There is a delightfully cosmopolitan group of children sheltering from the hot midday sun in the RV park, and they are playing under a shelter set to one side for communal use. A great deal of jumping around and waving is involved but what they're up to is complicated to follow. They speak a mixture of French, Spanish and English which is usually suppressed by loud cries of "Français! Français!"
Layne felt well enough to carry out a dental cleaning appointment in Oaxaca at a dental clinic of that name staffed by a dentist who graduated from dental school in Michigan and speaks fluent English. In the general scheme of things getting your teeth cleaned doesn't require much conversation and the process was mostly similar to what we did at home, signing papers as it was our first visit, and then waiting to be taken back. That's where things got different.
Layne went first and took great delight in telling me all about it when I got back after walking Rusty and was waiting to go in. They charged us a little less than $60 each for a tooth cleaning carried out by the dentist himself. The dental office felt just like any such facility you might use in the US. Dr Angel Gomez told Layne (she's more chatty than I am) he has regular Florida patients who come to see him for all their dental work. We have had our teeth cleaned all over the world and at a cost that would make you grind your teeth with envy.
I saw this poster which looked like it was in excellent shape for a concept that went out of style 30 years ago. I had about 45 minutes after I dropped Layne off and found a street parking spot (Score! Free!) so the plan was that I would walk Rusty around Old Town Oaxaca.
Street art is all over the place and the sidewalks are mostly pretty good so I could look around as Rusty walked head down nose on high alert. Sometimes the sidewalks played tricks on us.
I had no idea where we were going but I am determined to hit some tourist attractions before we leave the campground. Layne keeps protesting she's a thousand percent better after her heat exhaustion thing. A former math teacher should know better inasmuch as that's either a) impossible or b) a theoretical one thousand percent of zero is still zero. Either way she needs to take it easy after heat exhaustion. Getting her teeth cleaned seemed as much activity as she needed so my exploration of Oaxaca was within a few blocks and they looked like this pretty much.
I happened upon a tourist site totally by accident, the House of Culture a former convent built in 1730. The Mexican revolution was not kind to the church which was seen as allied to the Spanish. It was expropriated in 1863, bought back by the bishop in 1890 and turned into a cultural center. That wasn't all because in 1933 they all gave up on the project and the building was abandoned until 1963 when they restored it, declared it of historic importance and it is what it is.
Oaxaca is packed with this stuff, not to be too Philistine about it. Dogs have no souls so they can't go in and we've had enough of Rusty chewing through his leash to join me perforce in photographing interiors.
I found a man selling apples so I bought too many. It turns out 2.2 pounds of small apples is quite a lot so I promptly dropped one, gave one away to a man minding his own business in the park across the street then I ate two and suddenly the kilo seemed more maneagable. I would be grateful if no one points out to Layne I ate fruit with uncleaned skin on it.
I watched the gate go down for a man in a mobility chair who needed to get into the pedestrian zone. Mexico is badly built for wheelchair access though they do try to modify their ancient buildings and occasionally obtuse sidewalks. I like the street names in braille which I think is rather cool and also convenient for those of us who can see and want to know where we are. An "invidente" is a "non seeing" person.
There was no one walking in the middle of the pedestrian zone so Rusty and I walked there by ourselves leaving the sidewalks busy. It wasn't that hot for either of us in the sun.
I have a CPAP plugged in on a shelf above my bed which I have found produces much more restful sleep, no peeing in the middle of the night (a known positive side effect for reasons unknown to me) and it allows one's wife to sleep as snores are suppressed. However it does require the use of distilled water to keep the airways working and that has been a bit of a faff in Mexico. Pharmacies sell it, but as ever of course, not all of them. I scored big on my walk stopping at each one I saw and asking for "agua iniettabile" which is distilled water extra sterilized for injection use. Its quite widely available where distilled water, less pure is much rarer (and cheaper!). I got a month's supply of the more expensive stuff in three smallish bottles. We are knocking off the chores in Oaxaca, I tell you.
If all else fails you can send a nice wreath:
A mobile command post to offer us a "Safe City" though I have to say I never felt unsafe anywhere in old town Oaxaca, while walking around. Perhaps this is why!
We have a rather heavily loaded sliding pantry door that keeps popping one of it's two locks and we secure it before a drive with a strip of gorilla tape. However this is unsatisfactory so we went on the hunt for a Ferreteria, a hardware store, which we abbreviate to a "Ferret Shop"looking for little bronze eyelets we could screw carefully into the wood. The idea is to string a bungee cord across to help hold the sliding door in place. The owner of this store had none but he directed us to the one that did. Pretty nice as always in Mexico.
The second ferret shop had a stainless eyelet and that was good enough for Mrs B so we bought a couple and a can opener that would replace the fancy one we brought that she can't figure out to work and stuff like that. If you break an appliance in Mexico someone sells spare parts, often broken down from malfunctioning blenders or irons or whatever it is. It's an amazing small economy.
She also bought a lime squeezer which seems like critical kitchen equipment in Mexico. I also noticed another store selling Stock Island Nikes, the ironic name given to white boots used principally by Keys commercial fishermen. These are about $14.
On the way home I was entrusted with the awesome responsibility of spotting a roast chicken outlet as the chef is still feeling a little poorly. She did walk a few blocks while I was having my teeth cleaned ultra sonically but three blocks and she was dead. Starvation or roast chicken was on the dinner menu.
I asked Layne to pick up some radishes, a common side vegetable in Mexico and delicious, and she ended up getting some cactus too on the theory that after her cooking class she knows how to cook them.
Rusty knew at this point roast chicken dinner was on the menu and was making sure we loaded his share (his and I might add some for... 
...the stray dog at the campground gate). Perhaps he was looking at the dog food billboard. Indeed, some people do feed their dogs (mascotas) in Mexico:
We picked up our laundry in the village of El Tule on our way to the campground, where we had left our rugs for a wash or dry clean as needed. They did a brilliant job I know, because Layne was very happy.
Back at the ranch in the small RV row we now had a lone Frenchman in a four wheel drive Sprinter (a Hymer Grand Canyon more precisely), a Mexican couple in a Ford Transit, a couple from New Hampshire in a medium large Overland rig, along with the Catalans in the Delica and the Germans in the yellow Volkswagen and Alex and Denise from Lichtenstein at the end of the row in their Overland machine. We tend to say "Buenas Dias" when we pass unless we are sure of the correct language. It seems more polite to default to the host country's language. Unless you are too tired to notice:
