Day 6

We had a good weekend. On Saturday we went to the garden behind the Santo Domingo church. It’s a huge project with plants from all over Oaxaca, including a 700 year-old cactus that was rescued from the site where a highway was being built. It is huge, and to move it each and every needle had to be covered in newspaper. When it was all wrapped up to be moved, it weighed many tons. The cactus is called Bisnaga, and it’s a round, bulby kind of cactus. The boys were fascinated by a carnivorous ground-cover that resembled yarrow or tiny ferns. Any leaf you touched would shut quickly. I forget how fun it is sometimes to be with Jasper in nature, and this was no exception. He correctly identified so many different kinds of plants, even here in Mexico. At one point I was pointing to the beautiful flowers in a tree and he said, “I don’t think that’s part of the tree. It looks like a bromeliad.” Sure enough, the guide said he was right. The garden had an amazing fountain too with red-colored water. The dye in the water comes from the insects here that are used to make dyes for cloth, called cochineal.

Yesterday we moved in with our host family. They are lovely, but communicating is really tough. Today we are all exhausted. Our classes cover a lot of material and move quickly, but I am completely lacking basic vocabulary. The boys seemed overwhelmed and exhausted today, but tonight Jasper said again he’s glad we came. It’s important for us to have down time every day to just be together, kick a ball around, read, or play cards. It’s cute hearing Jasper and Hugo say words in Spanish, and when we played cards with one of the daughters here Jasper spoke a little Spanish to her.

I think I mentioned the crazy driving here? No seatbelts, no car seats, no one on motorcycles or bikes seem to wear helmets. When our host family picked us up, they came in a tiny car. Our whole family, our luggage, and three members of their family piled in. They had their daughter on their lap in the front seat, and Jim and I had Jasper and Hugo on our laps in the back. Our luggage was crammed in everywhere. No one thought anything of it. Today we took our first cab. None of the seatbelts worked and it was hard to keep Hugo in one place. We hit a lot of traffic on the way to the host family’s house, and we took a detour that included driving on an unpaved, muddy side street. The paved road just ended, and then there was mud. I thought we would get stuck, but we just powered on through and arrived at our destination. To get to school this morning we took a local bus. The music was blaring, it was very crowded, and we had to holler at the driver to get him to stop at our corner, despite having asked him beforehand. Then we had to push our way out of the bus. There is a lot of beauty in the city, but many parts are really run down and the exhaust fumes and dirt are hard to ignore.