In with a Bang!

BOOM!..BOOM, BOOM...BOOM....

It's three o'clock in the morning, and the booms keep coming. Could they still be celebrating that local saint's day festival? Could they be doing mining in the nearby hills? What on earth could keep the pace of these earth-shaking, ear-cracking mortars so consistent, even at this late hour? And more importantly, when am I going to sleep?

To understand the urgency and also the desperation of these three a.m. questions, some context is no doubt required. After all, last you knew, we were still frantically preparing for our four-month Oaxaca odyssey, and our biggest concern was how to get out of our own house. In the few days that have transpired, we've moved through several thousand miles, multiple landscapes, several languages, and a whole cuisine to reach our destination...Oaxaca. It's been a whirlwind of a ride.

First, there was getting out of our house. For some reason, we had the crazy idea that we would be able to make all of our last-minute arrangements, pack our Northwest clothes into the attic, pack our “summer” clothes into our suitcases, and clean everything underneath fairly quickly. Ha! As the hours ticked away on Thursday, our departure day, the fantastical logic behind this assumption was made ever more apparent. What started as a “quick” clean (I hear the entire DeHart family laughing at this oxymoron) soon became a herculean chore, and it was close to six o'clock—a full five hours later than our original exit schedule—when we wiped our hands, locked the door, and drove off. Somehow preparing for a “trip” seemed like it would be easier than preparing for a full-blown move, but this day's work proved otherwise. Needless, to say, not a little big of exhaustion followed us into that drive down to Portland (mitigated only by the incredible meal we managed to slip in at Las Tarascas in Centralia halfway down).

After a quick night's rest, we headed out for our long two days of travel. Luckily, despite the normal airport struggles (overweight luggage is not allowed to Mexico during the high season travel, so we had an extra 20 pounds to rearrange), we had an uneventful airport day. Perhaps our biggest challenge was the pitiful food situation in the Phoenix airport, where we had a four-hour layover. No amount of walking to other gates or lowering our expectations could compensate for the especially bad food choices there. Nonetheless, we made it to our connection, and on to Mexico City, arriving at midnight with an excitement diminished only by yawns. After immigration, customs, and a quick ride to the airport hotel, we crashed out by 2:00 a.m.

Saturday we rolled out of bed in time for a leisurely breakfast before heading out for the bus station. The girls were especially anxious about what our bus would look like, imagining I'm sure the Pierce County Transit buses that pass by our house. Being more accustomed to the third-class buses of Guatemala, I kept telling them how luxurious these Mexican first-class buses would be, equipped with movie screens, air conditioning, bathrooms, and reclining seats. Still, it was an awing experience for all of us as we arrived at the massive terminal that was, despite its size, impeccably organized for the volume of people, cargo, and buses moving in and out. And our first-class bus didn't disappoint for multiple reasons. The girls were mightily impressed with the reclining seats, cup-holders, and flip-down movie screens, but later disappointed to realize that the movies would be in Spanish (a disappointment made even more poignant by the first movie selection—A Beautiful Mind—which was not easily translated by its visuals). Meanwhile, Josh and I marveled at the incredible, changing scenery along the route, enjoying the lush green volcanic but urban landscape of Mexico City, the foresty mountainous climb away from the city, the increasingly arid and agricultural drive through Puebla, and the transition to cactus-dominated rises, only to return to Oaxaca's green mountains and forests landscapes. The sky performed beautifully for us the entire time, and we were continually enraptured by new views...that is, until the 6-hour ride slowly became a 7-hour ride, and our meager bus snack supplies disappeared to give way to yawning pangs of hunger. I don't know which of us was happiest, then, when we finally pulled into the bus station in Oaxaca at 8;00 at night.

Unfortunately, the rest of the evening did not produce the climactic arrival moment that this building narrative would seem to suggest. Instead, it brings us back to the “BOOM” of the introduction.

We went quickly to our apartment to unload our hefty luggage in the hopes of making a quick escape to long-awaited Oaxacan food, but instead got stuck getting a full-blown orientation to the apartment from the property manager. When we did finally take off, we weren't able to find the restaurant that I remembered so fondly (turns out it was a block north of where I led everyone), so we wandered into the Zocalo (main plaza) only to find ourselves in the middle of a huge melee of bands, music, fireworks, and people. We sat at one of the normally relaxing outdoor restaurants where we were promptly bombarded by smoke from a nearby German tourist and subjected to bad food, throngs of people, and an increasingly foul attitude (I'm speaking for myself here). In the end, we staggered home, dead tired, and hit the beds exhausted, only to find ourselves audience to a long, long, long night of exploding fireworks and racing cars outside our window. BOOM...BOOM, BOOM! At about 3:00 a.m. I had convinced myself that this couldn't possibly be fireworks, but must instead represent a new phase of strip mining on the nearby mountain. How was I going to convince my family that this was beautiful Oaxaca, a place worthy of the huge effort we had undertaken to get here and the fate to which we had resigned ourselves for the next four months?

By 8:00 a.m. the next morning the fireworks (or strip mining) had abated, and I had resigned myself to another fatigued and bleary-eyed day. The girls and Josh woke up similarly broken and tired, all of us kept from sleep by the crazy noise and over-tired bodies. The good news is, that the Oaxaca that we'd been waiting for came out that day; it was just waiting for us give in, relax, and stop anticipating it. We had a delicious meal of squash flower (mine) and grasshopper (Josh's) omelettes in a beautiful courtyard restaurant, took a leisurely stroll through a nearby market, and unpacked our things to a semblance of order before going back out to stock the kitchen with basics and have a quick, lovely evening meal of soup, mole, and hibiscus water. Settling in to bed last night, I began to feel like we had finally arrived. Bienvenidos a Oaxaca!