Life can be slow in a smallish Mexican town on a Sunday. For for towns with a market on Sunday, this is certainly not the case, but in this town (Tlaxiaco), the market was yesterday. By this morning, the stalls were long gone, the garbage all cleaned up, and the place looking like a different town altogether.

The plaza looks much smaller when empty. How did all those vendors fit in there? Yesterday I had trouble finding my way around. The big landmarks are hard to see, obscured as they are by the tarpaulins that cover most stalls. Also, the character of the market seems to change through the day. New stalls spring up later in the day, and perhaps some of the early birds pack up and leave. Merchandise might get rearranged as it gets sold. Some people might spell each other off so you might think you recognize a stall, but the people are different! When I say “stall”, I use the term loosely. Some vendors have a proper stall. Others have their wares laid out on a sheet or the bare pavement. So with only a handful of stalls in one corner of the plaza, I thought it would be easy to find the stall that belongs to my laundry service. Not so. I walked up and down, and did not find the people I was looking for. I was not panicked (yet), I was in deed stopped at the corner, squinting down the row of food vendors, when I caught the eye of a woman at the stall I was standing in front of. She looked like one of the women from the stall yesterday, and she seemed to recognize me. The stall was configured completely differently from yesterday, and the “stall mother” was a different lady. Anyhow, the woman who seemed to recognize me and who seemed to be the one who I thought was doing my laundry, invited me to sit down to eat, which was the main purpose for my being there just then anyhow (since I was well ahead of the agreed-upon time for the cloths to be ready). Breakfast was different from anything I had before. Then again, it had corn in it as usual. I never minded eating rice three times a day in Asia, but I find corn has more of a taste to it, and it gives all the food a strong common base. To me, this makes even very different food, such as tacos (wrapping: corn tortillas. I always ask to make sure they are not wheat) filled with spicy chicken and hot salsa, not so entirely different from mole negro (a rich sauce with something like 40 ingredients, including chocolate) with beef as I think they should be. But I digress. Breakfast was made from corn kernels that had been cooked until they had burst and splayed out. This with a mole rojo and rice. No one asked if I wanted tortillas, and I didn’t so I didn’t ask for any. Mean while, I was wondering if the “stall daughter” was the woman with my cloths or not. I had a look at the photo I had taken of the family yesterday (digital cameras can really come in handy!) and determined that maybe she was not the woman in question. A bit disquieting. I went to pay, and she mentioned my cloths. As far as I could make out, they were ready, and at the hotel, I only had to pay this other third woman (whom I’d never seen before) 40ps. How did that happen? I thought it was supposed to be 15ps! Anyhow, I don’t have the language skills to argue politely, or at all really (unless I am really irate, which hasn’t happened yet this trip), so I paid. The fact is that I wanted my cloths, and if I misunderstood the bit about them being ready and already at my hotel, the bad will created by arguing about the price (which after all isn’t that much, so this is not a time to stand on principle) just isn’t worth it. So I went to the front desk of my hotel. No cloths. Not much room for error, language gap not withstanding. There could have been some other misunderstanding, such as if the desk had been manned by someone else, but that seemed unlikely. I figured I’d better go back to the stall, but first I checked my room, just in case …. I couldn’t quite imagine my cloths neatly stacked up against my hotel door for anyone to take … but sure enough, that is where they were. Not piled up in front of the door, but in a bag, hanging from the door handle. I suppose they were safe enough there, but who knows. While not impressed, I was glad to have my cloths! Upon opening them, I discovered three things: 1) they were still damp. 2) they weren’t exactly ironed. 