Days 45 & 46 - Thursday 3rd & Friday 4th November 2005

After a journey that took me about 10 hours, 4 to get to Puebla and then 6 to go from Puebla to Oaxaca, I needed a beer. Thursday night drinking is for winners after all! When I arrived in town I was looking for somewhere to stay & I bumped into one of the girls with whom I had been on the trip to Teotihuacan the Saturday before. She told me where she was staying & the price ($70 Pesos/night) and I thought it was as good a deal as I was going to get, so she took me there.

I walked in the door and immediately recognised an American guy who had been in Zacatecas at the same time as me. He is a couple of months into a motorcycle trip from New York to, well wherever he decides to turn around and head back home. There was also an English guy who was about to fly to San Francisco the next day. We sat in the communal area of the hostel and had a couple of beers. As people gradually came in from wherever they had been during the day I recognised a few faces, including an English girl who had been in the same dorm as me in Mexico City. There is definately a trail that backpackers follow through this part of Mexico, and I was definately now on it!

A merry band led by Jesus (the guy who worked at the hostel front desk), we went out to a few bars including one where a 12 piece band was playing and a club when that closed. Although it was a Thursday it wasn’t very busy out & I was left wondering if I had mistimed my visit to Oaxaca as well. I needed to confirm or deny this statement by going out on Friday. That would turn out to be a really good night, as it was exceptionally busy and the beers flowed. Also the fact I spent most of the night chatting to an especially attractive Mexican girl helped in my overall judgement of the evening.

Anyway rewind all that back to Friday daytime. I spent the day looking at the art in the parks, at the people in the plazas and the architecture in the streets. It wasn’t a busy day at all. Most of the afternoon was spent reading my book in the Zocalo.

When I returned to my hostel, a few of the folks there were drinking in preparation for another night on the lash. It would have been rude not to join in, so I got a couple of jars from the local shop and set about finishing them. As the beers flowed someone produced a bag of the local speciality - grasshoppers in chilli sauce. The snacking started off slowly but as more alcolhol was imbibed, more of the insects found their way into various folks digestive tracts. One girl got particuarly attached to the snack and began nibbling them as if they were a packet of dry roasted nuts. Although I wasn’t there to witness it, apparently the insects made a reappearance later that night as the girl threw them all back up again! Remember folks don’t mix your alcohol and insects.

Again when it was time Jesus led us to the party. This evening it was to Freebar, a bar across the road from the one we frequented the previous evening. A cramped sweatbox with all kinds of music blaring out, I immediately took a liking to the place, especially as beer was the equivalent of a pound a bottle. As mentioned before I spent the evening chatting to a lovely Mexican girl, and that interspersed with some dancing was me up until 3am when the bar closed, which left me just enough time for me to grab some munch on the way back to my hostel.