Oaxaca, Mole and more Mole

It rains in Oaxaca every day at 5 -- the skies open and you head for a doorway. That´s why The Great Advance-Thinking Plotnik bought Guelaguetza tickets for the 10AM show this morning. Skies were clear, and the sun was broiling, but it didn´t rain until halfway through the final number, almost four hours after the show started, and by then it just felt good.

What an extravaganza -- music and dance and costumes plus civic and tribal pride. Fourteen different groups from different corners of the State of Oaxaca performed their local dances, speaking and singing in Spanish and Zapotec or Mixtec, filling up a huge outdoor circular stage. Their local eight piece bands stood behind microphones in front of a full 40-piece orchestra, which was only brass, woodwinds and percussion. No steenking strings or guitars and no bass either, just four tubas oom-pah-pahing their chicharrones off.

The Governor and his boys, all of whom wore white guyabera shirts with dark glasses, had the Best Seats, and the dancers would often run up the runway to present him with flowers or a ceremonial machete. This is saying something, since there were so many threats to disrupt the Guelaguetza that there are a trillion police, all carrying clubs behind clear shields, everywhere you look all through town.

Not like Guatemala, though, where they were scary. Here they have huge fat bellies and stand around talking on cell phones.

Maybe the best dance was the Jarabe Mixtec, which is a high-spirited very fast waltz where one man in a white peasant´s costume with red neckerchief, and one woman in a multicolored skirt, both in sandals, practically ate up that stage with exciting dancing. He was supposedly trying to capture her and she was having none of it. Meanwhile, the audience knew the lyrics and sang twenty different verses.

Or maybe it was the Zapotec women doing the Torero Serrano, which means bullfighter from the mountains, and as the men approached them, holding their handkerchiefs as if they were bullfighters, the women charged through the handkerchiefs and barreled into the men and knocked their asses right off the stage. They pulverized those guys. The audience went insane everytime a guy fell over.

(Please scroll forward to August 8 for many Guelaguetza photos.)

Almost four hours is a lot of hours in the sun. It was a fabulous morning, and now it´s 6pm and Plottie´s pooped. It probably has something to do with the mole he and Duck just had for lunch -- Restaurant Los Pacos brings little bowls of the six different Oaxacan moles to your table and you taste them, using tortillas as dippers, and then decide which to order. The Plotniks, having eaten the greatest Mole Poblano in the history of the world the other night in Puebla, opted for the yellow estofado which is a pork stew in a zillion spices including a lot of vinegar. The best part of lunch was the avocado/cucumber salad, dipped in a thick guacamole with a little morita (smoked chile) salsa.

Oaxaca is much bigger than Plot remembers it, of course, it having been 1965 since he was here last, and, to be honest, it doesn´t seem to have the charm of Puebla, nor certainly of Antigua, or anywhere in Peru. One of the reasons, most likely, is that no matter how you slice it, Mexico is basically the USA. There aren´t many Americans visible, but the culture, the music, the flow of people all point North. The real frontier of America is on the Guatemalan border.

Plot and Duck don´t do heat very well anymore, and it´s pretty danged hot during the day, until it rains. But the mornings and evenings are spectacular, and there´s a pool in the B&B, and Sophie, the cook, makes huevos rancheros using the local quesillo cheese. The strange thing about that cheese is that Plotnik remembers HATING the cheese in Mexico when he was 19, but now he loves it. It´s sour. Salty. Yumm.
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There will be another entry just about the Mole Poblano in Puebla, where they invented it. It´s the mole Americans are familiar with, if they know mole at all, dark, not hot but spicy, with chocolate as one of the ingredients. But eating this one, Plot and Duck realized they´ve never eaten mole before. Each bite was that absolutely perfect blend of thirty or more spices (clove, cinnamon, chocolate, peanut, pasilla chile, guajillo chile, morita chile, ancho chile, garlic, sesame, the list goes on an on) and you could NEVER taste only one spice. Everything was a symphony. The mole was so good that Plot and Duck have changed hotels, to stay at the Colonial, where the mole was, when they return to Puebla on Thursday.

But...they´ve got to take that freaking awful bus again. Plot hadn´t been carsick in many years, but it hit him ten minutes out of Oaxaca and it´s a four hour-plus, windy and miserable ride. Well, we´re not thinking about that now.

Time to go. Going to a weaving village and one where they make black pottery tomorrow. JK-aka-PP, you oughta be here. BZ, PD, 5H and BI too. Love to everyone.