Number 3 in my posts about traveling in Oaxaca,Mexico.Or start with # 1 right here:
Oaxaca travel blog # 3
The street dogs of Oaxaca seem very at home in the restaurants. We love how this big brown dog, overweight and clearly living his best life, moves slowly through our favorite taco place. The diners ignore him and he ignores them. The servers rush around him as if he’s not there. He waits at the back for someone (we never see who) to give him a snack before moving on with his rounds.
There’s so much to eat here. Piles of roasted beetles compete with crepes on the sidewalk carts, and everywhere the smell of chocolate — ground with sugar and almonds or stirred in big hot pots or waiting in hand-wrapped bricks for the willing mouth.
We settle in for dinner and unfortunately there’s an old guy in the restaurant, jabbering away in very loud English. One of the pleasures of not speaking Spanish is that it doesn’t matter what people on the street or singers in songs are saying, it’s all music to me.
This guy’s tedious stories are not music. I just got here and I already resent gringo tourists. It strikes me how much I’ve grown up in the last ten years. In my thirties I would have gone over and said, “You know, we can hear every stupid word coming out of your mouth right now,” and then sat back down. Now I just suffer through it. I’m not sure it’s an improvement.
After the mole, the mezcal. We head to a bar that stocks hundreds of bottles of the stuff, each hand-labeled. It all comes direct from the maestros who harvest the agave — some of it cultivated, some of it wild — and distill it in their own distinctive way. We try a bunch of them, the proprietress explaining how each type of agave was grown, harvested after ten or twenty years, distilled in copper and stored in clay or wood vessels.
The stuff sold in the US as mezcal usually tastes like gasoline. This is not that. This is art in the form of liquor, nursed out of the ground in small batches through patience and expertise. The stunning complexity of these each tell a story that develops on the tongue, of grass and desert, of sharp nights and cold thorns, of the piña roasting as fire, earth and air combine to create the water of the gods.
#mezcal #oaxacamexico #travelblogger #singersongwriter #paulinoaxaca