3) I had acquired a new shirt. This is better than loosing a shirt or even more frustrating, a single sock, still … I might be getting good value if the shirt fit, but at who’s expense? I took the shirt back to the stall, where lady #3 was gone, but the stall daughter was happy to take the shirt. I explained, smiling, in what I think was comprehensible Spanish that I did not want to pay for the washing of someone else’s cloths. Something was comprehended (accurately or not) because we agreed that someone (I suppose lady #3) was to come to my room at 9:00 or 10:00 tonight. Its more of a chance to practice my language skills than anything, since for the small amount of money, its hardly worth the effort. Still, I’m not really thrilled at paying twice the price for laundry as in the much more expensive city of Oaxaca, for a pretty substandard job. On the other hand, having clean cloths is a really good thing for everyone! So with this more or less settled, it was time to get to Achiutla, half the reason for coming to this town (besides the market, which is of limited reason all on its own to come to a place). This place is supposed to have an archaeological site, and be worth going just for the drive. I could not find transportation to Achiutla, although I tried for quite a while. Everyone had a different idea as to where the bus should leave from. I got a bit of convergence regarding a certain corner, but the shop there didn’t seem to know much about it. You would think they’d know plenty if a bus stopped in front of them several times a day, year in and year out. I finally got the vague idea (from talking to a bus driver) that maybe there were no buses to this place on a Sunday. So what’s special about Achiutla? I don’t know. Just a place in my guide book. My guide book has other suggestions for places to visit, and until I’ve actually been to a place, one destination is about the same as another to me, so I just picked another one and tried to go there instead. I was directed to a bus station, where I got as near to Yosundua as I did to Achiutla. When I inquired about getting to this place, I got a long explanation, of which I understood not a word. But my guess is that if I get a long explanation, then they know about the bus, and the bus is not leaving today. I decided to take a walk out of town instead. After all, I could see sparsely populated hills all around town, and beyond them, tree-clad hills. It was interesting enough. I saw some different living conditions, from a very nicely designed and built house (surrounded by an high wall topped by an electric fence, and situated next to the city depot, in which festering garbage trucks are parked) to wooden shacks with gaps between the lumber, situated near beautiful pine forests. I walked past farms and into the forest (pine and oak). I sat in the shade of lovely big pine trees, and in pine-needle-carpeted glades surrounded by pine and oak. This sounds better maybe than it was. It was OK. I guess I wasn’t very much in the mood for it, seeing as really I wanted to do something else. But it was nice enough and beautiful enough that I wasn’t really that put out. I’d have stayed longer, but was determined to get back in time for a decent meal and a drink or two. People here have their priorities all wrong around here in my opinion. Food stalls open late and close early. But you can buy a t-shirt, a pair of shoes or lipstick just about any time you want, but none of these items interest me at the best of times, less when I am hungry! So I wasn’t going to miss a good meal this time! So when I got back, guess what? Everything closes even earlier on Sunday! I was missing Thailand just about now, when there isn’t an hour in the day when you can’t find food somewhere. I’d rather fancied a drink on the front patio of my hotel, but yesterday it was too noisy what with loud music stalls in the market, and later trucks loading up all the unsold merchandise. Thats no fun, not when you are by yourself. Then today, when it is relatively peaceful, but not so peaceful as to be boring, the bar is closed! Worse, the restaurant in the hotel was also closed. It’s a pretty good restaurant. Although expensive by local standards, its pretty cheap by Canadian standards (although day to day I prefer cheaper still because eating three times a day really adds up). Anyhow, I was looking forward to having a really good meal there. Instead, I had a sort of so-so meal in the market. While disappointed, I felt lucky to get anything. I had two meals in one sitting, anticipating a worse food situation later in the evening. For example, last night I did not feel like eating until around 7:30. Mistake! Short of being sick, one must eat before 5:30 in this town, no matter if you are hungry or not, because it is hard to find much of substance later in the evening. I might have found better food than I did last night if I had the patience, but I settled for the first thing I found, which turned out to be excessively greasy tacos with meat and little else. Actually, I would have looked around more, except I was worried that by the time I didn’t find anything else, this first place too would be shut up. I’m prepared for tonight though. Besides the precaution of having both lunch and dinner at one sitting, I have stocked up on avocados and corn wafers. Speaking of which, I am getting hungry!