7 months in Oaxaca
Random thoughts and stories from living in Oaxaca, Mexico for 7+ months.
I haven’t lived anywhere else where it’s been this easy to make friends. I wonder how much of this is the place and how much is me? It seems like everywhere else I’ve moved to has been harder to break into.
When I moved to San Francisco, I spent a lot of Friday nights out riding my bike around alone. Women, in bars, would come up to me dancing and say “, We came over because we felt bad for you.” In Seattle, I joined a bunch of intense student clubs. Too many meetings was better than not having anyone to hang with.
Oaxaca connects people easily. It’s latin, warm, beautiful, and small. There’s a lot of foreigners staying for several months or more. There’s artists, musicians, and friendly people with a lot of free time.
In my first couple weeks here, I went to donation salsa dancing classes and joined a coworking space. In 6 weeks, I had people to hike and dance with. In 10-12 weeks, I could call some of them real friends.
These great people came into my life so quickly and we started hanging out all the time. You get close quickly when you’re hanging out almost everyday. Some weeks, we’d each have a night/turn to make dinner for the others. Dance parties by night, hikes by day. Sharing the good life.
The downside of these easy Oaxaca friendships is how abruptly they end. In a couple weeks time in May, I lost 40% of my crew. Most people are simply passing through. The good people come in and go out like the tide.
I’m learning to bond quickly without getting attached.
It got hot fast here. Back in February, it started to hit the 90s every other week. There’s generally no rain from October — May in Oaxaca. I’ve never experienced such long periods of hot and dry. It’s both wonderful and bizarre.
I listened to music whenever I did my midday walk from my apartment to the coworking space. If it was early in the day, I walked on the east side of the road. Past a certain hour and I walked on the west. In Washington, you launch yourself out into the sun to get the most of it. Here, you hide from it.
During those walks, I started to really like a psychedelic rock album called Lonerism by Tame Impala. It’s not an album I would normally listen to dozens of times. But something about long psychedelic rock tracks goes with hot dry days. Trippy weather calls for trippy music.
The first time it rained, I rushed upstairs to get in it. I climbed a gate to the roof of the apartment building and sat in the drizzle. The clouds were dancing with the mountains to the north and I could see most of the city from up there. After many nights of sweating in my bed, I’d never been so happy to see drizzle.
Now that we’re in June, the weather is mixed and interesting. It’s still warm and sunny most mornings (in the 80s, not the 90s) but it often rains hard starting the afternoon. It rains hard enough that you’re soaked in under a minute if you’re out in it. It’s rain worth watching.
The hills around the city have come alive because of the rain. They used to be an ugly scrubby brown color. Now they’re bristling with green foliage and the air is clearer. There’s no better time in Oaxaca.
On one of my midday hot walks, I met this random tall long-haired gregarious dude who had just opened a restaurant. He coaxed me to try out the food with a good pitch and a free glass of wine. The dude’s a born salesman. I grabbed the table in the front of the restaurant and enjoyed the fresh non-greasy food. It’s a such a relief to find something that’s not Tortas, Tacos, or Tlayudas.
As I sat there, he was out giving his shtick to other people walking by (some of them foreigners). I was there, a foreigner, enjoying the food. So me and the guy started joking that I was the mannequin. I’d hold the fork up, about to take a bite, and smile when people were getting the pitch. He kept the joke going for a while. I’d try to leave and he’d try to get me to stay and be the mannequin.
So that became the running joke between me and this guy. I’d walk by the restaurant each day and he’d strain his face and look at his watch like “, Mannequin! Get in here! You’re late!”
Most of the people I know hang out and live in a 15 block radius. Oaxaca is a much larger than that but we basically live in a village.
There’s advantages and disadvantages of my village life compared to my life in San Francisco.
The music, nightlife, and dating options are pretty limited. There’s no bottomless ocean of cute women to meet or live acts coming through. There’s not much in the way of good international food. You get tired of eating the same things or running into that same chick who gave you attitude the weekend before.
But it’s much easier to consistently see people here. With friends here, it’s sort of an implied question of “What are we doing tonight?” There’s rarely more than 2-3 good options any given weekend night. You end up running into the same people quite often and end up bonding more with the people you do hang with.
In San Francisco, you have “friends” who you only see once a month. It got tiring having to compete and schedule for these friends’ time. There’s so many strange scenes and cliques to deal with there as well. There is such a thing as too many cool people doing too many cool things at once. You get very entertained but also exhausted and with too many acquaintances.
Village life isn’t as exciting but I’m enjoying the stronger friendships.
There was a music festival here called Catapulta a couple months ago. It was part of a social innovation conference (that someone is making some good cash off of). My friends and I were all giddy to get some music festival action. A german friend said “, Isn’t it so nice to have beer and listen to music outside like in our countries?!”
