Wha´the Heck?

Greetings from beautiful downtown Oaxaca! After being on the hot beach for two weeks (like they say, SOMEBODY has to do it!), I was looking forward to returning to a cool, if not cold, climate here in Oaxaca. Surprise! It´s HOT here too! It´s about 85 degrees during the day and "cools down" to 70 at night. Fortunately, it´s a dry heat. When I washed my clothes in Chixculub (on the beach of the Gulf of Mexico), it took two full days and nights to dry. Here, it takes two hours. It´s definitely t-shirt weather, even in the evenings.
The town strikes me as not a whole lot bigger than San Cristobal. One big difference is the high number of gringos here. I understand there are a lot of full time residents and a significant number of winter residents. Given the weather, I can understand that. The gringos behave as one would expect: they speak only English; make no effort whatsoever to speak even a little Spanish; and drift from market place to market place like they were at a flea market looking for bargains. It´s truly amazing that so many of the Mexicans continue to behave so well with them. Understandably, they are not quite so friendly as in Chiapas, since there are so many more gringos here.
As I´ve mentioned in this blog before, machinery here is expensive and labor is cheap. At the Merida airport, I watched 7 (yes, 7!) men push a plane away from its gate. One drove the little tractor that pushes the plane, a couple of them had nifty little batons like sending semaphore signals, one more to hook and un-hook the little boom that sticks out from the front of the tractor to the plane´s front wheels. The rest, I think, supervised.
On my flight, I had a computer-generated boarding pass showing me in seat 4D. An upset older gringa resident also had a computer-generated boarding pass showing her in 4D as well. Obviously, computers in Mexico just don´t work as well as those in the states.
I arrived in Oaxaca just in time for the fiesta called the "Night of Lights." I got all dressed up; that is, I took off my t-shirt and put on a real shirt, and went out on the town.
There were temporary stages set up all around the main square. The music started at around 7 p.m. There was a full orchestra (as in full!) It probably had 60 or more musicians. There were all the usual instruments present; in addition, there were bongos and a couple of other interesting looking drum-like things. The orchestra looked like it had great potential. Disappointingly, they played what I would describe as Mexican elevator music. Nevertheless, it was received well by the several hundred people listening, mostly family and older folks.
There was a chamber concert going on inside the governor´s palace. About an hour later, the orchestra disappeared and in its place was a modern dance duo. The audience began slowly changing, shedding years with every quarter hour. Obviously, the really hot rock groups did not start until later that evening.
Latin American town squares are a special treat for little kids. There are balloon vendors selling every conceivable kind of balloon, helium or air, including a tube about a foot across and about 10 feet long, which kids were knocking 50 feet up in the air. There are all sorts of light sticks and every conceivable kind of doo-dad, trinket, or toy that Chinese industry is capable of producing. Every kid is walking around with some sort of toy or edible treat.
Then there are the food vendors: ice cream, popsicles, cotton candy, ladies selling cups of peeled fruit, men selling hot corn on the cob, shaved ice, every kind of sugary thing guaranteed to make you sick an hour later.
There are clowns doing their thing, involving the kids in their shtick, and thoroughly delighting the kids. For a kid, an evening at one of these fiestas must be the ultimate!
The streets around the main square are filled with restaurants, all offering outside tables, about 3 to 5 rows deep. Likewise, the second stories and their balconies are jammed with diners looking down on the action. On fiesta night, Oaxaca definitely feels like party central!
It was so exciting, I actually stayed up past 9 o´clock!
Until later!