13th – 17th of February 2023

Oaxaca

Hallo Ihr Lieben,

From the 13th to the 17th of February, we went to Oaxaca de Juarez City, the capital of the State of Oaxaca, located in southwest Mexico it is best known for its indigenous people and cultures. The weather during the day is usually hot and at nights a little chilly but not really cold, below you will find a chart of the average weather that compared to Toluca with a highest of 23° and minimum of 3° was considerably hot but still bearable because it is a dry type of weather rather than humid, adding the fact that currently in Mexico is dry season only expecting rain from May to October

We started our journey by taking an Uber at Leilani’s home to the bus terminal of Toluca, we took the bus to Mexico City, grabbed some “tortas” (a type of Mexican street food) and ran to “Observatorio” metro station, we took the metro with direction to “Pantitlan”, being “San Lazaro” our destination.

Everything was fine, the ride was running smoothly until we arrived at “Balderas” station. We did not know the rails of the pink line were getting repaired from that station on! At this point, we had 45 min. to reach the “TAPO station” to take our bus to Oaxaca, and we would have arrived perfectly on time if the metro was running as usual, but now we had to find another solution fast, and on a Monday afternoon in Mexico City that it is quite a challenge.

A nice old man told us what was going on because we were puzzled when we saw all the people getting off the train because otherwise we would have went back the way we came. He told us there were free alternative buses that were taking people to the metro stations from the pink line that were out of service, so we headed out to look for those buses, not surprisingly the queue to get in there was incredibly long so we decided to take a Didi to make it on time to the station, so we requested one, the timer said it would be there in 10 min.

Long story short, those 10 mins. passed and the taxi was not there, the timer kept saying 8 min. At this point we were in a panic, we had only 30 min. left to arrive at the station and that is exactly the time a car takes to get there, the problem was we were nothing close to being inside a taxi and on our way, so we decided to cancel the Didi and to run to get a normal taxi from the street, but with nothing to be found immediately we tried our luck with Uber and fortunately for us it arrived within 5 min.

We jumped in as fast as possible hoping the driver would rush to our destination, as the ride went on we knew that we were going to make it barely on time. A few minutes later the GPS said our destination was on the right, and yes it was, but we were on top of a big traffic bridge we clearly could not jump off, so yes, things got tenser! The GPS made the Uber driver take the wrong exit! And he went on a big bridge over the terminal instead of taking a direct exit to it, naturally, we were freaking out! The driver apologized and sped up a little because Leilani told him we were already late for our bus, as we only had 3 min left until the bus scheduled departure, and the driver still had to do a huge turnaround to get us to the entrance.

The driver dropped us off at 13:30! The departure time of the bus, so we jumped out of the car and ran like stung by a bee. But the station was huge… and we were still far from the drop-off point, so we crossed the street, ran through some street food stalls, squeezed between, and took over a bunch of people walking in a long corridor, to finally make it to the middle of the station, just to get blinded by the number of bus lines and stores. After rushing to another departure rondel we were out of breath and barely able to speak, Leilani asked a policewoman where our bus line was and she answered “up the stairs to the right”.

We arrived at the bus line and asked the man checking the tickets if we still caught our bus, and Leilani almost fainted when he said “híjole señorita ya se fue” meaning “Oh Miss, is already gone” but after he saw Leilani’s jaw drop in disappointment he followed with “Ah no es cierto, estan abordando a la izquierda” meaning “No, just kidding they are boarding on the left” so after having a heart attack we did it, 5 min. late and the last ones to get on the bus, about to faint from all the running, all people kept saying to us was ” calm down, you made it, you are here now, you can relax” and so we did, for the next 8 hours.

After a long drive, we finally arrived, made it to our Airbnb, and had some rest.

The next morning we went to the neighborhood market to get some groceries to make breakfast, Yannick got Leilani some flowers from a nice old woman selling them on the street because it was valentine’s Day. After breakfast we headed out to explore Oaxaca’s downtown, we enjoyed strolling around in the crafts markets, where there are tons of little stalls full of traditional colorful clothing, jewelry, paintings, and souvenirs. Usually, in Mexico different states or towns specialize in something like ceramics, rugs, leather, shoes, furniture, etc. And in Oaxaca, they are famous for their beautiful loom woven fabrics that later are used for clothes, bags, shoes, blankets, wallets, table covers, or other decoration articles.

We tried to visit the botanical garden of the city but we missed the opening time. At night we walked around the main plaza and headed home.

The next day, we visited “Monte Alban”, a pre-Columbian archeological site, known to be the pre-eminent Zapotec socio-political and economic center. To get there we took one of the shuttle busses on “Mina” street that do the round trip for tourists. It’s a short drive that goes mostly up until you arrive at the site, where you have a nice view of the city.

We liked Monte Albán, it wasn’t too crowded because we visited on a weekday, so we enjoyed the peaceful walk, took some nice pictures and went to the top of a few pyramids. Even though the place is not as big as Teotihuacan for example, we found it more enjoyable.

After we came back from Monte Albán we had some ice cream in the market, some food in the plaza, and headed home to rest.

On Thursday we visited the last few markets we didn’t do before, we got some food in the “20 de Noviembre” local market, then we bought some “huaraches” in the “Benito Juárez” market, just like the ones Leilani’s grandpa gifted Yannick last year (that unfortunately got lost) to look like a southern Mexican.

Afterwards, we visited a couple of museums, enjoyed our last walk on Oaxaca’s street, markets, and plazas, and prepared to leave early in the morning the next day.

On Friday we had a very long journey back, around 13 hours because of some people doing a strike on the toll stations of the highway, so the bus driver had to take the toll-free route and eventually the journey was longer, it was very tiring and we were happy to see Leilani’s mom at the bus station to take us home, she had already prepared some tasty food and after a nice dinner, we finished our travel week to Oaxaca.

Over all we would say our trip was nice and we finished with a cherry on top; an awful Airbnb review on Leilani’s profile provided by the host and honorably earned by Yannick for accidentally breaking two glasses and ruining two white bath towels, one for wiping the dirty floor with and the other one by spilling coffee on it, but also by a made up story of Leilani dying her hair in the bathroom (which she never did). We could understand the glasses and the towels (for what we actually apologized) but the host was over the top dramatic and rude, because we also made sure to leave everything clean and organized before we left, anyways, it is the only weird experience we have ever had on Airbnb in Mexico, we are usually considered good guests so, what to do?

In general, we liked Oaxaca de Juárez, it is a place full of colorful arts and crafts, although it is a big city and there’s quite some traffic around, so we figured we prefer strolling in smaller towns, so-called “pueblos mágicos” where fewer cars are allowed into the touristic areas and you can have very pleasant walks. Some of Leilani’s favorites are Tlaquepaque, Tequisquiapan, Tepoztlán, Querétaro, Mazunte, San Miguel de Allende, Real del Monte or Guanajuato, to mention some, and maybe to be covered in future blogs.

Thank you very much for reading.

Con cariño,

Leilani and Yannick.

More spam pictures from the trip

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Hugs,

Leilani and Yannick