Mexico

>
>Over the Christmas holidays my family decided to get together in Mexico,
>mainly in Oaxaca. With my parents, who live in Vermont, and my sister
>Flora and her friend Brian, who live in Baltimore, we coordinated plans
>with David and Cristina, a young couple dear to us who live in New
>Mexico. We stopped in Mexico City both coming and going. Our hotel for
>both stays was the Casa Inn, a former Days Inn at the corner of Rio Lerma
>and Rio Misisipi, a block outside the Zona Rosa. It was an o.k. place,
>well located; we had questions about their competence on our return stay
>when one part of our group was assigned to four different rooms before we
>were in the right room. The main thing we did on our first stay in the
>city was to go to Coyoacan, a former separate town absorbed into the city,
>with the Frida Kahlo and Trotsky museums. Back close to the hotel, in
>Chapultepec park, we made a too-quick stop at the Anthropology Museum. On
>our return stop in Mexico City, we got together for dinner with Laurie and
>Peter of the Travelzine, always a pleasure to see them again after
>previous times in Rome and Montreal.
>
>My mother and I had been to Oaxaca previously and had great memories of
>it, starting with our stay at the Casa Arnel
><http://www.oaxaca.com.mx/arnel/>, a great friendly place with minimal
>prices; I'd also seen recommendations, including in the Zine hotel
>database, for Las Golondrinas. Neither of them could accommodate us at
>this busy time, though, so I reserved rooms at La Casa de Maria B & B
><http://www.oaxacalive.com/maria.htm>. Maria manages discussion boards on
>oaxacalive.com; as I worked out details of the reservation with her by
>e-mail, she gave helpful tips for booking bus travel from Mexico City for
>this peak travel time from a distance. When we got to the inn, if I
>identified her correctly, she had a broken leg and we mostly dealt with
>her grandchildren. The place had a pleasant atmosphere but was probably
>overpriced for Oaxaca. It was some distance from the city center; the
>people there kept saying it was a 10-15 minute walk to the zocalo (central
>square), but it was easily more than 30. We were also hindered by not
>having a phone in the rooms, both for communicating between rooms and for
>reaching David and Cristina, who were staying in another hotel. I was
>given the assignment to call them to arrange our first dinner meeting; I
>called from the hotel office as they were completing their annual holiday
>pageant and there was shouting among family members; not great for me
>since I keep my voice at low volume.
>
>We were very satisfied with our meals in Oaxaca, with local specialties
>such as chicken mole and tasajo (thinly cut steak). Personally I didn't
>sample the chapulines (grasshoppers in chile). We had our first and last
>suppers for the whole group at La Casa de la Abuela, upstairs overlooking
>the zocalo, and our Christmas meal at El Asador Vasco also there. We had
>two lunches in places in courtyards on Garcia Vigil street; at one, La
>Tradicion, a few blocks north of the zocalo, we ordered main dishes at
>about $3.50 U.S. and got many nice appetizers; we wondered what kind of
>cover charge we would get and there was none. Arranging meeting places
>with difficult phone communication and some of us being earlier risers
>than others was a problem. Once we decided to meet for lunch at a
>restaurant listed in a guidebook without a full address, just the street
>and that it was north of the zocalo, meaning a two-block range; people
>looked in those blocks and beyond for the restaurant without finding
>it--it had apparently closed down--but our three groups eventually found
>each other. Even in this busy time for tourism our party of seven could
>always be seated without a reservation; true, we ate earlier than typical
>Mexican meal times.
