Greetings from downtown Oaxaca

So here I am, on my first night here, wandering around downtown, and I spy a little internet spot, and thought I´d check in for a moment.

Just before this, I was standing by a payphone on a corner and suddenly heard this loud boom, which, were I at work, I would have assumed to be a weird gunshot. It set off car alarms, and sent folks (locals, too) looking all around for what was going on. A few seconds later, firworks were raining down on my head, set off by some guy about 50 feet away from me for no apparent reason. But real fireworks, like Macy´s would set off or something, not some Brooklyn bootleg rooftop stuff. No idea what that was about, but I was never so right underneath fireworks. I´m still picking the blackened remants out of my hair.

The city is as beuatiful as I remember it, though I admittedly can´t see it so well right now, through the haze of my sleepiness and the general night-timeness. I ate a perfect elote, which I really hope doesn´t make me sick.

The woman I´m staying with seems lovely, and her house seems to be quite a complex, with half a dozen American 20 year olds staying there. I am starting to wonder if when a Spanish school in Mexico says that the average age of its students is ¨35,¨that´s because 70% of their students are 20 and 20% of their students are 70. I´ll learn more on Monday, presumably, and not all the 20 year olds in my house are from my school - several are a collection of NYU undergrads doing some short-term volunteer project. They´ll be leaving on Wednesday, but so much for getting away, huh? I am told, on the plus side, that Ruth (who is decidedly un-Jewish) is a fabulous cook.

Okay. There´s the update. I better head home now, in case that elote turns out to have been a bad idea.