Friends on the Road

Posted on November 20, 2018 by Michael Kane

My 2018 Adventure – Friends on the Road

I have wandered all of my life and also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. ~ Hilaire Belloc

My 2018 Adventure – Friends on the Road

One of the best things about traveling is meeting new people.  My 2018 adventure has been no exception and I’ve been fortunate to meet some awesome people.  On the West Highland Way I met a pair of hikers who were friends in London.  However, one was from Poland and the other from Lithuania if I’m remembering correctly.  We were on a similar schedule on the trail so I got to talk to them a number of different times.  I also met a father and daughter from Colorado and a really cool Australian couple who had done a lot of the same hikes I had, including being on the Appalachian Trail the year after I was.

On the Great Glen Way I met a really nice named Sal.  He was a relatively new hiker and after spending the day before yo-yoing each other on the trail.  We caught up with each other and finished the day out hiking together.  I also met a really cool young woman who was studying environmental science at the end of another day and finished the hike with her into  town.

In Spain I met a really cool English couple, one who had been a guide for some time on the Camino de Santiago.  I spent a really wonderful day hiking with them from time to time and then enjoying drinks and food as we sat outside at a great little restaurant in a small town in northern Spain.

In Morocco, I got to know the host of our Riad, he was from England and had been in Morocco for about fifteen years and had some really amazing insights into what was happening in Marakech.  I also met a really nice American couple staying at the same Riad.

Here in Mexico I have a really great situation by studying at a Spanish language school.  I get to meet a lot of locals but also a ton of travelers who are doing exactly what I am.  I’ve  been fortunate enough to meet some really cool women from Japan.  Fellow travelers from the US and Canada as well as travelers from Scotland and England.

When you meet fellow travelers there’s an instant connection regardless of age or background.  Just in my time at the language school I’ve had connections with people from eighteen to seventy from utterly diverse backgrounds, occupations and view points.  Yet we all share the same hunger for learning things and that’s a heck of place to start.  Hope you can experience this as well my friends, have a happy day. ~ Rev Kane

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Happiness is Reaching Your Goals

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Michael Kane

Happiness is Reaching Your Goals

rev kane, slower pace of life, can make you happy

A slower pace of life can make you happy

Es dificil, mas no imposible. ~ Isis, my Spanish teacher

I’ve written her on the site before about how setting and achieving goals can make you happier.  I’m not one of these type A madmen who feels you have to set and achieve it at all costs, hell I’m a well-known quitter.  Why do something that’s killing your spirit, but I diverge.  I think it’s important to have a direction.  In my life, almost every time I’ve set a goal that goal has morphed into something else but that something else was very often in the direction of the original goal.  So this is where tonight’s quote comes in, and for those of you with no Spanish background or access to Google Translate, let me, it is difficult, but not impossible.  She says this a lot, and it’s accurate of learning to speak Spanish as it is with so many other things, we just need the drive, the patience and the time.

The reason all of this goal nonsense is on my mind tonight is because today on the Ministry of Happiness we hit the goal we set for annual page views.  Given that it would be a partial travel year I figured we could make and average of fifty page views a day, or 18,000 page views for the year.  We hit that mark today, forty-seven days before the end of the year.  Yes, my friends, forty-seven days until 2019.  My hope is, given that December is always a strong month on the blog, that we’ll actually make 20,000 page views for the year.  It’s not a big blog, but one I’m proud of and one that nearly 225 people subscribe to.  Never would have I imagined that there were 225 people on Earth remotely interested in all of my wanderings and rantings, but apparently there are and I’m grateful for every single one of them.  Thank you to all of you who read this blog and have made it successful.

