Spanish Language School in Oaxaca Days 1-3
March 12, 2026
We arrived a day late due to our flight being cancelled, but we settled in to our little language school in Oaxaca quickly. The school feels a bit informal - there are a number of small apartments and rooms arranged around a courtyard. Room rental includes a breakfast served in the courtyard, then classes begin. There is also a cafe on the rooftop terrace, and there are a number of tables under umbrellas or awnings up there. Classes are conducted one on one, so the courtyard and terrace look like a bunch of tables which each have two people conversing.
I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from this - so far it mostly consists of me having conversations with the instructors, but they patiently correct my mistakes and help translate when I don’t know how to say something in Spanish. We are taking two hours of instruction in the morning, then there is a lunch break, then we do two more hours with a different instructor.
We finish the instruction at 2:00 so there is plenty of time in the afternoons to explore the city.
On the first afternoon we did some grocery shopping. There is a small kitchenette with a refrigerator and microwave in our apartment, so we bought some drinks and cheese at the “mini super” market, then spent quite a while trying to find a bakery which turned out to have been closed that day. The way they close it there isn’t even a sign to know that a bakery exists.
On the second afternoon we walked up a street that eventually became stairs to a hill overlooking the city. We saw some of the murals that Oaxaca is famous for on the way up.
There is also a big semi-outdoor auditorium in a natural bowl in the hill.
We did some more shopping, looking for salsa matcha. Matcha is an unusual type of salsa which seems like very spicy vegetable oil with seeds and nuts in it. We found a couple brand-named ones and also bought a home-made one from a little old lady at a market. The bakery was open so we bought some pastries and sliced bread and some hummus to go on it.
Later we walked down to the Zócalo, one of the main plazas in the city, on our way to a recommended mezcaleria (mezcal distillery), El Joven Viejo, to taste some mezcals. We passed at least five other mezcalerias on the way. A small town in the state of Oaxaca is known as the home of mezcal.
We returned to the Zócalo looking for a place for dinner and found they were setting up for some kind of musical event.
We settled on eating at Mayor Domo, a restaurant and chocolate drink chain, which has a rooftop terrace overlooking the music in the plaza.
Today I spent my afternoon class going to the Oaxacan Cultural Center, a Textile Museum, and a museum of Oaxacan painters with my instructor. Because the mountains in this area are very rugged a lot more of the indigenous culture and traditions have been maintained by isolated villages in difficult-to-reach places. The textile museum had a lot of information about the different designs and methods that are unique to various villages in the state.
At the museum of Oaxacan painters the phrase in English “Heroic Shart” caught my attention - if I start a band, maybe that will be the name!
After class we decided to look for more murals in the Xochimílco neighborhood.