Indeed, there’s something familiar and refreshing about having a drink in your hand in some ratty open field with only the purple and pink lights coming from the stage. The group I was with was a mixture of Mexican and foreigners. This was when I was beginning to notice that this was my circle. These were the friends and acquaintances I kept seeing all over. That night, most of them were moving and shaking while the rest of the crowd stood there. My crew was dancing silly and having fun for the hell of it. I realized “, I’m in the right group here. This is where I should be. Wherever I go, I need to find the dancers.”
Oaxaca has mountains, jungles, cities, valleys, and warm beaches. Mazunte is my favorite of the chill hippy Oaxaca beach towns. It’s a very rough ride through curvy mountain roads to get there. But once you jump into the ocean after a great yoga class, you’re not thinking about the tedious ride to get there.
The town is a mix of Mexican, French, Spanish, and Argentine hippies. There are many beautiful and exotic people, some of whom are a bit too cool.
The first time I went, I couldn’t click with several of the people I talked to on the beach. But as is almost the case, I soon found the people who were open to making friends.
A lot of people get happily stuck there for weeks at a time. They wake up, do yoga, read, chill, and then watch the sun go down right over the water (at a nearby beach called Mermejita).
I connected with a random group of Canadian, American, and European backpackers. Some of them were working professionals who took time off to travel. Others were students or long-term traveling freelancers.
A German guy and an Alaskan dude bought a bunch of fish on the beach and invited me to join their fish feed. We feasted on perfectly fried Mahi Mahi tuna until we couldn’t fit anymore. It may have been the best fish feed I’d had. After gorging myself, I made friends with the crew.
It was funny to interact with the Alaskan guy since I was born there and lived there as a kid. This dude was so Alaskan that he literally had the domain Alaskandude.com (his travel blog). He was a little guy with a long mane of hair, thick beard and an absolutely jacked body from fishing. He’d spent time in manly environments.
I told him I was also from there. We were shooting the breeze one time and I don’t remember what I said but he just shook his head and said something like “Fuckin Californian.” (mostly in jest). We got along but it was clear we weren’t cut from the same cloth. I accepted that I’d been disowned from my birth state.
A guy named Carlos and I quickly became very good friends. We’re always going out in nature or finding/making a good dance party.
Carlos has been a true friend in every sense. A drive you to the airport, loan you their car, help you move, and have your back kind of friend.
It’s sometimes unnerving to be in a new place and not really have your support network anymore. It’s easy to meet acquaintances but harder to know who’d help you out in a bind.
On more than a couple occasions, Carlos has paused for a sec, looked me in the eye, and asked “, Do you need anything?” He was actually asking the question not just making an empty gesture.
Another time, I was having a rough week of sleep and he randomly bought me an herbal mix to help with that.
His dad used to smoke a cigars and slowly drink rum while listening to artists like Pink Floyd or Jose Feliciano. That was the beginning of Carlos’ music education.
Music is extremely important to both of us. We’re always sending each other new tracks or listening to tunes together.
I put a track on from an old Jose Feliciano album (Feliciano!) one time and he was delighted. He told me how much his dad liked that album. I explained how it first meant something to my grandma and how I’d listened to it a various time in my life since I was 10.
Carlos and I generally speak in Spanish which has been excellent for mine. He can also speaks pretty well in English. It’s nice to have both available.
One time, sitting on a boulder with a view of a beautiful forest (ripped), I told him “I understand you perfectly in Spanish but sometimes I just can’t formulate the words to respond back how I’d like.” He replied to me in Spanish “, It’s the same for me. I can understand what you’re saying but just don’t have English vocabulary or phrases to respond how I want to.”
It’s so nice to be able to use both languages in a friendship. You get to know someone more deeply when you understand them in their native language. It would be a shame if I couldn’t know him as he is in Spanish and he couldn’t understand me express myself in English.
Carlos was one of the first to get there for my first real club DJ set a couple months back.
It was funny how the DJ set came about. There are so many bad DJs and so much bad music being played in Oaxaca. San Francisco really spoiled me. Motown Mondays. Afrobeat on Thursdays. Electro-Indie on Friday. Latin on Saturday. Funk mixed in. The occasional late Sunday and painful Monday.
Some of the DJs here leave me fuming. DJing 101 is “look at your crowd. Play for them.” These DJs don’t look at their audience. They play horrible cumbia mashups and low quality music off youtube. There’s no transitions and the selection is all over the place.
My old favorite bar, Txalaparta, really went downhill. We started to have many boring mediocre nights out there. I’d go to chat up a woman and it’d turn out she was 17. I got thrown out one night for getting in the DJ’s face about the music.