It’s also November my friends, a month where we all try a little harder to be more grateful than we usually are the rest of the year.  I’m quite grateful for my life and the people in it.  I’m grateful for open borders in other countries that allow folks like me to come see what things are like in the rest of the world.  Especially grateful for the perspective that provides when I return back to the United States.  My deepest hope is that through this blog I can somehow convince more of you that you’ll be happier if you travel.  This year my annual goals were really built around my 2018 road trip and after a change of plans due to a heart condition, I’ve realized almost everything I wanted to do, including living for a couple of months in Oaxaca from where I sit writing this piece tonight.  Have a happy day friends and thank you again for year readership, comments, thoughts and support. ~ Rev Kane

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A normal day in Oaxaca

Posted on November 11, 2018 by Michael Kane

A normal day in Oaxaca

As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes the new normal. ~ Robin S Sharma

So in many ways a really boring post tonight but one that I really felt like I wanted to write.  Having moved to my new apartment, today life really feels like it’s settled into some sense of a new normal.  So here’s what a typical day in Oaxaca has turned into, with prices because I’m still amazed how affordable this place is.

Woke, got out of bed ran a comb across my head, ok, no that’s the Beatles. Woke up and was a bit lazy, played on the net, did some reading, booked an AirBnB on the beach in Delaware.

Went to the grocery store and bought two big giant bags of groceries for $13.50.  Came home had a snack, pimento stuffed green olives and a Coke.  I’m being really bad on the Coke front here. Then I headed up to the open air market near my old place to buy vegetables including ingredients to make my own salsa.  I just had to stop writing to go have some, it’s the hottest, tastiest salsa I’ve ever made.  The funny thing in is that I expected being in Mexico would mean constantly eating really hot, spicy food.  To my surprise, a lot of the cuisine here has a sweet edge to it.  Not that there isn’t spicy, this white salsa at dinner last night was so hot that you could literally only use drops at a time, but super tasty, the food here is really amazing. While walking to the market, I did encounter some dragons.

While walking up to the market I came to realize today was a big day for weddings in Oaxaca and bumped into two wedding parades.

wedding, mexicowedding, photography, mexicoThere was something really cool about this festive little parade and celebration.

Returning from the market I went through my vegetable ritual.  You see it’s kind of a bad idea for a foreigner to either drink the water here or just go ahead and eat vegetables from the market.  You see they have been likely in the city water or worse.  So you soak your vegetables in a sink full of water with iodine in it, honestly given all of the salmonella in the US in the last few years, I think I might continue this when I return stateside.

After cleaning vegetables I made salsa then set out for my next chore of the day to have my amigo Jesus afeitado mi cabeza.  My new barber Jesus is a really cool old guy.  He’s one of those meticulous quaffed older gentlemen.  He took some joy in me describing my beard as palludo (really hairy), he chuckled at some of my bad Spanish and at some of my jokes he actually understood.  He was impressed that I’m staying in Oaxaca for a full month to study Spanish.  He not only shaved my head with the clippers but did all of the little service things that old school barbers do.  He clipped my ear hair, used the straight razor to do all of the trimming, popped on the aftershave, brushed and blew dry my head.  All for a massive $3.50 so I gave him $5.00 and he was generally grateful and smiling as I left.  It was on of the little experiences in life that made me smile and is making me smile as I write this.  I also found a little surprise walking back from the barber.

skeleton, surpriseI then headed over to pick up my laundry which cost me a whopping $1.85.  After I got it back I realized they had not returned my laundry bag. Ok, I know that sounds silly, it’s just a cotton bag with a drawstring and when it started to take a really long time for her to return I had decided to tell her no big deal.  But happily she returned with it and the reason I was so happy is that this stupid little cotton bag was given to me during my first week of college in 1982, that’s right I have a 36-year-old laundry bag.

Returning home, I made a little dinner, sat down to write this piece and am about to take a shower and watch a movie.  Just another happy day in Oaxaca, hope you had a happy one to my friends. ~ Rev Kane

 

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Living in Oaxaca

Posted on November 10, 2018 by Michael Kane

Living in Oaxaca

oaxaca, mexico, travelThrow your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love a new country. ~ Anais Nin

So the other day I was talking with a classmate after class was over and she said something that I’d be thinking.  After we’d both mentioned we hadn’t been to the zocalo in a couple of days she said, “I’m starting to feel like I live here.”  It really feels like that for me, I’ve been here for three weeks, I have three weeks of language school left.  I’m in my apartment and my days are fairly standard at this point.  I get up, go to school and after school come home make some lunch, run some errands and go for a walk, then do some writing  and watch some Netflix.

