October 19, 2026

The smell hits you first — woodsmoke, dried chili, and something floral underneath that you can't quite name. I followed it down a narrow alley in Oaxaca's Barrio Jalatlaco just after seven this morning, past painted walls the color of marigolds and rust, until I found her: a woman in her sixties crouched over a clay comal, pressing masa with practiced indifference to the hour.

I ordered two tlayudas without knowing what I was getting. She looked at me the way people do when they've decided whether to like you before you've opened your mouth. I must have passed some test, because she pointed at a low wooden stool with her chin, and I sat.

The tlayuda arrived on a clay plate wider than my outstretched hands — crisp tortilla, black beans spread thick as paint, tasajo cured and charred at the edges, cheese that pulled and didn't apologize for it. I ate slowly. There's a discipline to eating slowly when you're alone and the food is this good, because your instinct is to rush before it ends.

A boy, maybe nine, appeared from behind a curtain and stared at me with frank curiosity. I showed him a small notebook I carry — he flipped through it, found a page where I'd drawn a rough map of the market, and decided this was funny. He called something through the curtain. She replied without looking up.

Later, walking back toward the zócalo with my fingers still carrying the smell of copal from a passing vendor, I thought about what travel writing so often gets wrong: we narrate discovery as if places were waiting to be found. They're not waiting. They're simply happening, continuously, with or without our witnessing.

To be let in for a few minutes — that's the whole thing.

#oaxaca #travel #foodwriting #slowtravel