March 2010 - Mexico City and Oaxaca

The second leg of our trip was Mexico City (called DF or Day Effa by the locals which stands for Districto Federales) and then to Oaxaca. Rich (my brother) and his wife Mei Mei met us in DF and we traveled by bus to Oaxaca (6 hours in the luxury bus with comfortable seats and movies in Spanish). We stayed in a wonderful hotel - Los Goliandrias (The Swallows) which had about 30 rooms all around beautiful gardens with lots of nooks and crannies for sitting outside to read. They had a lovely breakfast area so we ate there every morning. This was a great chance to try out many different restaurants, only repeating one twice. Oaxaca is a very clean city, different than San Miguel de Allende in its layout and style - wider streets and different style buildings. They have a very large "zocolo" or main square with activity day and night. We combined tourist activities and relazation. Main highlights for me were the ruins of Monte Alban, the Museo Regional de Oaxaca in the ex-convento de Santo Domingo Church, Tour of the Etla Market and Cooking Class with "Seasons of the Heart Cooking School" run by cookbook author Susana Trilling, and lastly our trip to a small indigenous town known for rug weaving - Teotitlan de Valle.

The beginning and end in DF included visits to San Angel, a small artistic neighborhood and many sites related to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo that we had not seen before.

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Monte Alban is a large pre-columbian archaeologica site inhabitated by the Zapotecans who were responsible for the distinct architectural stle and its rise to power. The city enjoyed two golden eras (around 100 BC to 100 AD and 600 to 800 AD) at which time Monte Alban's population had terraced the surronding hillsides to support a population close to 35,000. It had two eras of decline. The first around 200 AD and the second in 800 AD to leave it uninhabited. The reasons for this are unknown but they know that by the beginning of the 13th century a people who had long coexisted with the Zapotecans called the Mixtec began to expand their territory and that they reoccupied Monte Alban but did not add much to the existing architecture. They did leave, however, fantastic jewels and treasures in "Tomb 7" which we saw in the museum in the city of Oaxaca. It is facinating to explore the many ruins found in Mexico of the different peoples.