school of traveling

The last week had been one big adventure. I´m traveling with Seth a great friend from Chicago. He happend to be in Mexico, and we decided to meet up in the district Oaxaca. He travels every year for some months and is for me "the master of traveling". We have the same preferences in traveling and the biggest goal is to meet the people of the country. Imagine two gringo´s only speaking in Spanish, looking for crazy food (and Oaxaca is famous for the best food of Central America) and making jokes with the locals, hitchhiking through the district. People are very friendly over here, have great humor and many times they insited on paying our drinks or food after a great talk.
Most of the days we had breakfast,lunch and/or dinner at the market of Oaxaca city or at a stall on the street. Specialties are grasshoppers, tortilla with melted cheese and flowers of the pumkin, "mole" (like an indian curry with a base of choclate)with meat and of course tortilla , BBQ, tejate (chocolate and corn drink), horchata (milk and cinamon drink) and many more all with lots of chili peppers!

For a woman alone it´s not possible to hitchhike in the macho culture of Mexico. So I was delighted to share this experience with Seth. In Mexico most people travel by bus or with a collective of taxis, which is a very cheap way to travel. But for Seth and me it´s much more fun to go for a ride with the locals. We ended up with a group of 12 people from Puebla in a little van, where I was pressed between two ladies who were making dirty jokes and laughing very hard. Another special ride was in the back of a pickup (great view) for 3 hours to end up high in the mountains in the middle of no where in a village Juquila like "Lourdes" where every week 6000 pilgrims all over Mexico go to by foot, bike or car and where they hardly ever see a gringo. The family in the pickup goes every year to this holy place with a grandmother of 96 years old who had to vomit all the time, so they had to stop the car many times and the driver came to talk with us and making fun in the back of the pickup. Hope the old lady will be cured for her carsickness by the Virgen of Juquila and live many more years..