After 25 hours on a single bus, we arrived in Oaxaca at 11 en la noche. The bus, like all first class buses in latin america, inexplicably played a variety of bad, bad American movies, either subtitled or dubbed in Spanish. The second one Ben Stiller movie ended, a superhero movie began. The views out the window, at least until it got dark, helped distract. The bus followed the Gulf coast, and I was surprised to find such steep, tree-clad mountains falling down right to the edge of the sea. South of Veracruz, it looked like I´d expect Vietnam or Thailand to look.
We stayed at a hostal on the north side of the downtown district the first two nights, and we wasted no time to explore the city. By noon on our first day, we had already enrolled in language school(at Amigos del Sol) and found an apartment a block and a half north of the zocalo, the central town square inhabited by towering, shading trees, balloon vendors, and general loiterers of all shapes, sizes, and nationalities. Most, of course, are Mexican, but that means about as much or more variety in appeances as any US city. There are many indigenous communities in Oaxaca, and people come in from these pueblos to vend their crafts and skills.
My favorite part of the zocalo are the large, long balloons that twenty or so children are playing with at any given moment. They toss these balloons twice as tall as they are up into the air. The toy rockets up thirty or forty feet in front of the Cathedral, then tips and falls back to the earth, the children all the while racing after beneath it.
