Oaxaca - On my own

Couldn't fall asleep last night. Not sure why. Went down to the lobby at 4 a.m. to say goodbye to the rest of the group as they began their 6-hour trip up to the Mexico City airport on the bus. The group from Minnesota wasn't planning to return home until 3 a.m. the following day - a 23-hour trip. Ugh!
Before they left, they donated some of their old clothes and lots of pesos (over 5,000, which is close to $500!) to the organiztion Cliff helped found and that we visited earlier: Oaxaca Street Chilren Grassroots (Centro de Esperanza Infantil). Isn't that AWESOME?!?! The students came up with the idea on their own. Instead of exchanging their remaining Mexican pesos back into US dollars, they just donated them to the organization. I'm still touched by their generosity!

Today I visited two places just down the block from the hotel. The first was a library (in the photo here) with a cool quote outside: 'Soy los libros que he leido." (I am the books I've read.) Cliff told me that it was a quote from a local dignitary who had died within the last year.


Next, I headed down to the Museo Rufino Tamayo and was disappointed to discover that it was a building the Tamayo's had donated to the city as a museum to house their collection of pre-columbian artifacts, some nice stuff, but I was hoping to see some of Tamayo's own art.