Life is pretty standard and good.  Had a great dinner tonight, Tamale with Mole Negro, a margarita all with local ingredients and very traditional.  Really tasty and delicious and with tip, $12, you have to love Oaxaca.

oaxaca, mexico, travelWe talked for a bit today in class about security and how safe people feel in Oaxaca.  In my class are all women, from 28 to 70 and everyone expressed that they felt pretty safe.  I point this out because people have expressed to me more fears about me being in Oaxaca than any other place I’ve ever traveled.  One of the other things I’m really impressed with about my classmates is that almost all of them are traveling alone.  Three women in their late 20’s and early 30’s and most impressively two older women in their 60’s and 70’s, on the road alone and fully living their lives, I really admire all of these women and I hope you do to.  More than that, I hope you’ll use them as inspiration to set out on your own if you’ve been letting that hold you back.

Oaxaca is an interesting place, walking home from dinner tonight the parks were full, people eating at the street food booths.  Kids rollerblading, playing volleyball, a band playing in the middle of the park.  Lot’s of families just having fun.  Hell, even a train rolling down the sidewalk.

It’s a pretty town in a complex way.  It’s an older city, with a history of earthquakes and poverty, there’s a real mix of new modern buildings, kept up historic old buildings and abandoned buildings with razor wire.  But I like it here.

Just a truck full of dugout canoes

Have a happy day my friends from my new temporary home in Oaxaca. ~ Rev Kane

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A New Place in Oaxaca

Posted on November 7, 2018 by Michael Kane

A New Place in Oaxaca

comfort zone, change, happiness

Hello friends!  Today was a really great day, I hope it was for you as well.  First, it was my second day of Spanish language school at the Institute of Oaxacan Culture.  I’m really digging my class, I’m in the absolute beginner class but it’s a good spot for me as I prefer as a student to be a little ahead of the curve than behind.  We’re doing a lot of vocabulary and basics which I already have, but it’s given me lots of time listening to a native speaker talk so that I can improve my listening comprehension skills.  Not that I’m not learning things besides that, I’m picking up new vocabulary and tightening up details I have a tendency to skip over when learning on my own.  Our teacher is great, very approachable and the other students in the class are super nice and they are from all over the world, the US, Canada, Japan and Scotland.  I do three hours of basic class and one hour of conversation training each day.  I have classes for the next four weeks so I’m hoping to make some good progress.

Today was moving day for me, as I was leaving my last place one of the other guests and I got talking and he mentioned this festival he goes to, maybe I’d heard of it, Burning Man.  I smiled and  let him know I’ve been on the playa eight times, we had a great conversation, he’s a great guy and let me know that there is a burner community here in Oaxaca.  He also turned me on to two burners who are producing their own brand of mezcal, their names are Gem and Bolt and the link will take you to their website.  Great product, cool website and I really dig the spiritual nature that they infuse in what they do.  Turns out there’s a burgeoning burner community in Oaxaca and I’m happy to have gotten hooked into it.

So I moved into my new place, my last place was great but it was on the basic side.  I’m now in an apartment that is all mine, in the central district of Oaxaca so a little closer to sites, the zocalo etc… It also meant tonight two things, a really hot shower and being able to cook in a kitchen I’m not sharing with anyone.  The apartment is great and I checked-in with the mother of the woman who owns it, who although I said I spoke a little Spanish, waived me off, said my Spanish was great and then started talking at the speed of a coked up New Yorker.  I was impressed I followed her as well as I did but I’m sure I missed something important like don’t open that closet there’s a nine foot python inside.  The apartment also has a great wifi connection so I’m really happy to be here for the next month.

