flower shop by day, speakeasy by night
Love notes from Siel is a monthly-ish newsletter from Siel, who used to live in Los Angeles but is currently traveling around. If you love the notes, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
The airport in Oaxaca is tiny, with its own unique set of rules. When I landed I wasn’t allowed to just get a cab at the curb, for example. Instead, officials directed me to line up to buy a shuttle ticket, then line up to get on a white van, which, once full, a laconic driver took on a bumpy 40-minute ride to the city center, eventually dropping each of us off at our individual addresses in the order of his choosing.
It all took forever, but the door-to-door service cost less than $5.
Which is to say, Oaxaca de Juarez isn’t a rich city, but one that feels rich with time — to linger over a meal, to loaf in the sun, to show up late, to patiently wait your turn. This isn’t a get exactly what you need via overnight delivery kind of place. It’s more of a wander around long enough and you might find something that wasn’t exactly what you were looking for but will probably suffice for now town.
It was quite a change from L.A.
Right next to my Oaxaca apartment building, a genial man ran a little shop offering not only organic eggs but also second-hand books, jewelry, and a melange of other unrelated knick knacks in a sort of permanent yard sale. Next to that shop was a convenience store to which I might have become a regular had it not been perpetually dark — the overhead lights were kept off, perhaps to lower electric bills — or offered fruit not already going brown, or stayed open reliable hours.
Even the ride-hailing services worked differently in Oaxaca. Uber didn’t exist there — only DiDi, the competing, usually-cheaper service available in many Latin American countries but based, I discovered recently, in China. Call a DiDi in Oaxaca and you’ll be matched with one of the many yellow taxi cabs rolling around the city — all uniformly old and run down, with an odor of leaking gas. A quarter of the time, the license plates on the cab won’t match what it says on the DiDi app. Nevertheless, the driver will usually take you to your destination just as you expect — except quite often, he (and he’s always a he) will try to get you to cancel your ride on DiDi to pay in cash instead.
But just to be clear, Oaxaca is a charming city — and a decent-sized one at that, with about 300,000 residents. One of Oaxaca’s claims to fame is that it’s been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, though if we’re being accurate about it, this designation really only applies to the small, well-preserved center of the city.
Still, that center truly is beautiful and full of hidden surprises: gorgeous rooftop restaurants with lovely views, nondescript doorways that open into lush courtyards, one-of-a-kind fusion restaurants — including Cru, an omakase Japanese-Oaxacan place that seats just six at a time. Seemingly every other day, the city holds a parade for a festival or a wedding, with giant papier mache puppets swinging from poles, dancers in colorful costumes, brass bands, drum circles.
Time went by strangely fast. I’d arrived in mid-February with the plan to slowly explore the place during my month there. Next thing I knew, it was my last week and I had to cram in all the sightseeing back to back: Zapotec ruins, petrified waterfalls, a bike ride to a gigantic tree more than 2000 years old —
Which perhaps explains why many visitors to Oaxaca end up extending their stays. One Swiss guy I met at a dance studio had come for a short visit and, two years later, had yet to leave. The people in my apartment building were from all over the place — a lot of Americans and Canadians, of course, but also people from Colombia, France, Italy, Portugal. One girl from South Africa stayed a month, took off to Puerto Escondido for a week or so, then came back, she wasn’t ready to leave yet. Somehow in this quaint city she’d found ways to have adventures — of the go to a crazy house party, eat mushrooms, and dance all night variety.
Did I want to stay longer? For a little while I pondered this question.
Then one night, I found myself at a speakeasy bar. It was a tiny space that functioned as a flower shop by day, a place I’d never have guessed turned into a bar had I not been out with a group that included a few locals I’d met that night. For a minute I tuned out of the conversation — this happens to me a lot at bars — until I heard one of the guys say this: “Yeah, it wasn’t a big party, but like, there was this South African chick —”
That brought me back. “Wait, I think I heard about this party,” I said, interrupting.
And I was right — the “South African chick” the guy was talking about was my neighbor, we quickly determined. “This is why I couldn’t live here,” I said. “It’s way too small. Everyone knows everyone.”
The bartender clutched his head in pained agreement. “It’s the thing I hate most about this place,” he said.
Ten days ago I took my last DiDi ride to the Oaxaca airport. I flew back to Mexico City. I’m now a safely unknown person again, lost among the to 9 million or so other people in this metropolis —
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
The drug that makes you lose interest in food. ““I don’t know how long this post-appetite era will last, or how it will end. Just that, once again in our lives, everything has changed.”
The moral case against equity language. “The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. ”
The case for giving your books away. A small rant of sorts against the cult of book ownership: “having a lot of books and boasting about it, treating having a lot of books as a stand-in for your personality, or believing that simply owning a lot of books makes one ‘know things’”