Day 5. Shopping! Cathedrals! Hilarious dancing!

So, today has been our last day in Oaxaca city, and it's been one of my faves so far. Had a Oaxacan omelette for breakfast, and A HOT CHOCOLATE (I KNOW!), in our favourite cafe in the city called Magic Hands. It's also an art gallery and shop, run by a family of artists. It's very cool. There's an abundance of "Dios de los muertos" inspired stuff in Oaxaca, so there are skulls and skeletons everywhere, but me and Andrew were really taken with the ones in this gallery. There was one skull in particular that was just beautifully designed and made, and we fell in love with it. Thanks to everyone's wonderful and generous honeymoon donations, we were able to buy it. It's a really unique piece of art that will be a great memento of our honeymoon, so thank you all so much!

After a tad more shopping (I wanted to buy EVERYTHING!) we moseyed over to a restaurant called Marco Polo for lunch. It's menu was exclusively seafood, so Andrew vommed a little at the very thought...so we moseyed on back, to yet another closed restaurant! We found a great place eventually, on the corner of the Zocalo, and spent a very happy lunch watching the busy Oaxacan afternoon whizz by.

Later on in the afternoon we went to the Santo Domingo Cathedral. It's very ornate and golden, and I've attached some pictures here as I can't really describe it well enough. Suffice to say, it was a beautiful sight.

Now then, hold on to your hats...the evening's entertainment tonight was utterly ridiculous and brilliant. In the morning, we had reserved two tickets for the hotel's dinner and show evening! The Guelaguetza is a folk dance festival that happens every July in Oaxaca. But at our hotel, they put on a mini-guelaguetza every Friday! We had a buffet meal first, seated at round, wedding-y tables, and then we were treated to a compendium of dances from each of the 8 regions in Oaxaca State. Accompanied by what can only be described as the school band from the Simpsons opening credits, our dancers gamely trotted on for the first dance. They were very sombre (even though the music was a bit like la cucuracha) and they stared at their feet a lot, and absolutely did not smile. And they just kind of trotted around the stage some more, and then went off. So far, so bemusing. But THEN....each new dance was progressively more animated and bizarre. The next offering was a bullfighting dance - the ladies were the bulls, who literally head butted their male matadors until they fell off the stage. All the while, the dancers were kind of getting it wrong, and pissing themselves laughing. It was hysterical! I won't go through all 8 dances, but particular highlights were the pineapple dance, and the egg-laying duet...Completely camp, bizarre, colourful...like our entire Oaxaca City experience really. I'll try and upload some videos for you all to enjoy!

So that's it for the city! We are flying down to the Pacific coast tomorrow morning, to hopefully do...nothing at all! By the beach! Hooray! Xx