Cafe Itanoni in the Reforma neighborhood of Oaxaca celebrates the tortilla. Using techniques and recipes that go way back, the tortillas are served in various ways using different kinds of food items. Orders are singles, mostly, and cost less than a dollar. Full breakfasts come in around $3-$4. The setting is relaxed, the food is simple and tasty, and the fruit juices are wonderful. If in town, grab a taxi and go. Try the “holy herb” eggs!
March 6, 2012
A Tortilla Celebration: Cafe Itanoni
Posted by vagoscribe under Mexico | Tags: Cafe Itanoni, food, Mexico, Oaxaca, Photos, tortilla, travel |[2] Comments
January 21, 2012
Why Travel?
Posted by vagoscribe under Say Something | Tags: africa, food, Latin America, Paraguay, travel |[2] Comments
To break down stereotypes.
To undo the learning in your head.
To learn that you have a lot to learn.
To taste how foods are prepared by other people’s hands.
To drink local juices, brews, concoctions with the people.
To know how a place smells and not just how it looks.
To be discomforted.
To feel what it’s like to not understand what someone is saying.
To feel the satisfaction of communicating with someone whose language you do not speak.
To better recognize from where it is that you come from.
To realize the arbitrariness of political borders.
To find that humanity’s borders are non-existent, unless we create them.
To get turned around, lost, disoriented.
To be helped by someone who sees that we need it, and as a result, have a new found trust in “strangers.”
To wake up in a bed that isn’t familiar, and be excited and a little afraid about the unknown that awaits outside the door.
To see the differences in how people live, and learn to accept them, and eventually celebrate them by adopting some of those ways into your own life.
To see what makes people smile on planet Earth.
To walk in forests, deserts, grasslands, mountains new to you.
To swim in oceans, lakes and rivers that your skin hasn’t touched.
To assist in making the world a better place for all of us to live by working side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder with each other, sharing our skills and determining, together, rich and poor, “educated” and “uneducated,” how to answer a call of need.
Like this:
June 9, 2008
“Children Play with Earth”
Posted by vagoscribe under Say Something | Tags: Arrested Development, Chief Seattle, earth, food, gardening, hiking |Leave a Comment
Remember when Arrested Development broke into the national music scene a decade or so ago? With their African rhythms, the drumming, the social-conscious lyrics, they were a breath of fresh air with an edge. We need some AD these days.
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“Dig your hands in the dirt,
Children play with Earth.”
–Arrested Devlopment
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Turn off the TV. Get your old clothes on. Tell the kids to put their dirty clothes on too. It’s about time we get D-I-R-T-Y.
Plant the flowers. Get the veggie garden prepped. Dig a hole to contemplate how exactly you see the “hole” part of the hole. Get dirt under the fingernails. Walk in the woods. Lift rocks to look for crawlies. Dig worms and take a kid fishing. Make mud pies after the rain has stopped. Have mud pie battles.
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It is important that we not lose our connection with the earth. To place significance on this thought is rather easy when one gives thought to death.
“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust” isn’t just something to say to give symoblic meaning to our passing from this plane. It is testimony of who we are physically, and places much-needed remembrance of our place on this earth. Understanding of the familiar saying credited to Chief Seattle–We are a part of the earth, not apart from the earth–is essential if we are to care for the earth.
Care will come with intimate knowledge. Knowledge will come with learning through practice, as well as through study and scholarship. Knowledge needed to care for the earth can come with prolonged encounters with earth in its rawest states, encounters that breed respect for the earth in the face of human humility.
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“Dig your hands in the dirt
Children play with earth.”
–Arrested Development
It is as elemental as that. Getting back to basics is all we need to do. Feel the earth. Watch plants grow out of it. Eat food that is nourished by it. Put your little ones in it and watch them. Get yourself in it. See what happens. Feel what happens.
(written 25 April 2004)
