We drove to the village of Teotitlan de Valle for a home visit with an extended Zapotec family. The couple met us in the village center and provided us with baskets. Balam, our tour director, divided us into small groups and gave each a shopping list.
Because the village is remote, cell service was poor and our Google Translate apps didn't help us figure out what we were looking for on the list. We just had to keep asking in our very limited Spanish.
We finally acquired at least a little bit of everything on our list -- peas, roasted grasshoppers, potatoes, herbs, and a limestone paste that is used in place of cooking oil. We still hadn't spent our allowance, so we started filling the basket with random vegetables.
Then we were placed in tuk-tuks, which in Mexico are called "mototaxis." These taxis took us to the home of our hosts where preparation of our noon meal was already well underway. Our groceries would simply be gifts to the family, not used for today's lunch.
At least six women, all members of the extended family, were involved in the preparation of the meal. Our hostess conducted a demonstration of how the mole was prepared, though what we would actually eat had already been completed. It's a complex recipe with many ingredients and many steps!
Lunch was quite good, and we had "chocolate caliente" (hot chocolate -- prepared in the traditional Aztec way) for dessert.
Our host makes his living primarily as a weaver, so we walked to his shop for a demonstration of how fibers and dyes are prepared. Then we got the sales pitch. No rugs are coming home with us.
The bus then took us a short distance to a mescal distillery. Mescal, like tequila, is made from the agave plant. We walked into the agave field to learn something about the plants.
Then we saw how the harvested agaves were cooked, pressed, and distilled. Then we had a rather generous tasting of several varieties of mescal. We aren't bringing any of that home, either.
After returning to the hotel, we walked on our own back toward the old city center. We came upon a wedding parade.
It's apparently typical in Oaxaca for the couple to hire a band, dancers in costume, and character mannequins and for the wedding party and guests to go dancing in the streets.
This was obviously a very prosperous young couple, and the entire company of wedding guests were dressed to the nines!
We briefly visited a free museum of contemporary art. It wasn't very inspiring. We also got inside the cathedral, and it wasn't too inspiring, either. It was much more plain than some of the other churches.
As we enjoyed a beer and snack near the central plaza, another parade came by. This one appeared to be celebrating Chinese New Year, but we saw no one who looked Chinese.
On the way back to the hotel we saw yet another wedding parade, although this one didn't appear to be quite as high class as the first.
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