Our week here is passing much too quickly, not helped by both Iris and I being out of action on different days because of a bug and fever respectively. However, it hasn’t stopped us from enjoying this relaxed, beautiful and fascinating town.
We’ve been very fortunate as well to have had excellent spanish teachers at the Instituto Jovel. They’ve both had an uncanny ability to find and hone in on our areas of weakness (which admittedly there are many!) and improve them. Like in Oaxaca, we’ve found it a superb way to learn also about the town, it’s people, history and culture and we’ll continue to do this more as we travel around.
The only detraction from the town, like Oaxaca, is that there are very few parks for the kids to run and play in. One of the afternoons, I took them in a taxi ride to Parque Convivencia de Infatil on the outskirts of town, which had been recommended to us. The park was massive and had about 60 apparatus to play on, but they were all identical sets of swings, slides and see-saws with many of the joints rusted through. We found the best way to have fun was playing our own games like pinecone throwing competitions. Because the place was huge, empty and rundown, it had a sad post apocalyptic feel. Equally sadly, we are finding that the playgrounds in Burger King and McDonalds are the best places to take the little ones to burn some energy.
We’re relieved that the kids are finally warming up to playing with local kids as well. In Mexico City, Sofia came crying to us when a girl approached her to play because she didn’t know what to say to her in Spanish. Of course, when kids play they don’t need language, but we think that the little spanish that they’ve learned so far has definitely helped with their confidence and to break the ice.
One of the highlights of the week was a mountainbike ride which went through the outskirts of the town, through little townships and through a reserve and to several nearby caves.
Mountainbiking has been a bit of a revelation for me over the past few years in NZ, not just for the adrenalin, but also for the journey and adventure. It has enabled me to see places I had been visiting for years in a completely new way and similarly when travelling, it enables places to be seen in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t be.
In this instance, much of the ‘adventure’ was unplanned with many wrong turns taken and doubling back necessary. The ‘guide’ had just moved to the region and I don’t think had been on this route before and was often asking my opinion on which way we should go. It was all a good laugh though, and well worth the morning’s effort.
Believe it or not, this was an innocent attempt at making a monkey, but I ran out of pipe cleaner when it came to the tail… Hilarity ensued
Another visit to the market
