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Please fasten your seatbelts ladies and gentlemen... we are taking off to Oaxaca again! I've finally gotten around to wading through the pictures, good, bad and the ugly... Here are mostly the good.... Have a fun trip! (Oh, you might want to get a cup of coffee or tea while the pictures are downloading if you are not on a fast cable connection...you might even have time to bake off some biscuits, as it will take 8 minutes on a 56K dialup.) Stay put, and you'll hear all about Tuna and Burnt Milk ice-cream....
Anyway... one of the things I loved in Oaxaca are all the entryways. There are a multitude of colors, styles and stages of (dis)repair. Some you can tell have been painted a gazillion times but the paint has still faded, some are newly painted. All have that in common that they don't really have a front porch or or other outroppings. It is pretty much the door facing the street, and behind it are almost always courtyards, sometimes gorgeous ones... I really found the different doors and what might be behind them fascinating. Here is a small sample...
Another thing that blows me away is the resourcefulness of the people. In a village called Atzompa not far from Oaxaca, (we were looking for a potter, but more about that later.) From across the street, I saw this fencing that was put togeter from these patterned sheets of something... So I crossed the street and had to get closer....
The pattern was really intriguing. It looked like corrugated metal, but I had to get up really close to it to see what the faded patterns actually were...
See the Coca-Cola logo? There were others, with Fanta and Budweiser too... I figured out that they were the printed sheet-metal that they make bottle caps with! You kind of wonder about the story of the bottle cap that didn't cap... how did the sheet metal end up in this village...who corrugated it? And once you look around...
You realize that it is all around... Here is another fence but the rust has taken off all the paint. See the little round "ornamentation" they are bottle caps through which the nails are driven. I would never have figured out what it was if I hadn't seen the "younger" version of the corrugated metal earlier!
So anyway, we decided to take this other cooking class (if you go, and are interested in food- I can definitely recommend it- her name is Susanna Trilling, and has written a book called Seasons of My Heart (which is also the name of her website.) Anyway, the cooking day started with a market tour of a nearby village, Etla. We got to try, touch, and smell many different things, as they took us around, explaind about all the foods and purchased a sample for us to taste. It was great! This is a real "Tamalera", a woman making her tamales and selling them at the market. She had about 6 different kinds, and her baskets were full. They were great, and I learned that mine (the ones I made a few weeks ago) were not far off the mark! They are all different, and this was just ONE Tamalera, there were several of them.
It was also Mango season! Even the green ones are ripe, they are called Mango Pina (if I remember correctly)...and they roll them against something hard and flat to "mash" the fruit to pulp, then they make a little hole and suck the fruit out, like a smoothie I guess.
Here is the "meatlady"...
Among many meatladies....
One of the strangest things at first glance was when the woman guiding us said, "here, have some Tuna and Burnt Milk ice-cream." I tried it and it was good! Turns out "Tuna" is the prickly pear cactus fruit, and the burnt milk is indeed an ice-cream flavor that tastes a little bit like scalded milk. The two flavors are usually served together because they complement each other.
They also had gorgeous green pottery for sale...all very inexpensive. This shape jug is often used to serve Mexican hot chocolate in. Unfortunately someone said the glaze contains lead, so I didn't get any.
After the market tour, we drove for about 20 minutes to the "cooking shool" which is Susanna Trilling's ranch. Here is a sample of the unpaved road...I'm not going to give you the full 20 minute version!
But finally getting there is a treat! Out in the middle of nowhere, is this beautiful ranch, overflowing with bougainvilleas. The "dome" is the main gathering area, and the extension to the right is the kitchen.
Inside the "dome" looking toward the kitchen. Look at the SIZE of that kitchen...al with gorgeous colorful Mexican tiles, plenty of workspace, and a sunny yellow (one of my favorite colors) on the walls.
There were about 18 of us, and we split into groups and cooked a 4 course meal that we ate at the end of the day. Very fun!
This is just outside the kitchen...I just couldn't get over the flowers. They were really growing like weed. Bougainvilleas must be very hardy, I can vouch for it, because the one I have at home survived the hail storm - although it isn't flowering like THIS!
You know you wouldn't get away with at least one food picture... this is Cevice (marinated fish) and a seafood cocktail...and some seafood tacos in the background.
Midweek, we changed hotels to another bed and breakfast (the first one only had room for the first half of the week.) Anyway, they also had this gorgeous inner courtyard with a very lush garden. While walking around there, I saw these wonderful pottery sculptures sprinkled here and there.
Most of them were unglazed (only this one was glazed) and they were so intricately ornamented... I really was impressed. This one is about 2.5 feet high.
Here is another one.... I just had to find out more about them... and boy did I!
The B&B where we stayed, had this wonderful library of books, and among them this one....(If you ever see this book for sale anywhere...please let me know...I want it!)
Anyway, inside there was a write-up about the artisan family making these sculptures in a village nearby. This is a picture photographed from the book. This is Irma Blanco working at one of her sculptures. (Guess where we're going next?!)
Yep, the town is called Atzompa, (and that is also where they had those interesting bottle cap fencing.) But it took us a while to find their pottery shop. We first walked around the entire village..
Which was just in the process of re-doing their sidewalks...
We FINALLY find the place...(it happens to be one of the first pottery studios on the left site on the MAIN street- but we missed it when the Taxi passed it to drop us off by the main pottery market...so it took a while...)
Inside their courtyard...To the right you see all the wood needed to fire the kiln. The corrugated roof is the "studio" where they make the clay, and let the pieces dry in the shade.
And here is the kiln, a bit larger than mine, and I'm now eternally grateful for electricity.
They MAKE their own clay... meaning they gather the dirt from nearby areas... Hammer it to pieces, grind, sift and finally mix with water to get the clay. Talk about making art from scratch! I really, really like the fact that when you get a piece of of their art, you get a piece of their land.
Here is Irma Blanco's daughter in law, Maria Rojas holding up one of their gorgeous pieces. (Which is now in a wooden crate on its way up to California in -hopefully- one piece!) I couldn't resist it...I mean they make their CLAY from scratch!
And this is just funny, just like I have 'seconds' and orphan beads laying around here and there...so do they... This one happens to be where the teenager put his tracksuit. I just liked the contrast between the feature in the "Great Masters" book and the teenager's reverence for their trade.
Oh, and before I let you go...Here is the tree of Santa Maria del Tule... one of the oldest living trees on the continent (as far as they know.) Over 2000 years old... still going strong!
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