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Published: February 4th 2008
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Its sometimes nice when you're travelling to stay in one place for a while, and to feel like you actually got to know a city just a little beyond what the average tourist who passes through gets to see. I´d been planning to do a week´s spanish course somewhere early on in my travels, and recommendations from various guidebooks and people I´d met on the road suggested that
Oaxaca (pronounced wah-ha-kah) would be a pretty good place to do one. After arriving on the Saturday before last, it gave me time to suss out some of the schools, find a pretty cool backpackers/budget hotel, and settle in for the week and see what goes on in the fairly lively state capital.
My backpackers was a pretty cool place, with a nice big internal courtyard with lots of plants, cactii and some groovy artiscitc decorations and funky light shades. It doubled as a backpackers with dorms, and a budget hotel with private rooms, and as I was studying for the week I paid a bit more for my own room, even though the social atmos of the whole place felt more like a backpackers. On my first night I met Ryan,
Cathedral
Note for photography geeks: taken with my groovy new 16-35mm wide angle lense, wound down all the way to 16 a canadian who is
Couch-Surfing his way across Mexico though couldn´t suss anything out in Oaxaca hence he was staying in the hostel, and a fairly courageous American girl called Maddy from upstate New York who got a one-way flight to Guatemala with her road bike and is cycling her way home, often just camping in her tent somewhere off the road. She even cycles with her own leather-sheathed machete to clear ground for camping, and of course she could also wave in the face of any unwanted company - tho it sounds like she´s had no significant hassles so far.
Maddy had stopped in Oaxaca for 4 weeks, to do 4 weeks of language school. She had a pretty good feel for Oaxaca by the time I arrived, and on my first night she led me and Ryan to a very groovy night club with cool tunes, hip young Oaxaquenos (as people from Oaxaca are called) and groovy decor like strange art on the walls and big plush red velvet curtains hanging everywhere. Oaxaca is quite a youthful town, as it has a few Universities and university-aged students from all over the wider region come here to study.
My week was made up of 3 hours intensive spanish every morning, and I then had my afternoons to do as I pleased. I learnt a lot from my week at my
Spanish School , and both my teachers were really good. I would have one teacher for 90 minutes for spanish converations, and then another teachers for 90 minutes who covered grammar and other rules of the language. It turned out to be a pretty good combination, my vocab for day to day stuff expanded untolds - particularly re: things I need to talk about as a traveller, but I also learnt some key rules about speaking in past and future tenses, in addition to those aspects of the present tense which I already knew from previous night classes.
My afternoons and the weekend either side of the school week (ie. Mon to Fri) were made up of quite a lot of different things. One day I travelled just out of Oaxaca city to a satellite town called Tlacolula, as it was that town´s market day. Talk about a full-on assault on all of the senses, one person from the hostel summarised it best as she was leaving, "I
think I better go and lie down in a darkened room for a while and let my senses recover". I also made it to some impressive ruins of an older city, called
Monte Alban , to a few local art galleries (Oaxaca is known throughout Mexico for its arts scene), and to the huge and impressive museum detailing Oaxacan history from 2500 years ago until now. I also explored some more of Oaxaca nightlife with a crew of american, canadian, finnish and dutch folk from my hostel, the highlight of which was going to see a 14-member Mexican Ska band put on a live gig to a crowd made up mainly of bopping Mexicans.
But my favourite day was the day after my course finished, and I missioned it way up to some tiny villages in the mountains that are run as a co-operative. They´re called the
Pueblos Mancomunados , and after a 2-hour bus ride up there I went trekking through the jungle with a couple of others to a few "Miradors" (lookouts) to enjoy the "vistas" (views) and generally soak up small town mountain life. Everyone up there was dead friendly, and on the walk we got to see lots of
pretty Oaxacan mountain nature. After the time I spent in San Jose Del Pacifico in my last blog, I get the feeling that spending time in small mountain villages is going to form a reasonable chunk of my time out in Central America.
I´ve since left Oaxaca, and come to the city of San Cristobal de las Casas in the Chiapas region, but I´ll write more about that another time!
Hope all is well, send me news soon ;-)
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