Day 1

 Day 1 – travel day

Traveling during pandemic is definitely different. The airports were about as busy as before, but everybody was masked, and surprisingly many people were double-masked. And both flights were full. When we landed in Oaxaca, they were very well organized. People led us from the plane to the airport building, before entering the building they took everybody’s temperature, squirted us with a disinfectant, and collected a Covid questionnaire we had to fill out. Immigration and customs took all of 5 minutes and we were out. We took a taxi to the hotel (Quinta Real). The ride took about 25 minutes. At the entrance to the hotel, the same procedure was repeated – temperature, squirt with disinfectant and fill out another questionnaire. As we later found out, this is a standard procedure at entering any place (minus questionnaire). We checked in and went into our room to unpack. The hotel premises are spectacular as it is an enormous 16th century former monastery with beautiful architecture, multiple manicured courtyards, two restaurants, bar and a pool. However, the room is a bit disappointing – dimly lit, not enough outlets and quite small. At about 9 pm we decided to go out and explore. The hotel is in the heart of centro historico so we just walked up and down the main pedestrian street – Manuel Alcala, which was quite alive. Looking for an ATM, we ended in the Zocalo, which was hopping –hundreds of people, families with kids, music, vendors, etc.  At 10 pm we got back to the hotel wanting a drink, but the bar closed at 10 so we went out again and found a nice little mescaleria close by and tasted two different (both excellent) mescals.





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