Apartment Hunting-Oaxacan Style

Today was filled with menial errands that are small in nature, yet somehow seem to occupy the entire day. The morning found me waiting in line at the cell phone company for 45 minutes to fix a problem with my brand new phone. I paid in karma today for skipping through the line yesterday when a family friend was working in the office and allowed me to budge to the front.

The day seems to wrap itself around the hours we eat. Desayuno. Comida. Siesta. Cena. What can get done before lunch, sliced from what can get done between lunch and supper. It's a sort of odd way to live, for me. Reminds me of time spent with my grandparents in Arizona. Each meal is such an occassion that the rest of the day falls away around those moments. I feel like I should list what I'm eating. For lunch there was a creamy pasta salad with shrimp from the Istmo of Oaxaca, cilantro and some kind of kick at the end, relleno of tuna, almonds, tomatoes, chard and chilies, steamed squash and broccoli with melted quesillo and agua de jamaica--a juice really, without the sweetness, but with a brilliant hue of magenta.

After lunch the clouds threatened to let loose a storm. Regardless, my friend and I piled into her truck to go hunting for apartments while the storm murmured. Looking for an apartment in Oaxaca is a hilarious undertaking. You can read the classifieds. You can call an agency. OR you can hop in your car and drive to a house where your friend saw foreigners entering a few times (and thus figured they rent places). There were no apartments available at that door, unfortunately. And I say "unfortnately" because the garden inside this place was out of a story book of exotic beautiful locales with all its bugambilia. The owner did have a place for rent in another area. He also pointed us up the block where a sign was hanging about apartment openings. When no one answered the next door, a neighbor standing by asked what we were up to. On learning of my housing needs, he called to his mother-in-law who showed us to a place on her property, and then later on to her neighbor's house. We could have canvassed the whole city that way, from one neighbor to the next.

Nothing's sung out just yet. The secretary at the school where I will be working had a nice little house with three bedrooms, a roof porch and a cute little kitchen for only $400/month (that's Oaxaca for you!). But it stretched so far out from the city center--I'm afraid I might never venture away from home for the time it takes.

I'm attaching two photos from Oaxaca. The one on the top is to demonstrate how homes here are all enclosed by walls. No one shows off the wonder of their yards, or the beautiful architecture of their abodes. Everything is locked up between four walls. The second is a shot of Oaxaca from the roof of the house where I am staying. The clouds rolled off the hills today just like that and finally unfurled their rain, catching my friend and I uncovered on the street.