Calcified Waterfall, Lucha Libre and MORE!
We have done even more fun and exciting things during our second week here in Oaxaca. We went to calcified waterfalls and Lucha Libre (the Mexican wrestling league) matches – we had a busy week. We changed Airbnbs on Saturday, and our new one is great. I really love the part of the city that we moved to; it has been super cool for the last couple days. We were exploring the surrounding couple of blocks, and we saw some pretty awesome activities that we are excited to check out during our next week here.
Here are a couple of the super neat things that we have done in this past week. Toby and I have continued to do our Spanish school at Becari, and we were joined by our friend Emmer this last week. It has continued to be a great learning experience and a lot of fun. This week we made piñatas, which was really neat. On Thursday, we took a venture out of the city to the ruins of Monte Albán. This is an ancient city from the Zapotec people, built around 2000 years ago. The next day, Friday, we took a two hour van ride to Hierve el Agua. This is a calcified waterfall that overlooks the city of Oaxaca and the surrounding mountains. The view from the top was incredible. We could see mountains that seemed to stretch on forever, and they were all covered with green forests. From there, we took a ride over to a mountain that we could hike up to see cave paintings from over 10,000 years ago! My main adventure on Saturday was going to a wood carving class with my mom. This was an amazing experience and was super rewarding. We picked up the prints on Monday, and they came out awesome! (Thank goodness, because that was some hard work, carving into wood for three straight hours. My wrist hurt so much.)
One of my favorite activities from this week was visiting the archeological site of Monte Alban. This is an ancient Zapotec city that is located just outside of the city of Oaxaca. The ruins were absolutely incredible. They were so much bigger than I expected, and man, what a cool surprise! I think that my favorite part of the ancient city was seeing the ball court, which I really liked, and found really interesting. And the views were wild! We were on the top of a mountain, and it was a clear day so we could see so many mountains and forests.
Another amazing experience was visiting Hierve el Agua. This humongous waterfall would have been beautiful by itself, but then it was calcified! All of the colors in the falls were so beautiful, and to top it all off, there were even swimming holes! They were super cool looking, being made out of this calcified water. However, the water was super cold! We went in anyways, the views while swimming were too hard to resist. (The cliff right next to us was pretty scary though!)
My next awesome thing that we did this week was our wood carving and printmaking class. I was told to bring a picture, and I had no idea what to do, but Mom helped me and I ultimately chose to do a lizard. While we were drawing, carving, inking, and pressing our wood blocks, our teacher gave us some super neat history on why this block carving was important to this region of Mexico. We learned that it was used to make pictures of skeletons and skulls in newspapers back when many people couldn’t read or write, to symbolize that we are all the same. This was done because it was during a time period where the rich people were somewhat oppressing the poor people, and many people wanted this to stop.
One final activity was attending a Lucha Libre wrestling match. Since it was late at night, only me and Dad stayed for most of it. Even though we were pretty tired afterwards, it was worth it. It was so exciting! The wrestlers were doing acrobatic tricks while still attacking each other. That was certainly an experience that I will never forget.
This second week has been awesome! I really miss all of my friends back home, but I’ve been doing my best to stay in touch. Since we have another week here in Oaxaca, I am super excited for that, but also San Agostinillo (the beach we are going to next week) and just the rest of our trip in general!