The bouncers at that bar had also stolen my friend’s motorcycle helmet, the staff were arrogant, and they let the music go downhill. I decided to be done with that place.
A couple days later, I wrote to a bar called Cafe Central that had also really gone downhill from bad DJing. I had asked the manager to let me play several times prior. But one random facebook message was what did it. I asked if I could play sometime and she said “How bout next Friday?” Whoah. Ok. So I had a little over a week to prepare.
I quickly started feverishly buying and downloading the songs I would use. I found some free controller software and taught myself the basics (most good DJs use hardware because it offers a lot more control).
I made a Facebook invite and tried to spread the word. I knew there were a lot of other disgruntled people out there.
When the day came, I started getting pretty nervous. I found out I’d be opening for a traveling DJ who’d been playing for 15 years. We did the soundcheck in the afternoon and he was a nice guy. But he was surprised I was just DJing on software. It was sort of a janky setup for professional DJs.
I got more nervous. I was going to be DJing the janky way. I barely had any experience beatmatching (matching songs so they flow together). This was truly winging it.
I’m was there at home, a couple hours before, trying to make sure I have enough material to fit two and a half hours. To calm my nerves, I said “Ok, you know you have the songs, the instincts, and the energy for this. There’s no way, on your first night, you’re going to have anywhere near the technical ability that a guy who’s been doing it for years and has a piece of hardware made for it. But only maybe 20-30% comes down to technical ability. Just make the transitions passable and the good songs and good energy will carry you.” I had to calm myself down.
I started at 9:15 or so. It was still raining outside and there was no one in the bar. I first started playing random music off Spotify because I didn’t want to burn through my set. The bar is a beautiful open space with couches, pillars, smooth lighting, red curtains and cool art. It has a upscale bohemian feel to it. When some people trickled in (actual customers) I realized “you’re on.” So I just started DJing. Carlos came soon and was my number 1 fan sitting there up front.
I didn’t know what I was doing but that mattered less each minute. The music sounded so damn good on those loud enormous speakers.
My only real goal was to not mess up the transitions too bad. It’s called a train wreck when two songs are played on top of each and they’re mismatched.
The audience slowly trickled in. A couple groups sat but a couple groups were standing up. It built slowly.
I kept close track of the crowd. “Oh ok, I sort of got that group on the left moving. Those girls on the couch aren’t moving but they’re enjoying. Ok, now those 5 in the back are warming.”
The crowd kept growing. “Ok, now that white shirt young latin dude, he’s moving. Oh, whoa! These two 30-something American chicks are pulling out their disco moves.” People I knew and didn’t know started to fill the bar. More and more groups started to move a bit. My friends would come up and hug me on stage when they came in.
I started off sober but then started to take advantage of my free drinks.
I slowly raised the tempo by choosing progressively faster songs. I wasn’t doing much while the song was playing so I danced and enjoyed. People take their cue from a happy DJ.
I made a couple bad transitions and accidentally paused the song a couple times. But overall, it was turning out to be a rocking performance.
Then it became the most dancey night I’d seen in almost a year. I kept cranking the electro, disco hits, and tasty remixes.
I like to use songs that people know but haven’t burnt out. So I’d put something like “Baby give it up” (KC and the sunshine band) but never something like “That’s the way I like it.” (same band). There’s a fine line between classic and cheesy.
A group of acquaintances jumped on stage and started dancing next to me. A couple people came up to explicitly say “This is the best music I’ve heard since I moved to Oaxaca a year ago.” I’d pulled off my first set.
Finally, around 11:20, the other DJ came up on stage. The vibe was on fire at that point. He looked over as he was setting up and genuinely said “, Nice dance party!” I’d more than warmed it up for him.
It was nice to get off stage. Probably 30-45 friends and acquaintances were there. People were stoked for me and gave me hugs.
I more than took advantage of the free drinks.
The next DJ was incredible. He got in your mind and took you for a ride. Up and down, this way, that way. I danced with anyone in my vicinity. The whole bar was open and alive. Everyone was in a good and open mood, like a festival.
Maike was one of the people who left and left a hole in our group.
She’s a gorgeous blue eyed blonde designer from the Netherlands. Being as exotic and charming as she was, she accrued a fan club for herself in Oaxaca. We had fun teasing her about it. There were these guys that came out of the woodwork to see her every time we went out.
One guy wrote her a really cheesy poem called Ojos Azules (Blue Eyes). Each line of the poem started with a letter from “Ojos Azules”. Another guy, we called “The Dancer” started to come to our group events to hang with her but we haven’t seen him since she left.
Early on, she got herself in a couple awkward situations because she couldn’t see what some of those artists’ intentions were.
One guy got her to loan him some money (roughly $35). The guy ended up stiffing her but still gave all sorts of lame excuses for when he would pay.
