Hey guys!! As you know I'm on vacation for the next little while with my other half Brendan. In the meantime, I have some lovely blogger friends guest posting on my blog. The topic? Best Vacation EVER. Today Nova will be writing about her trip to Mexico. If you haven't checked out her blog, DO IT. She's awesome. And without further ado....
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First of all, I’d like to thank Erin so much for letting me talk about myself on her blog. It’s always so scary and exciting to have the chance to talk to an entirely new set of people. Hi everyone!
Erin asked me, and I assume a bunch of other people, to write about a vacation trip we’ve taken. I honestly haven’t been tons of places other than Mexico, so I’m going to tell you about one little trip to Oaxaca City I took in November 2007 for the dia de los muertos. Somehow this trip seems to fit best on Erin’s blog.
It had always been a goal of mine to be in Mexico during that time of the year, as I like cool skeletons and pretty papercuts and creepy atmospheres, so when I had the opportunity to do a year-long exchange to Xalapa, Veracruz, I was stoked! Mexico in November! I thought that dia de los muertos was going to be kind of like Halloween, but for adults too. Boy what an understatement. The day of the dead stuff lasts for weeks, and is HUGE. And it’s not as much of a party atmosphere as I had thought it was going to be. It’s quite serious in a way, but also larger than life and somehow carnival-esque. There was celebration for sure, but not in an in-your-face kind of way for the most part.
This was four years ago, and my memory has kind of faded as to exactly how that trip went…luckily for me I kept a crappy updated-like-twice-a-month blog during my time in Mexico and wrote about it, so I will be relying heavily on what I said there. The writing’s hurried and of low quality; I wrote blog posts when I had time between classes at the language school across the street in an internet café with a bathtub in it, everybody chain smoking around me. I don’t know how I made it that far writing like that. Or what suddenly changed in my psyche. I suppose I have blogging to thank for that; it is excellent practice.
So, back to the trip…first of all, at our little Spanish school in Xalapa, we had heard rumors that one of the hottest places to be during the day of the dead was in Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, which was all the way across the country, literally from where we were staying. And so, after much planning we decided it was no big deal, we had a few days off school, and we’d just take a bus.
I’d like to add here that the busses in Mexico are phenomenal. They’re like if you take the Greyhound busses in Canada, but then make it like a tenth of the cost, double the comfort of the seats, add like a million towns to the routes, add more busses to each fleet, plus you get free snacks and movies all the way to your destination. I can’t recommend the ADO and ETN busses enough. They’re as luxurious as riding a coach bus with fifty other people could possibly be.
Here’s my Oaxaca Trip entry from that crappy blog…note the complete lack of introduction or explanation as to what the hell I was talking about. Oh yeah, and I had dreadlocks in 2007. So…there’s that.
Another ten hours on busses and we arrived in Oaxaca at almost 5 in the morning. Since we had nowhere to go until our check in time of 11 at the hostel, we waited until 7 at the bus station, and then went for breakfast at one of 2 restaurants in the city that opened that early in the morning. Dropped off our bags at the hostel and did some walking around until check in time.
There were SO many people from our little school in Xalapa in Oaxaca that weekend, and many of them were staying in the same hostel which was cool and annoying at the same time... it’s difficult to organize anything with a big group of people, but I never lacked company.
Apparently we had all decided separately to go to the same place, and even the same hostel. Isn’t that hilarious? The rest of my blog entry is in point form, which is actually a nice way to throw a bunch of random information together, so I think I’m going to just let you all have a look at my favorite bits of the trip that way, with little explanations to go along with it. Please note, I didn’t take many of these pictures and have credited the original photographers on the photos, just in case people get all stealy, as internetters are wont to do.
-We decided to go to some ruins nearby, called "monte alban". There were eight or ten of us, we took two taxis out there and stayed for 3 or 4 hours. The ruins were really cool...lots of pyramids and stuff.
-We decided to go to some ruins nearby, called "monte alban". There were eight or ten of us, we took two taxis out there and stayed for 3 or 4 hours. The ruins were really cool...lots of pyramids and stuff.
LOL! “…lots of pyramids and stuff” is quite the understatement. For any of you who have been to Monte Alban it is just gorgeous. It’s an entire ruinous city located on the top of a mountain! Or at least a really tall hill. The view from any location was fantastic, and um, you know, they had lots of pyramids and stuff. And altars. Pretty much everywhere we went had altars.
Here’s a little (sideways!) video clip of our Norwegian and New Orleansean friends jumping off the side of the pyramid. It looked to us like they would fall to their death, but there was a little ledge they could land on and not die.
-One night we went out to a seedy kind of bar and drank waaaay too much mescal. If you don’t know what mescal is, it’s kind of like tequila but from an agave plant...and I think it’s unrefined. So the next day was SUPER hangover.
And to this day, I love me some mescal. Seriously. Have you ever had it? Do. Here’s me, totally wasted. For posterity.
-We went to a "folkloric dance" in the town center. It was free entrance, so even though folkloric dance sounds kind of lame, we went anyway. It turns out it was kind of the story of day of the dead, including really cool music and dancing zombies and creeeepy guys who i think were supposed to be priests but really looked like the jack in the box spokesman.
I took a video of it, it’s pretty low quality but you get the general picture of what I’m talking about…the Jack-In-The-Box thing is pretty funny.