I celebrated my move in with a pasta dinner, a coke and my old favorite white chocolate covered Oreos for desert.  Even bigger as I lament the diminishing amounts of protein in my diet, I bought a dozen eggs so I can have eggs for breakfast.  I’m more excited for that than you can imagine.  I’ve spent so much time in places like Spain, Portugal and Mexico, places that tend toward bread, pastries, juice and fruit for breakfast that it will be a joy to have a couple of eggs each morning for the next week and even better to get back to my standard egg beater, veggie omelets in the morning.

Well my friends, a great but long day, I hope you’re smiling and had a happy day as well. ~ Rev Kane

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Happiness is Community

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Michael Kane

Happiness is Community

The original AARP group after their climb out of the NOC

Without a sense of caring there can be no sense of community. ~ Anthony J. D’Angelo

Sunday’s are always an interesting day for me because they are the day I write my Sunday post.  While here in Oaxaca City, I’ve been writing a new post nearly every night.  I hope to be able to keep that up for the entire time I’m here, we’ll see how that works once I start four hours of language school each day tomorrow.  So far it’s been easy, a new place, new revelations and the Dia de Los Muertos festival.

Each day I take a couple of walks, I’m trying to make sure that I walk at least four miles every day.  Typically later in the day I take a walk through the zocalo to see what is happening.  One of the really nice things about Oaxaca is the zocalo.  The space is ringed with restaurants, shops, vendor booths  and food vendors.  There is almost always some form of entertainment happening each night.

One of the things I really noticed tonight as I was walking around was the sense of community that I saw in the zocalo.  Small groups of friends and/or family eating dinner.  Groups enjoying the music or just walking and talking snacking on the corn on the cob that is so prevalent from the street vendors.

A sense of community or sense of belonging is an important factor in feeling happy.  This need is initially addressed as children by our immediate and extended family.  As we grow older, particularly as we complete school and begin working that default community structure is not always as strong or available.  Particularly for those of us who move out of the places where we grew up.  No longer having family near at hand, or being in a town where there are people you’ve known your entire life can make finding community a lot harder.

There are plenty of recommendations about how to build community.  People most often develop community through their workplace, or via their children’s connections to other children through school.  People participating in church or volunteer organizations build community through those structures or through group activities/hobbies.  But what if these don’t work for you?  For many of us, particularly those of us who are introverts, we find that at work, we’re often the youngest or only single people in the office.  Without children and if you don’t have a strong religious conviction, you lose out on those opportunities as well.  Finally, particularly for those who are just starting out in their career, you are putting in a lot of hours at work and for those of us further along overworking often becomes a substitute for community.  It’s hard, I don’t pretend to have a solution, I know all of the right things to say, I listed a number above.   And one thing that I’m not very good at is just putting yourself out there, become a joiner until you find something that works for you.

For me, given my nomadic nature, my community is virtual.  Not is the sense that the people aren’t real, but that they are not physically present in my life.  It is something that I would like to change, it’s a hole I feel in my life, but given my core nature, I’m not sure I can.  So I was more than a bit envious tonight walking the zocalo and seeing all of these little communities.  I was happy for all of these folks and their happy smiling faces, I hope that you’re smiling tonight my friends and having a happy day.  ~ Rev Kane

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Time Warp in Oaxaca

Posted on November 4, 2018 by Michael Kane

Time Warp in Oaxaca

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories. ~ Florence King

I’ve been in Oaxaca for over a week now and being here is starting to take on a certain sort of familiarity as I fall into certain patterns.  My days here are pretty nice right now.  I get up in the morning and make my bed, yeah, I make my bed, no idea why, I certainly don’t do it at home, ever.  But then I do a morning walk, maybe I walk a couple of miles to the grocery store or down around the zocalo or go exploring to a part of town I haven’t been in yet.  I come back, relax, eat, work on photos, my Instagram account (@reverendmichaelkane) or on a writing project.  I then nap or watch a video and then do my afternoon/evening walk a few miles typically down around the zocalo to see what music/art  is showing up there on this day.

The change that has been happening in my head over the week has been my brain getting familiar with the place.  I’ve gone from noticing every little thing, to noticing  the subtle to starting to overlook the subtle, to overlooking the obvious because it has become so familiar.  Now this is all about to change this week as I start language school on Monday and move to a new place to stay on Tuesday and then I’m sure the entire process will start all over again.

