Living la vida Oaxaca

So Oaxaca did get better with a little sleep.  I spent two more days there, getting out to see some of the ruins, the main zocalo and the markets.

I hired a bike and rode to Monte Alban.  For future reference, and I may be stating the obvious for some, but Monte means mountain.  I kinda realised that when I set out.  But two hours later when I had been riding uphill - not just up hill after hill - but continually uphill for the entire time and I had rounded three mountains and was thinking surely I'd taken a wrong turn I saw what I thought could be a ruined temple in the distance.  Another k and there was a sign, finally I was going  the right way, and 3 k after that I got there.  I was pooped, but I knew the whole way home was downhill so I managed to trek about the ruins for a couple of hours.  They were in pretty good nick and similiar to those in Mexico in style.
 
The ride home was sweet, except for when I found the bike didn't really have breaks and the couple of times I realised I was riding on the wrong side of the road. Der!  You'd think I'd have it figured out after a month.

The other ruins I went to see were the Mitla ones.  This town is a little further out of the city than Monte Alban so I caught buses.  The first bus I caught was the right bus, but going in the wrong direction.  By the time I'd figured this out, I was like 'ah well I'll get a bit of a city tour', which was fine except this guys driving was shocking and I was feeling pretty queasy by the time I got off.  The Mitla ruins were good too.  Quite a different style to the Monte Alban ones.  Mitla also had quite a large market area.  There are a lot of cool handcrafty things and traditional dress clothes and stuff in the markets, but markets are markets.  The cool shit in Mitla is the same as the cool shit in Oaxaca.  And the cool shit in the first half a dozen stalls is repeated through the rest.  I do like all the Dias de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) decorations and trinkets though.  That stuff is cool.