How to truly appreciate a cuisine

Breads, in Bread Aisle, of the Friday Market

Friday morning and I step out of our hotel into a changed world. The streets are gone, instead replaced by a microcosm of tents. It's Friday market! The first tent I encounter is all bedspreads, fleece blankets, decorated with roaring tigers and jungle scenes. Then the panties tent, scanty to grannie style, then western saddles and spurs and bridles, smelling of fresh leather. Enormous bags of chilies, in unimaginable varieties of reds, tiny dried fish, bags of peanuts. A woman walks by carrying a bag of tomatoes, a giant drooping bag of greenbeans balanced on her head. A man carries a long stack of blue and yellow 5-gallon buckets. I sit in the middle of it all, drinking hot atole (corn drink) with some dry bread for dipping. Selections of buns, little puffy ones with mottled tops, expansive ones shaped like a mountainous continent: stand after stand of these breads. All in the same place; you hit the bread aisle, you find the Plastic Junk aisle, it always amazes me that people sell their similar things all in the same place (what if the southeast corner of the market happened to have a demand for bread?). An old woman carefully unpacks a selection of heavy green clay pots. I wonder how far she had traveled for this market with these?

Street perro regards our lunch break

We rode to Miahuatlán today, which is the last town within reasonable riding conditions, before we hit the knee-masticating mountains that block us from the Pacific coast. 

Yesterday we took a complete day of rest, thanks to me needing to lunge for the toilet (then questioning which end to put over it first) in the middle of the night Wednesday. A momentary stomach flu? A spot of food poisoning?  But sleeping most of the day Thursday, sleeping as if an enormous hand was pushing me down, sleeping in this involuntary deliciously overcome way, was the best medicine. 

There is nothing quite as disappointing as having no appetite in this heaven of food culture that is Oaxaca, and there is nothing quite as jubilant as regaining it again, eating a tamale in bed, and having it be the best tamale in the world. (Bless Kathy for taking such good care of me, as tamale huntress)  Feeling well is poignantly meaningful after feeling unwell. The tamale was wrapped in a corn husk, and inside the corn mush read the striations of the husk, and the beans were just spicy enough, and there was a mysterious green tree leaf (which I still have yet to identify) gracing the whole thing in there. 

By the way, I can imagine no better place to be creating an appetite through cycling, than in Oaxaca. It is the first regional cuisine to be designated by UNESCO as a World Cultural Treasure. Mountains and Moles, mm! 

 We found a cafe, which had salads!, for dinner tonight. Funky fonts with words about coffee graced the walls, the place was tall-ceilinged and airy, and an espresso machine spissed at the counter. "This place feels so American!" Kathy remarked. "Not with THIS on the table it doesn't", I said, indicating this egregious balloon heart. Thus we posed for silly selfies. (Also the over-produced Latina soaps playing on the two TVs)