Like most things, she didn’t let it bother her. She has a nice policy of trusting people. She said “, I’d rather get ripped off every once in a while than be afraid and uptight with people.”
I try to take a moment of stillness each day. My mind gets moving so fast, especially when I’m on the computer a good part of the day. Taking a moment to be present and pay attention to my senses changes how I see the world. Instead of ‘do, do, do’, purposeful stillness gives me a moment of ‘be’. I immediately notice all sorts of details and sensations about the world that I didn’t before.
My neighborhood is idyllic. The buildings are a nice mix of colonial, colorful, but also just a bit run down. In front of my house, there’s a park that used to be owned by a biologist. He planted the most random assortment of trees in the park and no two are alike. People walk their dogs around the park for exercise and sometime just stop to sit at the fountains. Dog walkers sometimes pass with two hands full of leashes for 12 dogs. The knife sharpener guys go by with their bicycle wheel knife sharpener set ups. They ding a bell in the restaurants to see if anyone needs a sharpening. Another guy goes by with a bicycle barbecue contraption. I still don’t know what he’s offering only that he lets out a really loud “choo choo”. If I’ve had a toke of weed and I’m sitting on my roof, I can’t help but yell “choo choo!” back at him. It just seems so absurd to ride around a neighborhood choo-chooing at odd hours.
Sitting on my roof, watching the park, is what I call the cinema of life. It’s people watching galore from a high vantage. There’s just so many random types of people going by. Sometimes, I’ll just watch the cinema, but sometimes I can’t resist waving to or shouting at the people below.
Mexicans here will often go out to a public square or bench to idly sit. They aren’t necessarily talking or doing anything, just sitting and passing the time. They know how to be still.
My house is the first one I’ve lived in with cockroaches.
The first time I saw one, I tried to be buddhist about it and gently catch it to let it outside.
But those fuckers run and hide. They are cunning. And then you’ve got one in some crevice under your bed, and it’s 1am.
I don’t hesitate now, I kill fast.
Sometimes I’m just too tired to kill cockroaches at night. They come every couple weeks. On some nights, once they’ve ducked into a corner, I just call it quits. I don’t want to tear everything apart to murder the little bastard. I think “, You win this time, roach. Have a good time in my pantry.”
Like everywhere else I’ve lived, I’ve been a weekend warrior here in Oaxaca. I get up into the mountains around Oaxaca almost every weekend. Carlos is usually my accomplice.
It’s not like the city stresses me out that much. Getting up into the mountains is something I need everywhere I live. It gives me a fresh perspective, renewed energy, and taste of something new.
Oaxaca City is in a valley surrounded by different mountains and mountain ranges. Oaxaca the most biodiverse state of Mexico, probably because of its abundance of microclimates. Almost every direction you go will offer a slightly different climate and set of species. I’ve seen a lot more mountains and forests here than most and still feel I’ve barely scratched the surface.
The only hard part of getting out is finding the right bus or truck (if Carlos doesn’t go that day with his car).
One time, I decided to get away on my own for the weekend. I decided on Friday that I would leave but I didn’t know where. I checked out the map site I made for a new spot. There was one area that I hadn’t been before but I thought would be easiest to find a ride to.
Instead of trying to google or plan the heck out the trip, I went with the flow that day.
I got up when I felt like it, stumbled into a random hole in the wall with great service and a nice breakfast.
I moseyed on down to the bus station and a bus was leaving to my spot 15 minutes later.
I got on the bus and relaxed to bluegrass in my headphones and beautiful forested mountains going by. A perfect warm breeze came in the window.
I got off at the place (Capulalpam) and discovered it was a very quaint clean mountain village.
The owner of a nice coffeeshop told me about some cabins I could stay in. I walked to the cabins, several people helped point me the right way.
The cabin guy wouldn’t go down on the price and was trying to charge me the price that 3 people would pay (because there were 3 beds). But I didn’t sweat it. I just kept wandering.
A guy who was taking care of plants at a green house told me about a family closeby that rented out a room. It was another 3 minutes walk away and they indeed had a nice clean cheap room.
The family stay overlooked the nearby mountains around the town. There were forested mountains going off several miles in each direction. The place was exactly what I was looking for.
The next day, I walked down a road, out of town, and off into the forest. I set my hammock up in a clearing, read random books, and chilled in the quiet woods. The forest was like many Oaxacan forests, both familiar and exotic for me coming from the US west coast. The tall conifers, waterfalls, and thick brush felt like being in Oregon or California woods. But there were these twisting bright orange flowers posted up on the tree branches and ferns of all shapes and sizes. It was familiar and exotic at the same time. That combination is a perfect metaphor for why I like Mexico so much.
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