It was really neat, we had great seats right in front of everyone. Near the end of it some of the dancers brought me and 2 of my friends onto the stage to dance with them. In front of like 500 Mexicans. Then when the song ended, we were about to go off the stage, but the dancers said "Wait until death passes". We were like "What?" and then all the lights turned off and there was some guy dressed like death walking through the crowd then onto the stage. It was kind of scary.
Yeah, it was kind of scary. We all had to freeze in place while an announcer said something creepy about death being able to strike anybody at any time. And death went around “killing” some of the dancers around us. EEK!
-Markets markets and more markets. Oaxaca is known for their handicrafts. I tried not to spend a lot of money, but i did get a few things.
-We took a trip to a famous rubber tree called "el tule". it’s between 2000 and 3000 years old. They say it’s the biggest tree in the world but I don’t believe it. I think it’s just a tourist trap mainly. It was really cool, and obviously really old. And the trunk was wider than any tree I’ve ever seen.
Sorry about the formatting of some of these pictures It makes me crazy these days when people’s photos are all different sizes and formats, but this was the only one I could find of the tree, and I thought the Monte Alban pic was worth a look too.
-They sell corn on the cob covered with mayo, lime and chile everywhere in Mexico, and i finally tried some from a street vendor in Oaxaca. And now I love it. I know that mayonnaise sounds disgusting but it actually is really good.
OH! How I miss esquite. So so so much. It was my number one favorite snack in Mexico, and it seemed like wherever you’d go there would be at least one little food cart guy selling esquite. And they never believed me that I wanted chile in it because I’m a white girl, but I was all tough and insisted on it. Yum yum. My mouth is literally watering, thinking about it.
-We visited a chocolate shop where they actually have the cocoa beans there, and make the chocolate. It smelled amazing in there!
Oh right. And day of the dead was everything I expected. So cool!!! We decided to go to 2 cemeteries. The first one was in a small town and was called XOXO. (pronounced hhohho, kind of). Since it was in a small town, every grave in the tiny cemetery was decorated with the special flowers they use for day of the dead, and i think more or less the whole town was there. I found that cemetery pretty creepy. The graves were not in rows or anything, and there were some fresh ones with the ground all humped up, so it looked like the body was right there...and since the graves weren’t in rows and it was really dark in there, I kept stepping on them by accident.
THAT? Was a creepy place to be. It felt too formal and private to take any pictures. And was much too dark for my crappy camera anyway.
We went to the central cemetery for Oaxaca after that. It was HUGE and more of a party then I was expecting. There was a freaking carnival outside, and inside there was live music and gigantic paper mache skeletons and people dancing and drinking. The cemetery was really beautiful as well.
Here’s a little video I took inside the central cemetery. The place was huge, and unfortunately I wasn’t thinking too much about documenting the place, I just wanted to capture a little bit of the music that was being played, it was so haunting. You can see a candle lit path, and at the end of the video just one of like a thousand giant ornate mausoleums.
Day of the dead is beautiful.
The decorations and everything, I guess they seem morbid, but I love the fact that the people believe the dead come back for a visit every year, and they leave them presents on altars.
So yeah, the trip sounds ideal, right? But what is missing from these little entries is the heat, the sweat, the revulsion at people eating crickets, the sleeping in bunkbeds with thirty other people…the general confusion of traveling. You know, those little mix-ups and the confusing things that happen…and the small kindnesses of near strangers, like when someone gives you keys to an empty apartment when you miss your bus:
4 of us were supposed to leave at 3:00 Sunday to be back here in Xalapa in the night, but we missed our bus!!! and had to stay another night, because the next bus didn’t leave until 8am Monday. We had all spent so much money on the weekend we really didn’t want to stay in a hostel another night. Luckily one of the girls we were with had a friend who lives in Oaxaca. He said that he was in the process of moving into a new apartment, and he was still living at his old place but we could stay in the new one. He gave us the keys and said the only condition was that we have to be quiet and not have a party.
So it was really cool, we got to stay in an apartment for free. We played a bunch of word games and scrabble, and made a necklace as a thank you present for him. The next morning we arrived at the bus station super early, just to be safe, and I got home at 8pm yesterday.
4 of us were supposed to leave at 3:00 Sunday to be back here in Xalapa in the night, but we missed our bus!!! and had to stay another night, because the next bus didn’t leave until 8am Monday. We had all spent so much money on the weekend we really didn’t want to stay in a hostel another night. Luckily one of the girls we were with had a friend who lives in Oaxaca. He said that he was in the process of moving into a new apartment, and he was still living at his old place but we could stay in the new one. He gave us the keys and said the only condition was that we have to be quiet and not have a party.
So it was really cool, we got to stay in an apartment for free. We played a bunch of word games and scrabble, and made a necklace as a thank you present for him. The next morning we arrived at the bus station super early, just to be safe, and I got home at 8pm yesterday.
Sometimes I think back to my time in Mexico, and I wonder if I did it over again now, with my love for blogging pretty much daily, and my love of photography that has developed over the past few years, would I have enjoyed it more? I think so. I was feeling lost there, and I think that had I been such an avid blogger as I am now, I would have felt like I had a purpose. And a creative outlet.
Thanks so much Erin for letting me be a part of your blog. This was fun!
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THANK YOU NOVA! This was awesome to read! As a kid I use to have a huge fascination with Mexico, and going there for the Day of the Dead is on my bucket list.
Until next time, later gators!
~E
