I booked a room in Oaxaca for a week and stayed for thirty-one days. The room was on the second floor of a building on Calle Murguía, with a window that looked onto a courtyard where an old woman watered plants at seven every morning. The room cost 450 pesos a night. I had no programme.
The decision to stay was not dramatic. On what should have been my last morning, I packed my bag and then sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the courtyard and felt, with unusual clarity, that I had not yet learned what I had come to learn. This is a feeling I have come to recognise as trustworthy, though it has cost me several flights.
Oaxaca is a city that rewards staying. Its reputation — mezcal, mole, textiles, the ruins at Monte Albán — is real but is also, in the way of reputations, a reduction. The city it describes is accessible in three or four days of purposeful tourism. The city beneath it requires time and repetition and the willingness to be confused.
I spent the first week doing what travellers do: the market, the churches, the restaurants that appeared on every list. I ate very well. I saw beautiful things. I felt, with each day, more like a person passing through rather than a person arriving. This is the standard tourist experience and there is nothing wrong with it, but it was not what I had come for.
The second week I stopped planning. I walked without destination. I sat in the same café each morning and watched the street. I began, slowly, to see the same people. A man who opened his hardware stall at exactly 8:15 and sorted his stock for half an hour before his first customer. Two women who met at a corner at around 10:30 each day and talked for exactly as long as it took to finish a coffee purchased from a passing vendor. A child who walked home from school via a specific crack in the pavement that she was careful never to step on.
These are trivial observations. But they are the observations that make a place real rather than picturesque. They are what you miss when you are moving through a city on a schedule that optimises for monuments.
By the third week I had a routine. I understood, approximately, what the rhythms of my street were. I had eaten at the same family comedor four times and been given, without asking, what the family was having rather than the menu. I had had one long conversation, in my approximate Spanish and the cook’s approximate English, about whether Oaxaca was still Oaxaca or whether it had become something else. She thought both could be true simultaneously. I think she was right.
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