>
>One reason for this being a busy time is the world-renowned Night of the
>Radishes on Dec. 23. After dinner that night my parents went home, and
>the rest of us went to see the display of radish sculptures. The line to
>get onto the platform to view them went halfway around the zocalo and
>doubled back 3-4 times. Although I was the most interested in seeing the
>radishes, I wasn't sure I wanted to go through that. The others were
>ready to make the effort, so we all did. The line was self-policing, and
>eventually order broke down; people from behind us surged past us, and we
>joined the flow of people getting onto the exit side of the
>platform. With people going in two directions, we felt one section of the
>platform sag and it collapsed just after all our group was off the
>section. (I don't think anyone there was hurt.) With all our difficulty
>in seeing the displays, we found some of them very impressive, but I'll be
>glad to call this a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
>
>Oaxaca is great simply for taking in the atmosphere and great
>weather. The outdoor market stalls and busy covered markets are
>appealing. The area north of the zocalo is picturesque and generally
>calm, while to the south one feels the bustle of a big city. Important
>sights in town are the Basilica de la Soledad and the church and cultural
>center (with interesting temporary shows) of Santo Domingo. On Christmas
>Day, we went to the spectacular archaeological site of Monte Alban, high
>above the city. Construction there began around 700 B.C.; the very first
>thing they did without machinery then was cut the top off a mountain; what
>we have now is the vast main plaza of a big Zapotec city, with big
>structures to climb and take in the view. Mitla is another important
>site; we missed going there this time when it rained on our last morning
>in Oaxaca and we hadn't fully resolved the problem I'll describe next.
>
>Our stay in Oaxaca was marred when my mother's purse with her passport was
>stolen. Although she had been in a busy market, she remembers spending
>from the purse afterwards. Evidently someone in the street made a quick
>cut in her big heavy-duty nylon bag and the straps of her small purse for
>valuables. There is consolation in the thought that, if the thief had
>been spotted, he might have done something worse with the knife. While my
>mother filed a report at the police station, my father and I went back to
>the hotel to make calls to cancel the credit card and get the house sitter
>to fax a copy of the passport. We needed to make these calls from the
>street, and loud buses came by at crucial points of the recorded messages
>we were hearing or leaving. (There are places in the city center where
>one can make calls from a quiet booth and pay afterwards.) When my mother
>got back, she said the police station typed up the report with five carbon
>copies, scanned it into the computer, then ran paper with carbon through
>the printer. This was Sunday, Dec. 23; we waited to see if the U.S.
>consular office in Oaxaca (a small space in a shopping mall) would be open
>Monday. It wasn't, and the number in Mexico City that supposedly answered
>24 hours only had a recording and no other way of getting help. On Dec.
>26, the secretary of the consular office prepared the paperwork for my
>mother to return to the U.S.; the consul needed to sign it and it wasn't
>certain when he would be in. In fact he only came in after hours on the
>27th, our last day in Oaxaca, but he delivered the papers in person to our
>hotel. I was in e-mail contact with Laurie, who deals with this type of
>problem for Canadian citizens, during this time, and she was helpful. We
>had worried about crime in Mexico City and had somewhat let our guard down
>in Oaxaca; this atypical incident doesn't hurt our positive view of Oaxaca.
>
>About transportation: we took first-class buses as the reasonable way to
>get between Mexico City and Oaxaca. We left from TAPO, one of the four
>big bus stations in Mexico City, on the peak travel day of Saturday, Dec.
>22. Although the station was crowded, boarding and baggage checks went
>efficiently, with the departure hall separate from arrivals. The pretense
>of a security check wasn't very serious, though. There was an odd
>selection of videos on the scheduled 6-hour ride, including a preview of a
>movie about a plane hijacking. I had heard that travel time had been
>reduced with the construction of the new toll road. These roads had
>periodic booths with a set toll rather than a system with tickets. There
>were delays with these multiple stops on the road to Puebla, the first
>part. At some of these stops, police boarded to look for fugitives. Then
>the toll road on to Oaxaca was in fact a mountainous two-lane
>road. Sitting close to the front I saw some risky moves; it's common to
>pass on an unmarked middle lane and count on others to move to the side.
>
>Not that much to report on the air travel (beyond the current changed
>realities): the best deal available to me was on America West. Once I
>knew that there would be no meals on any of my three-hour segments
>connecting through Phoenix, there was nothing too bad about the trip on
>the airline known as "America's Worst." I was selected for random
>searches on both the international segments. I booked the others out of
>Washington Dulles on a Mexicana ticket but a United non-stop flight; it
>was a better deal than anything out of Boston or Baltimore. My parents
>made a separate connection Boston-JFK-Dulles. On the return, we followed
>the airlines' guidelines and arrived more than three hours early for our
>11 a.m. departures. We got through check-in and security in no time; it's
>some consolation to think that the lines would have been much longer if
>we'd gotten there just a little later.
>
>So it was a great adventurous trip; thanks for reading.

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