What our brains, or at least what my brain does, is to look for the familiar in the new so that it feels more comfortable.  Over the last couple of days I’ve really consciously started to notice this process in my brain.  So tonight I thought I’d take you through some of those pathways in my brain, basically show you how my brain tries to keep me happy, because the familiar is generally something that makes us feel, comfortable and good, happy.

One of the first things that my brain has done has been to connect my impressions of Oaxaca to another Spanish speaking town, Oviedo in Spain.  I wrote a lot about Oviedo, so you can follow the link and I won’t rehash all of my thoughts here.  But it was a walkable, social city that seemed very focused on art.  I have a similar feel for Oaxaca although Oaxaca is a bit less modern (I’ll talk more about that in a minute) and four times as large as Oviedo.

The second big thing my brain has been doing, in a very odd association is connecting me emotionally to what America was like in the early 70’s.  You see there are a lot of similarities between Oaxaca in 2018 and Hudson, NY in the 1970’s.  The first is the prevalence of VW Bugs, there are a lot of them around.  Now of course there are mostly modern cars and the bugs are even recently produced, but they look just like they did in the 1970’s.  The second is packs of dogs.  As those who know me well know, I’m not great with unfamiliar dogs, I’m leery and usually give them a wide berth.  And something I wonder about from time to time in America is what happened to packs of dogs.  As a kid in the 1970’s, I remember from time to time running into packs of stray dogs.  It’s something you just don’t see anymore.  I don’t know if it’s because people are better about their pets, or the rise of animal control, but they just don’t seem to exist anymore.  I see at least one pack a day in Oaxaca, mostly strays but everyday I also see one on a roof near where I’m staying this pack obviously owned by someone.

The third thing that takes me back to the America of the 1970’s is litter.  Yeah, Oaxaca is a city with a good bit of litter on the streets.  For those who don’t remember the America of the 60’s and 70’s it was a place with lots of litter.  Happily no longer the case.  And this brings me to the interesting thing about Mexico.  It’s both a country in some ways every bit as modern as the United States.  I mean there is an airport here with huge jumbo jets, I’m typing on a home wifi setup and was even on a 5G connection at my language school today.  There is food from all over the world, almost everyone has a cell phone.  Yet, on the other hand there aren’t big giant stores everywhere, but small specialized stores and services.  People have LP gas delivered, there are water trucks and food trucks that roll through the streets much like there used to be in the US.  There are some advantages to this decentralized approach that we’ve abandoned in the US.  Here in Oaxaca, unlike almost everywhere I’ve lived in America in the last 10 years, I know exactly where I can get a button sewn on, and can get it done it like 10 minutes.  There is a laundry service on the corner, and one a block later and another a block later.   Tiny neighborhood businesses mean that the businesses get replicated a lot.

So my brain is using nostalgia to make me feel comfortable and happy in a new situation.  Our brains are really cool.  I don’t see this as a good thing, or a bad thing it’s just what are brains do and it helps us all have happier days.  ~ Rev Kane

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Speed Bumps in Oaxaca (DOTD)

Posted on November 2, 2018 by Michael Kane

Speed Bumps in Oaxaca

xo 6 blue white

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. ~ Thomas Campbell

So last night I did something that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, I visited a cemetery in Mexico during Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead).  The idea of the holiday is based around that idea that during this time of year, that the veil between our world and the hereafter are at their thinnest point.  As such, spirits from the hereafter can cross over into our world.  In America we’ve turned this into a scary thing, Halloween is all about protecting ourselves from all of the scary spirits we’ve learned about in horror movies and being mischievous.  Heck I’ve had several occasions while working in colleges where people have been upset about Halloween decorations on campus because it’s “devil worship.” And like most US holidays really now it’s just about the merch.

xo 8 girl 2

I’ve always like the idea of Dia de Los Muertos much better, the general idea is that given  that spirits may cross over, people invite their deceased relatives to come home.  They decorate their graves and create altars to help bring their ancestor’s spirits to the right place, so they can be with their family for two days.  In this way, as a family member was explaining to someone last night, they don’t lose their ancestors, this holiday helps them stay connected to those who have passed on.

