Dan, Kevin and Mexico

We've been quite fortunate to have a number of visitors! Not long after Tony and Manoj left, our friends Dan and Kevin arrived for a six day visit. We did a lot, saw a lot and ate a lot - Tule for the tree, 20 de Noviembre market and Biznaga (among many others) for food, Monte Alban for the ruins, a distillery to learn about craft mezcal, and the Escalaras del Fortin for a little conditioning and great views of the city. We had a total of five cameras for the weekend, so maybe pictures is the best way to share it all.

A lot of the weekend was just hanging out . . .

and monkeying around . . .

We toured the city a bit: Kevin was impressed with the stairs. Dan actually ran them once with Erica.

We went out a few times, in a low key kind of way. Sunday night, we found out that Txalaparta has board games, including Jenga, as well as 10 peso beers. Dan had trouble sitting still long enough for a clear picture, but showed a steady hand with the game. We took enough pictures in a row, trying to catch him in a still moment, that if you scroll through them in sequence you can watch the tower of blocks rise.

We saw the tree in Tule and enjoyed a nice lunch there, although no soccer game this time. The town was really quiet, which makes sense for a weekday. We also, amazingly, got a ride out there from a collectivo driver who grew up in Milwaukee, WI. He ran a pizza place on State then moved back to Oaxaca a few months ago to take care of his parents. He suggested we come back sometime and look him up - we'll be able to tell his house from the others because parked in front is the only car in Mexico with a Wisconsin license plate. He's a big Brewers fan and said he's hoping to return soon, although he sold the pizzeria before he left. (Surprisingly, Wisconsin teams have a tiny bit of presence here - in the movie we saw with Jorge, one of the characters wore a UW hat, and we've also recently seen a local in a Packers jersey!)

You can get a pretty good sense of the size of the Tule tree here. The littler cypress just to the right of the church is actually a child of the main one, but it's only a few hundred years old (as opposed to a couple thousand).

Lunch was good, and coke in glass bottles is delicious...

We also tried out the swings at the playground near the tree. The sign in the background asks adults to kindly stay off the equipment. But you don't always have to act your age.

On our way back to the apartment we swept through Abastos and tried a new kind of fruit (whose name I can't remember). Pretty good if you wait until they're practically rotten-soft to eat them. Don't bite hard though, because most of size is just pit.

In addition to the mystery red and orange fruit, we found out that guayabas and guavas are the same thing. (This later inspired quite a few songs from Dan and Kevin.) These have many, many ridiculously hard seeds, but the seeds are embedded by a pretty tasty custard. Best method I found was just chew carefully and swallow it all.

Abastos also had tons of Halloween and Day of the Dead stuff on sale. The sugar skulls are pretty, although we didn't buy any. They also have them in amaranth and chocolate.

Later on, Dan made some new friends . . .

. . . and had a small Indian woman fall asleep on his shoulder. She's still awake in the photo.

We also visited Pensamientos Distillery for a tour. It's a small, family operation, with six employees that produces about 25,000 liters of mezcal a year. (Bigger places might produce over 1,000 liters a day.) We got great descriptions and a tour from the daughter of the founder, although, sadly, we had to go without demonstrations: the distillation pauses for the rainy season and doesn't start again until the dry months of February and March.

The process starts with the cores of agave (or "maguey") plants, called pinas - the giant leaves are useless and are simply thrown away - which are roasted in an open pit for three or four days. Afterwards, the soft, shrunken pinas are placed in a grinder (the big stone wheel in the picture below) that the lone horse operates. The resulting liquid is fermented in open vats for another five or six days, then distilled and aged in oak barrels for anywhere from 6 months to 12 years. You can also see the top of one of the distillers below.

To make the flavored blends, fruit is added to the barrels, then filtered out later. We tried quite a few - good thing we were catching a taxi home - including a special anniversary edition that not only had been aged for 12 years, but also used 12 year-old agaves. According to Norma, our guide, they select older agave for the mezcals that will be aged longer. For example, for joven (young) mezcal they might use three year-old maguey, but for reposado (rested), they might let the plants grow for eight years before harvesting. The plants themselves are somewhat susceptible to insects and infections and so require a good deal of tending. They also have to be grown in considerable bulk: it takes about 40 plants to make 20 liters or so of mezcal. (Which means they need a whole lot of land to grow it all.) As a final lesson, we learned that naturally produced mezcal - which is in the minority now - bubbles in a distinctive way when shaken. Norma seemed quite proud that they used no chemicals at all in their process.

And, finally, while Erica (sadly) went back to work on Wednesday, we went out to Monte Alban for some Indian Jones moments. We met a few farmers, but no treasure... Maybe next time - there were a lot of suspicious looking stones that we didn't have time to press.

Only a week left in the city, then down to the beach. Seems almost like home is around the corner.