Although anything with the virgin Mary screams Most Mexican Moment to me, I think this story is extra special. This evening when I got home from work, one of my old spinster landladies invited me in to see the candles she paints and sells. She paints mostly flowers but she also does the major candles for masses, and she does the work for free for two nunnery cathedrals.

Hello from Mexico, friends.

Last night I saw a movie with a few friends, and one guy told us about his aunt’s funeral the day before. His aunt was relatively young, and died suddenly. Here in Mexico they have a service immediately and it goes all night. They often have a mass several days or weeks later for the dead person.

Last night I went to a spring to swim which is called El Ojo del Agua.  I went with a lady I work with (the one who got arrested, and also the one who gave me some illegal giant tortoise eggs to eat—Not a good person), her daughters, the doctor and a drunk aunt.  She was kind of funny, my age and stumbling around.  We chatted about love and drank beers in the car.  She is dating a married soldier from Oaxaca city and he comes and visits here every few weekends.  There were millions of kinds of bugs there, one beetle was all over the bathroom (there was a salamander in there too) and one of the little beetles was in the toilet swimming around, and I thought to myself, there is HIS ojo del agua!

My Chinese cooking teacher told me there was store in town that you could buy shoes woman used to wear when they had bound feet and they had a history of bound feet in all of the different dynasties with pictures. So today it was pouring rain (winter officially began yesterday I think) and I dragged the other foreign teacher into town with me to check out this shoe store/museum. After taking the bus and asking a million people where this shoe place was—we found it! And guess what, it was just a really big shoe store.

I have no idea where the place she was talking about was. I am pretty sure that we were at the place she said to go, and the other teacher asked me, “So what exactly did she tell you this was?” When I told her what I thought she said it was, she asked, “Did she tell you this all in Chinese or English?” I said “Chinese.” And then I kind of figured out my Chinese must be really horrible! I completely misunderstood her. How can you think you are having a discussion about something but in fact you are talking about completely other things? I guess I misunderstood her. Well we still found a big shoe store and even though China is sometimes not a slave to fashion I think China has some really cool shoes! After looking at shoes we explored some of the markets around town, you can buy live turtles for soup and all sorts of live animal and sea creatures are crawling around everywhere.