Oaxaca travel blog # 2
This morning we go out for coffee and end up with some of the best espresso I’ve ever had. It’s $1.50. June wants to wash her hair so we head back and discover that the shower doesn’t work. Also the toilet doesn’t work. The charm of our little place is wearing thin. I spend an hour fixing it all, we get showered, and by then we’re starving.
As we walk down the stone streets, the little cafes and mezcalerias give way to the Zocalo and full bore mercados where locals buy meat, vegetables and bread in incomprehensible amounts. We enter a cavernous building full of food stands. Two señoritas jump in front of us with menus so we capitulate and sit down.
I am here for mole, and the chicken mole doesn’t disappoint. It’s thicker, richer, more chocolatey, and yet also spicier than anything I’ve ever had before. June gets some chocolate con leche, which turns out to be a large bowl of too-sweet hot chocolate.
We exit through the smoke-filled Hall of Meats and head into another cavernous building full of a different kind of food. Here, art is everywhere. Blankets, shawls and bedspreads in subtle and brilliant colores, native dresses and shirts that seem both traditional and ultra-modern, all of it spurring my hunger for beautiful things.
In the final booth, I fall into the big psychedelic eyes of an owl. A plant medicine flashback overwhelms my senses. The surge and motion of familiar geometries burst my sense of here and now, and I struggle to remain standing. These are alebrijes, handpainted carvings of leopards and dragons and insects, each one a magical beast of the more-than-real world.
Already I love this place. It feels like home and a wild, foreign country all at the same time. I want to sink into it and drown, to find out who I am by letting go of the life I’ve led so far. It is the impulse of a child, and I want to be a child again.
#alebrijes #psychadelics #mushrooms #dentaltourism #oaxaca #travelblog #singersongwriter #paulinoaxaca
