| Hola!
Here in Oaxaca we are gearing up for the Food of the Gods Festival taking place at the beginning of October and the Day of the Dead celebrations at the end of the month and the beginning of November.
And we look with delight toward the Night of the Radishes and, of course, the Christmas season. The Fall and Winter season here are just filled with celebrations and surprises.
| ANCHO, CASCABEL, CHILCOSTLE and more..... |
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 Chiles have been grown in Mexico for thousands of years. There are more than 150 indigenous varieties with at least sixty of these grown in Oaxaca and nowhere else. Many of them are used in the famous mole sauces of the region.
In the 15th century Columbus brought Mexican chiles to Europe and from there they spread around the world. The rest, as they say, is history.
Read on....
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| Intricate Oaxacan Embroidery |
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 The skirts and blouses in Juchitán are richly embroidered with a thick layer of silk flowers and figures copied from Chinese shawls that began to arrive in Mexico in colonial days aboard the Manila galleons.
Although the ancestral tribal dress has all but vanished in Oaxaca City, significant numbers of Oaxacan native women make and wear 'traje', especially in the Mazateca, Chinantla, and Zapotec Sierra in the north, the Isthmus in the southeast, the coastal Mixteca in the southwest, and the Trique in the Mixteca Alta in the west.
The native garments have so many uses, at home, at the beach, or in more formal situations, that you almost can't go wrong buying them.
Full Story....
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| Lighting The Way For Dead Souls |
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 It is a sleepy Sunday in Teotitlan. Sitting under a shady tree, revered candle maker Viviana Alavez Hipolito is squeezing hundreds of limes with the help of her elderly aunt, while gently rocking a push chair to keep her grandchild quiet.
"The lime juice is to clean the wax" Viviana proudly explains. "I do not make the candles on Sunday, I do my washing on Sunday". But a busy time of year approaches, so she is preparing the wax for the week ahead.
Candles play as vital a role in the lives of Oaxacans as does music. No wedding, funeral or fiesta is complete without them. At this time of the year Viviana is inundated with special requests for decorative candles to adorn altars for Day of The Dead.
Full Story ...
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| "I can fly.... I can fly" |
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 As some of you know, travelling by road from Oaxaca to Huatulco can take more than 6 hours by car and up to 9 arduous hours by bus.
Now, the small airline that could, Aerotucán, provides morning flights between Oaxaca City and the beach destinations of Huatulco and Puerto Escondido cutting traveling time to approximately 35- 40 minutes.
More on this topic...
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Back To Basics–
Way Back |
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77, 88 99... I am powerless to stop. Once again, at 11 calories a crunch, the fried tortilla chips I eat while waiting for my low-fat entrée defeat my good intentions. Which is why I, like many other crunchaholics, regarded the advent of the baked tortilla chip as one of the great inventions of this century.
We were only wrong by two millennia. The truth is, toasted tortillas and tortilla chips were probably being served with guacamole and hot sauce in pre-Columbian America- a time of great pyramids, vast empires- and, apparently, low-fat snacks. I stumbled across this piece of tortilla history last summer when I visited an archaeological laboratory in Oaxaca , Mexico, near the site of the Monte Albán ruins.
If you're a fan of the modern baked tortilla chip, you're going to love 2,000-year-old Mexican tostadas
Find Out More....
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