Continuing with the decadent life, Val provided me with breakfast in bed. Culture was a poor second, but even then it took us some time to find the State Museum, since the key to the map that the Information Centre had provided us with was wrong. The museum adjoined a church, Santo Domingo, which we thought impressive, far more so than the town’s cathedral. The latter seemed the same as so many of Mexico’s churches – cluttered, + so lacking in majesty. The museum was cheaper than we’d thought, correspondingly less worth our time. Their advertised pride + joy was the treasure of Tomb 7, a tomb at Monte Alban. All looked to my untutored eyes like so many bits of stone. Not quite fair, since there were some good pieces, but nothing of the awesome splendour one had heard of.
Visited the artisan’s market next, and it was picturesque enough, with a few women weaving. Unfortunately tho’, it had been rehoused in what was effectively a brick warehouse, thus neatly destroying any atmosphere. Spent quite a time after this looking for a cheap comida corrida. Eventually settled on paying $60 each for a moderately nondescript meal, mainly because we were becoming weak from hunger by this time.
In the afternoon we decided to visit Teotitlan, a small nearby village, which specialises in the making (+, of course, selling) of rugs or blankets. It was the craziest bus journey – we seem to have picked on the bus loaded with women taking home their purchases, so it was just packed to bursting point. The village itself was picturesque, with narrow dirt streets, only spoilt by a preponderance of signs in English inviting one to come in + look at what was on offer. We checked out a couple, + finally spotted on we really liked. The guy was very friendly, + came down from $1500 to $1000 – we still only had 900 on us, but he trustingly accepted a £10 note plus $500. Took a picture + promised to send him one. Spent the evening sitting by the Zocalo with Lynda, a friendly Canadian girl we’d met.
I’m afraid the photo we took with the blanket-seller went the same way as the others from this time, but this is a photo of the blanket in question, which we still have (though the colours are not quite as fast as we were promised.) I expect we paid more than we ought, being pretty poor at the business of haggling, but there you go. If it appears that the absence of photos from the time seems to have gone on for quite a while, that would be because we were so parsimonious with the taking of photos, and the one film, with 36 shots, would have covered a fair period of time. Nowadays, there is no need to ration such things, but then, every shot cost money… and we were always concerned about that.
Our search for a comida corrida – a simple, meal of more than one course that we had heard so much about, is another illustration of the same thing… and, typically, we had great difficulty in tracking one down.
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