Day 3 — Marching Bands and Plants

Oof. It was late last night and I posted this entry to the wrong blog. So here it is about 12 hours late.

For break­fast this morn­ing we had march­ing bands. One of the largest of the local high schools had their parade to the zocolo in honor of the Bicentennial.

First there was a bit of a pro­fes­sional band (bor­ing) and then the school banner.

Fol­lowed by the school’s drum corps…

… and then the stu­dent body. Loosely orga­nized, and very happy to wave and say hello and make funny faces at the folks peer­ing out of the Casa’s front door.

The bulk of the day was taken up with a tour of the botan­i­cal gar­dens at Santo Domingo. Jardín Etnobotánico de Oax­aca.

I’m still work­ing on get­ting all the pic­tures sorted out. There will be a nice big gallery of them later this week. But for now here are a hand­ful to give you a feel for the gar­den and its plants.

The tour starts with a dis­cus­sion of the native food plants. The tri­umvi­rate of squash, beans, and corn. These are squash plants.

In the back­ground are bunches of the large marigolds that dec­o­rate the altars at Muer­tos. I am deathly aller­gic to them.

This lit­tle red flower on the other hand doesn’t make me sneeze. It’s a dahlia. Seri­ously. All those fancy gar­den flow­ers (Hi Elise!) have been bred from one lit­tle red flower.

Of the com­mon trees in Oax­aca the one that I can always iden­tify with­out a doubt is the pochote. But when you’re look­ing at some­thing with points like this…

The gar­dens are located behind the build­ings of the Monastery of Santo Domingo. The church’s walls pro­vide a back­drop for the large col­lec­tion of dry eco-system plants.

Maguey cac­tus. The source of mescal/tequilla. Also just plain pretty.

As we were leav­ing the gar­dens and head­ing toward lunch we ran into another march­ing band. This one was fol­lowed by dancers.

Mean­while Jim would like you to know that he is hard at work cat­a­loging the var­i­ous motor trans­port options in the area. Today, I think it’s work­ing bikes.