 

So last night, I did a tour to one of the oldest cemeteries in Mexico, Xoxocotlan.  It’s a small cemetery that I was told is over 400 years old.  The town it is located in is someplace that takes Dia de Los Muertos very seriously and keeps the tradition very faithfully.  So I was excited to get there, of course it was a bit of journey.

xo 3

Our tour group met, including some really cool German people from Sweden.  That’s a bit of an inside joke, they were a super cool couple from Switzerland.  According to our closest sources of information our correspondent Michelle from the CBC and actor Michael Cera, this whole thing would be a couple of hours, a couple of cemeteries, a little mezcal, bread and chocolate.  Well, the planning was way off, the tour didn’t go to midnight as we’d been told, it was going to last to past 2AM, it wasn’t three cemeteries as billed, but 2 cemeteries and building an altar at someone’s house.  Travel around the area is slow, not helped at all by what seemed like a speed bump every 100 feet on the road.

xo 2

To be fair the activity period, I didn’t participate in the altar building, did included mezcal, hot chocolate (the Oaxacan,not the American version) and very tasty tamales.  Of course this occurred after our visit to Xoxocotlan and by time it was wrapping up it was after midnight.  A little revolt broke out and about half the group decided to take the vans back to Oaxaca and I joined them.

The logistic fails weren’t the source of my disappointment though, those types of things are expected in a foreign country with people communicating in different languages.  My disappointment was with the visit to Xoxocotlan itself.  It’s a small place and we were told before we arrived that we should be respectful, but that the locals really welcomed the tourist visitors in the cemetery.

xo 1

When we arrived there were a lot of immediate revelations.  First, this cemetery is really, really tiny with the ruins of a church in the middle.  The graves cover 80% of the ground and it’s difficult to walk between them.  Even more so when you literally add thousands of tourists into the space with a single gate people have to go in and out.  The graves were amazing, people do a magnificent job of decorating and sitting with the graves.  However, my take is people are so thrilled to be invaded by thousands of people while trying to welcome their dead loved ones back home.  Especially not when a lady paying to attention at all knocks over the huge floral display at the top of the grave you’ve decorated.  A couple of people were talking with tourists at their sites, but most sat at their sites looking thoroughly unhappy.  It felt just wrong to be there.

xo 4

I took some photos while making a loop around the church and headed for the gate about twenty minutes earlier than required.  Meeting up with my Swiss friends and talking about the experience I found they felt very similarly to how I did.  It was disappointing for me after waiting for this experience for so long, but I was truly sad for the families that we and in particularly I had intruded about this time in this fashion.  Some photos below. ~ Rev Kane

xo 7

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It’s all about Your Attitude

Posted on October 30, 2018 by Michael Kane

It’s all about Your Attitude

oaxaca sign

Adopting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one. ~ Hans Selye

Last night I was kicking around on Facebook before crashing for the night and I found an article, 10 famous travel locations that DO live up to the hype.  I looked through the article and had to laugh, the list was pretty similar to pieces I’ve read before entitled, 10 famous locations that don’t live up to the hype.  The two on both lists included the pyramids at Giza and the Eiffel Tower.

So hopefully not some huge spoiler for you, but the Great Pyramid of Giza is a half block from a Pizza Hut and the entire city of Giza, there’s garbage, there are tourist traps and scams that surround the pyramid.  So one person’s list makes this place a huge disappointment.  On the other hand this massive structure was built to exacting mathematical, geographic and construction standards thousands of years before anyone in the western world knew for sure North America even existed, so a person approaching it with that attitude sees an ancient marvel and is moved by the experience.

The Eiffel Tower has similar reviews, if you have romanticized the idea of the Eiffel Tower, of standing alone upon the tower and viewing Paris, well, long lines, admission fees and tons of rude tourists might really kill the experience for you.  However, the person writing last night’s article basked in the reality of just standing underneath such an amazing and iconic piece of architecture.

