Helen Ubinas and Mike Dunne in the Houston airport, and came into the city with them. Our hotel, the Camino Real, is a really beautiful old hotel that is a major historical site in itself, a former convent built in the 16th century – at the time of Shakespeare, Will likes to relate. It is a stunning place, with exposed brick, crumbling stucco on walls several feet thick, a labyrinth of passageways, arches and hidden courtyards lush with flowering trees and bouganvilla. There is also lovely, chilly pool that Will took a dip in this afternoon. Outside our room is an ancient gazebo-esqe structure called the Lavendera. It’s where the nuns used to do the laundry, and there’s lovely running water into a series of basins.
Last night we cooled off after we arrived with a couple beers and a big Sprite for Will in one of the courtyards (the whole place is open to the sky), and a plate of cheese, meats and deep fried grasshoppers, which were spicy and, actually we decided, not all that tasty. This morning we went exploring on foot with Mike and Helen, starting with the Zocalo, the main square in the center of the city, through the massive gothic central cathedral and on to the central market, which is this enormous, sprawling collection of tiny booths all packed under one roof. Everything was for sale, from huge slabs of meat, whole dangling saffron-colored chicken, and entire mahi mahi and other fish, to toys, jewelry, pots, art, fruit and vegetables, and piles and piles of those grasshoppers. Row upon row of chilies in burlap bags were stacked next to piles of fresh herbs and spices. It reminded Courtenay of the indoor markets she visited years ago in Vietnam. It was a wild, fun place, and Will’s eyes were wide the entire time.
We went from there to a chocolate factory. Oaxaca is famous for its chocolates; after all, cacao was first cultivated here by the ancient peoples, where it was made into a drink for royalty. Chocolate is now used in the many and complex moles for which Oaxaca is famous. We bought several kinds after trying some of the tasting-size pieces. Will put a pretty good size dent in the tray of tasting pieces before we pulled him away. We went from there to the big regional museum a block from our hotel at the Cathedral of Santo Domingo. The collection of ancient artifacts dating from the time of Classical Greece are housed in another gorgeous former convent, a huge stone building surrounded by an amazing cactus garden and full of ancient artifacts from the nearby ruins at Monte Alban and other sites. The artifacts ranged from prehistoric spearpoints to intricate gold and jade jewelry found in a tomb at Monte Alban to relics of the Spanish invasion. Numerous interior courtyards and open external windows gave us a view of the surrounding mountains and the sprawling low-slung city. It was a great museum, and we had almost the whole place to ourselves.
We went from the museum to lunch at a restaurant sporting modern art, when we sampled the mole sauces for which Oaxaca is famous – verde, Colorado, tradicionel, and three others whose names we’ve forgotten. After that, it was back to the hotel to hang around the pool, and meet more of the friends and family of Elizabeth Dalziel and Rob Hodge, the couple getting married on Saturday.
Tonight we’re all going out to dinner with the wedding party at a traditional restaurant looking out on the zocalo, and tomorrow we’re hiring a driver to take us out to Monte Alban, the ancient ruins. Hope all’s well back in Oregon.
The Thompson Attigs 