You can spend a fulfilling vacation in the state of Oaxaca and never actually leave the city of Oaxaca itself. There is that much to see and do. And buy. Ahem.
The ex-convent of Santo Domingo is in the centro district, and
like many other ex-convents around Mexico, this one has been restored and turned into a community arts center and a regional museum. Its grounds have been developed into a botanical garden featuring native regional plants, each area having been designed by one of several landscape architects. Beauty. If your passion is Spanish Colonial architecture, precolumbian artifacts, botany or landscape design, you may want to plan more than one full day for a visit just to this one place.
Speaking of precolumbian artifacts, Santo Domingo's collection
of ceramics and other objects retrieved from sites around the state of Oaxaca is a total tourist must-see. They've got your ceramic funerary urns featuring not just supernatural figures like the nice lady on the left, but also some portraits of the deceased - like this old soothsayer guy over here on the right.
One of the museum's most famous artifacts is the human skull overlaid with turquoise and shell, that was retrieved from Tomb 7 at the Mixtec site of Monte Alban (Tomb 7 was a treasure trove similar to King Tut's, it is said). I'm not sure if this decorated skull was a respected family member's, or if it was a war trophy that needed embellishment. I've seen a fair amount of American Southwest art in my day where a cow or buffalo
skull is given the same treatment. I'm not sure if this means that decorating skulls has always been an innate art form, or if in the 21st century it's only the Jeffrey Dahmers who still work with human skulls -- but the more I think about it the creepier it gets. Nice seashell eyes, though, don't you think?
(Can you feel the eyes following you about the room?)
If it's less macabre and more contemporary Oaxacan culture you're looking for, I'd recommend attending a Guelaguetza - a performance of folkloric music and dance featuring traditional garb. It shows only the state of Oaxaca's regional differences, and the cultural diversity of such a small geographic area is impressive. We saw one of the weekly
Friday performances at Fonatur's Hotel Camino Real, which included a very lavish dinner buffet. We're not accustomed to large buffets serving a couple hundred diners, so in some ways the meal itself was as much a cultural experience as what we later saw onstage. My, that buffet was competitive. We were completely outclassed by all the other diners, who I think must have honed their skills on cruise ships and at high-end hotel brunches. The dessert buffet was completely picked over before any of these people even looked at the dinner items.
Good thing GB's trained as an anthropologist: he saw how other people were handling food retrieval, and he realized we needed to form our own defensive strategy. Quickly. While acting nonchalant and staying classy. It was tough to blend in, but we didn't walk away underfed. We didn't even have to resort to filling our pockets...
Not just Jeffrey Dahmer!!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2007/jun/01/hirstsskullmakesdazzlingde
Posted by: Terence Sims | June 24, 2010 at 06:45 AM