Oaxaca, part 1

The driver of the nightbus from the coast to the city of Oaxaca played loud Mexican pop for nine hours straight. At least it stopped him nodding off on the twisty-turny mountain roads. Consequently, Wen and I arrived in Oaxaca delirious from lack of sleep and with the tunes to Mexico's Top 10 in our heads.

It was great to be back in a city again. Pavements! Street signs (occasionally)! Working internet! And, of course, so many places to eat.

Oaxaca - the city and the state - is a famous food destination in Mexico. Its seven moles ("molés" not the garden-destroying animal), a corn-based soup called pozole, and the variety of its fruits and vegetables make it a delicious place to visit. Although I think my favourite thing I ate was the lechon (suckling pig) tacos from a late-night cart diagonal to our BnB.

Our first order of business was to take part in a cooking class. The class was in Nazareno Etla, a market town about 25mins away in a taxi (cost to and from covered in the cost of the class). The family running the class grow almost all of the ingredients ("there is the tree the avocados come from, and that is our passion fruit vine...") and the father runs a local dairy, which may or may not have invented the famous Oaxacan-style cheese (sort of stringy, salty mozzarella) sixty-plus years ago. We arrived to a table of mezcal bottles and traditional snacks - sliced fruits, different types of ground chillies, and grasshoppers (very small as it's the start of the season - fried in lime, salt, garlic and chilli) and worms (salty). We kicked off with three shots of different mezcals - produced by the family - before learning how to make tortillas, memelas, salsa verde (using a metate, a grinding stone and rolling pin), and nixtamalised corn. With continual shots of mezcal. Rumour is that you don't get a hangover on mezcal because it's made from agave - while I felt fine the next day, I think my hangover kicked in around 10pm so I probably just slept through it. The class was great fun and I got to use equipment I wouldn't get to otherwise - a tortilla press, a metate, a comal (large dome over a charcoal fire, used for cooking tortillas).