The only difference between these being horrible let downs or amazing experiences were the writer’s expectations and attitudes.

oaxaca cathedral

Watch Your Attitude

I’ve been experiencing this phenomenon a lot on my 2018 adventure.  The first was my Camino Experience in Spain.  I went into it with lots of doubts and not the best attitude and the universe helped me manifest an unpleasant experience.  The opposite could be said about my time hiking in Scotland, where some bad weather, a huge blister, getting lost, getting ripped off due to a mistake by my tour company and some fierce midges at one point was a great experience.  My attitude going into Scotland was sooo much better than my attitude on the Camino.  Not that I didn’t have valid complaints about the Camino, but I would have been happier had I had a better attitude.

marigold streets

For me Mexico has been a microcosm of the same issue.  The trip in was stressful, I was tired and so things seemed overly negative.  Happily as I talked about in a blog post about the trip, I was aware that the stress and lack of sleep were likely ganging up on me.  Day 2 in Oaxaca was better, I was feeling more myself and had some time to do a bit of photography and look around after getting settled in. Today was much better, I have come to realize that the place I’m staying at for the first two weeks is a bit at the edge of the hood.  This is not a revelation, the razor wire kind of gave it away, also for $12 per night you have to kind of expect you’re not in the center of the tourist section of town.  Not to scare anyone, the neighborhood so far seems very safe and the place I’m staying is actually great and very secure.  We’ll see how I feel walking home at midnight after my cemetery tour on Halloween night.

However on my morning walk today, I decided to take a left turn and head for the big cathedral in the city which I see when heading down into the center of town.  Once I got into that area it was a whole new world.  Here was the Oaxaca you read about in the travel guides.  The cathedral is surrounded by artisan markets, galleries, coffee shops and you’re walking on cobblestone streets.  The restaurants are pretty and serve the traditional foods Oaxaca is famous for world-wide.  I had to laugh, I instantly had an even better impression of Oaxaca than I already had.  The apartment I have while in language school is actually located three blocks from the cathedral in this area.

marigold streets 2

It was a great illustration of the effect of your perception, expectation and attitude really impacting your perceptions of a place.

sleeping store owner

Business was slow today

BUT, this is not the sole reason I came to Oaxaca and I’m happy for how things played out.  You see the first night I arrived late and stayed in the tourist zone at a very nice hotel near the zocalo.  Riding in from the airport, tired and grouchy and through a rundown section of Oaxaca didn’t leave me excited.  Walking to my current location I used Google Maps to give me the route to my place.  And here’s the thing about Google Maps, I love Google Maps and it’s made traveling a hundred times easier than it used to be.  However, there is no humanity or additional knowledge.  The algorithm picks the “best” meaning the most direct route.  It does not account for the types of things that also matter, how pretty is the route, how safe is the neighborhood you’ll be walking through, hills anyone?

So my first day I took a direct and efficient route that took me down streets that gave me the razor wire and broken glass fence top route.  Again, and I can’t emphasize how safe I feel in Oaxaca, not a terrible place.  We’re not talking about walking through the South Bronx at night in the 80’s.  However, I could just as easily have walked the tourist route that first day up Dia de Los Muertos, skeleton filled and marigold lined decorated streets with a more gently sloping hill.  So today’s walk improved my attitude and allowed me to find some really neat places.  So my friends, watch your attitude and you’ll have happier days.  Below are some photos from today’s Oaxaca explorations, enjoy. ~ Rev Kane

street art 1

street art

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Stranger in a Strange Land

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Michael Kane

Stranger in a Strange Land

church muertos sign

‘Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed — to experience.
~ Dr. Mahmoud (Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land)

Greetings from Oaxaca City, Mexico!

