Tumbleweed

Greetings from Veracruz! Ginny was asking me yesterday if I feel as though time goes slower or faster while we're traveling through Mexico in our van. I definitely feel like it passes very quickly as there's always so much to see and do when we're traveling in such a diverse and fascinating country like Mexico. We've been here nearly three months already and are planning to stay about one more month before returning to the US.  We spent most of this week in the state of Veracruz which was a nice respite from the hot and dry state of Oaxaca. Don't get me wrong, Veracruz can also be hot at times but we had a couple of fairly cool days including a rainy day last week which were greatly appreciated! It's also very lush and green here compared to Oaxaca which is why I've heard Veracruz referred to as the breadbasket of Mexico - I think almost anything will grow here!   We only ended up spending one night in the City of Veracruz as we were underwhelmed by the city...

Greetings from Veracruz! We've been in the state of Oaxaca for the last month and just left it yesterday after three weeks in the City of Oaxaca de Juarez and one week at the Oaxacan coast. The coast was nice but also very hot so one week was plenty of beach time for us mountain folk! I've continued to speak Spanish all morning and I must say it is helping me to think in Spanish which I think is a good sign that I may be moving towards fluency. Ginny has been a great sport with it and is learning lots of Spanish as well! We spent the beginning of the week in Mazunte which is a super chill beach community that is also known for being a spawning ground for baby turtles and home to the National Mexican Turtle Sanctuary. Visitors to Mazunte trend younger, dirtier (yes, even dirtier than us!) and hippier so it wasn't exactly our crowd but we did enjoy some nice little restaurants and there's some really gorgeous beaches as well. On one of my morning runs, I stopped to look o...

I've wrapped up my three weeks of intensive Spanish classes in Oaxaca and have significantly improved my Spanish. But I really want to continue to learn now that I'm not in Spanish class every day so I'm trying to do other things to continue to learn such as reading, listening to the radio and practicing my Spanish with the locals. Today I've started with only speaking Spanish in the morning which Ginny REALLY loves! She repeats in English what I've said to see if she understands what I've said - so far we've had no major misunderstandings. See photo below of my Spanish class and a few other shots from our last week in Oaxaca. Ginny took a four-day natural dyes workshop last week in Oaxaca in which she learned the process of preparing fibers, pigment extraction and dyeing with regional pigments, such as pericon (a wild marigold), brazil wood and cochineal (the female  parasitic bugs that feed on nopal cactus leaves). They taught the class in both Spanish and...