Brian’s Microblog

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.

March 09, 2026

We slept fairly well and did not get any messages early in the morning about our flight being canceled. We ate another Best Western breakfast and saw on the news that TSA lines in various airports around the country were extremely long so we packed up quickly and got to the airport almost three hours ahead of our scheduled flight. Fortunately ABQ is a very sleepy airport and the line was longer than usual - we had to wait for five or six minutes to get through TSA.

Unfortunately there was some kind of issue with the airplane - United said there was a cleaning issue, and it arrived late. We departed a bit over half an hour late which made for a slightly stressful layover in Houston, but we made it.

We arrived in Oaxaca a bit before the sun went down. The hills had nice lighting as we approached for landing.

We got through immigration and customs without any issues and took a collectivo (taxi van that makes multiple stops) to the bed and breakfast associated with the language school and got settled in, then we walked around. Julie knew of a reliable street food vendor but wasn’t sure exactly which street they were on. Eventually we found it and got some quesadillas for dinner.

We stopped at a small grocery on the way back to the room. The room features a fridge, microwave, and electric kettle so we can make tea and coffee and keep some drinks cold.

March 08, 2026

We woke up to the news that United had canceled our flight from Albuquerque to Houston, which left us no way to get to Oaxaca. We are re-booked on the same flight tomorrow, but it was a long battle with United’s customer service to get even “Economy Plus” seats on the new flights despite our canceled flight being in Business. It seems like their rebooking algorithm should give you either the same class of seats you had on the canceled flight, or the best available seat in the re-booking if the same class is already full but, no, it just re-books you into the worst seat on the plane.

Anyway, after that we had a day in Albuquerque. Gustavo had some good suggestions but my wife was very tired. We ended up walking to a grocery store to pick up a couple things for the trip. On the way back we stopped at Differential Brewing where we had some decent but not amazing beer and a really nice pizza, but they played really loud and harsh punk rock music for all but the last few minutes we were there, then the playlist made a sudden transition to country.

We walked past a large and old cemetery where trees were already blooming.

We spent some time at the hotel trying to accomplish some stuff on our devices, then went for another walk in the evening, eventually ending up at 377 Brewery where the beer was better but the food less interesting.