I finally feel like I’m here in Oaxaca City now that I’ve checked into the space I’ll be living in for the first two weeks.  My plan here is pretty simple, two weeks of playing tourist and getting my bearings.  Then four weeks of language school to improve my Spanish language skills while living in my second space.  Right now I have a room in a courtyard with a shared kitchen and bathroom.  Space number two is a full apartment all to myself.  During this period of time I plan to get a bit of writing done, there are things hanging out there that I need to get to.  Primarily my next book of poetry, work on a website project, digging into some fiction projects and my next non-fiction book.

So I’ll be in Oaxaca for at least six weeks, a few weeks in I’ll decide if I want to extend this trip into February or make a move sooner somewhere else.  My initial impressions of Oaxaca is that it is a lovely city.  There certainly is an emphasis on food, art and music so we have that in common.  The town is ramping up heavily for the Dia de Los Muertos festival with decorations going up everywhere, people in costume are on the streets heading to parties and all of the little kids are dressed up.  I love this holiday so much.

I have to admit to a certain weariness at the moment.  I’m not sure if it’s just having had so many nights on so many variable sleeping surfaces or being so many consecutive nights on the road.  More likely it is that on this adventure I’ve spent more time in non-English speaking countries than I ever have before.  It adds to the stress I talked about the other night.  So it will be a careful decision about whether or not I will extend my six weeks in Oaxaca to ten or to move on.  Either way I am really determined to improve my Spanish skills, it frustrates the hell out of me not being able to easily communicate with people.

Stranger in a Strange Land

So I picked tonight’s title and quote very purposefully.  If you have not read Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land you really should.  Most people know the saying but have never read the book.  It is all about a Martian to who comes to Earth in an attempt to Grok earthlings.  I really feel like the Marian right now, trying to Grok everything about Oaxaca.  Especially at the moment, why they have been firing rockets from our neighborhood for the last 48 hours.  They fired them until midnight or so last night and started again at seven this morning.  Think of bottle rockets on steroids, the big boomers without the sparkles from fourth of July.  The concussions have at times been significant enough to set off all the car alarms on the street.  Oaxaca – 1, me groking – 0 at this point.

So far there are four primary reactions to me by people here.  At least 50% pretty much ignore my existence, just another tourist, nothing to see here.  Of the other 50% I get three primary reactions.  The least frequent and most disturbing are the occasional men who just glare at me, they are definitely anti-gringo at every level, one guy stared at me for a third of a block, I didn’t make eye contact but it’s a weird reaction.  Not one that really makes me feel unsafe, but a tad bit unsettling.  The second, is utter fascination.  I get this a lot from little kids.  I think this has a little to do with being a gringo and a bit about size and facial hair.  My friend Larry who has spent some time in Oaxaca made a comment about Oaxacans that has stuck with me, he said, gleefully, “they are so tiny!”  He’s right, the further you get from the tourist section of two the lower the average height gets.  Without exaggeration I have walked by a whole lot of four-foot full-grown adults, especially older folks.  One lady was working at a booth with her six year-old granddaughter and the kid was only about two inches shorter than her grandmother.  So a nearly six-foot, two hundred pound bald man with gleaming white skin and a beard is definitely a bit of an experience, especially for the munchkins.  The third reaction has been utterly friendly.  The women I met at the airport, the folks at my first night’s hotel, my Air BnB host, random smiling folks on the street and some folks at the grocery store.  The usual question, in English is to ask where I’m from, when I say California they all expect me to be from LA.  I think they get a lot of Angelinos in Oaxaca.

The food so far has been good, I’m just getting out but have been eating a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables from the markets and tonight for dinner had my first of the many, many moles they make here.  A little mole verde with pork, it was quite good.

mole verde con pork

By the way, why are the rest of the world barbarians when it comes to salsa.  Since arriving in Mexico not once have I gotten a bowl of salsa that didn’t come with a tiny serving spoon in the bowl.  Really puts an end to the disgusting double dipping that so many people do.  Okay, tangent over.

So, below are a series of photos from the last couple of days, about a third of what I’ve shot already, it’s going to take me months to catch up with all of you on photos, so you’ve got that to look forward to.  Enjoy and have a happy day my friends.  ~ Rev Kane

 

 

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