A Garden

On Thursday, October 21st, we had a very nice breakfast consisting of a fried egg on a tortilla with a tomato, onion and chili sauce, along with chocolate croissants, muffins and fruit (banana, kiwi, watermelon orange and papaya slices). I needed my morning coffee, but Mary Joy had hot chocolate, with various spices. This is a specialty of Oaxaca. In the markets you can by chunks of chocolate with different mixes of spices (or none at all), for drinking. Oaxaca isn’t much known for chocolate candy, but it is famous (as one of the major centers of Mexican cooking, along with Puebla), for its seven mole sauces. Some of them involve chocolate. Most of them involve chilis. They are (according to Lonely Planet):

Mole negro (black): very dark and chocolaty, yet picante, mostly served over chicken.
Mole amarillo (yellow): tomatillos, cumin, cloves, cilantro, etc., usually served over beef.
Mole verde (green): delicate, with pumpkin seeds, walnuts, almonds, lettuce and tomatillos, over chicken.
Mole colorado (red): strong, with various chilies, black pepper and cinnamon.
Mole coloradito (little red) or rojo (red): sharp and tomato-based—sometimes dumbed down and exported as enchilada sauce.
Manche manteles (tablecloth stainer—it’s more watery than most moles): brick red and woody-flavored, used with fruit.
Chichilo negro: chilies, avacado leaves, tomatoes and corn dough.

We went down to the headquarters of the organ institute, where we signed in, then Mary Joy got on the bus to go to a master class in Tlacochahuaya, and I wandered down the main pedestrianized street, Alcala, past the spectacular Santo Domingo church, then over past the cathedral, across the Alameda to the Zocolo.

Oaxaca has two main squares next to each other, unlike most Mexican cities, which have only one, the Zocolo. Zocolos throughout Mexico are named after the huge square in Mexico City, which, in turn, got its name from an empty pedestal (zocolo, in Spanish--the statue on it was taken down because the person portrayed by it was kicked out of office). Rather than agreeing to meet in the enormous Plaza, people would say “Meet me at the zocolo,” so, eventually, the whole square took that name. In Oaxaca, the Alameda is the square directly in front of the cathedral, to its west. It is always full of activity and people—vendors of food and balloons, strollers and gawkers. The Zocolo, on the south side of the cathedral, is more heavily wooded and less peopled. There, along with the shoeshine stands, is a large gazebo, where bands play almost every evening.

It was pleasant to sit there and read my guides to decide what I was going to do. I had joked with Mary Joy that I would take the “chicken bus” over the mountains via a twisty, precipitous mountain road, the eight hours to Puerto Escondido, on the Pacific coast. She punched me in the arm.

Instead, I took the 11 o’clock English-language tour of the Jardin Etnobotanico (Ethnobotanical Garden). We had taken the same tour eight years ago, but most of it had been spent in the garden’s office, since it had begun to rain not long after we got started. The garden was originally the garden of the Dominican friary of Santo Domingo, behind Santo Domingo church. When the monastery was shut down in the 19th century, it was taken over by the military as a cavalry barracks and a high wall was built around part of the grounds. When the cavalry moved out, in the 1990s, the whole complex was almost turned into a luxury hotel and parking lot, but the artist Francisco Toledo got a foundation together, which saved the buildings as a wonderful regional museum and the grounds as the Jardin Etnobotanico. The garden contains specimens of plants from throughout Oaxaca State, relating to how humans had interacted with them over the centuries. Our guide, Diego, in nearly two-and-a-half hours, showed us many (to our eyes) exotic plants, explaining their uses. Most impressive, perhaps, was a huge barrel cactus, which they believe is around 1000 years old.

The tour finished around 1:30 and I went to lunch at Maria Bonita, where I had a tlayuda, another local specialty. It was a crisp tortilla with beans, mole negro and the local cheese (white and mild and crumbly), along with a bottle of Bohemia beer. I was proud of ordering and paying for everything without using a word of English.

Then I went to pick up Mary Joy at the restaurant Quince Letras (Fifteen Letters), where she was having lunch at a long table in the courtyard (open air, in part) with other organists, organ groupies, etc. It was a much larger lunch than I had had: a bean and tortilla soup, two chicken drumsticks (each in its own mole, one negro, one colorado) with rice, and for dessert a flan covered with caramel.

Lunch was running late, so it was after 4 p.m. when we got back to our room to take a nap, to the sound of children playing at the school next door.

A little after seven we walked over to the Basilica of La Soledad, looking unsuccessfully for something quick to eat along the way. We heard a concert of baroque and new neo-baroque music for organ and trombone. Unusual, but nice. Soledad is another gorgeous church, with plenty of gold leaf, baroque statuary and a miraculous statue of the Blessed Virgin over the main altar.

The concert ended a little after 9 p.m., and we tried to find some where to eat on the way back to the B&B, but didn’t find anything open that looked interesting. Instead, we sat on our balcony and had some snacks that we had brought from home. It was very pleasant. The weather has been unusually warm, in the upper 80s, but it cools down very quickly at night, to the low 50s.