Our Day Sessions are short day trips and classes that offer guests a deep cultural, spiritual, and ecological dive into ancestral Mesoamerican foodways in Oaxaca City and the Oaxacan Central Valleys.
Food of the Gods Chocolate + Maize Session
We taste pre-hispanic cacao drinks, local seeds, chocolate tastings, very rare types of chocolate, and heirloom maize foods. We endeavour to learn about the mysterious paths of the humble cacao bean and the corn cob from their beginnings to its modern incarnations today. Guests are challenged to consider their approach to the vast differences in taste, textures, and context that root Oaxacan and Western chocolate traditions. We ask how all of this might inform our relations to money, death, time, and ceremony.
The Spirits of Agave Session
Join us for a flight or tasting of three ancient maguey/agave beverages. We endeavour to learn about the mysterious path of maguey, the Goddess Mayahuel, and the moon. Guests are challenged to consider their approach to the vast differences in taste, textures, and context that root Oaxacan and Western traditions. We ask how all of this might inform our relations to farming, elderhood, sacrifice, myth, and food.
Earth, Fire, Food
Over the course of a full day we will visit a family of three generations of potters actively engaged in the collective rememberance of their craft.
We will explore the process of turning clay into ceramics, each step being undertaken and taught together, the use of stone in traditional chocolate preparation, and the ceremony behind the work.
Finally, we will be getting our hands dirty learning the living alchemy of earth and fire, listening to master storytellers, and discovering the old relationships between the fire that cooks our pottery that cooks our food.
Blood of the Gods in the Sierra Norte
Over the course of a full day we will climb into the fertile Oaxacan mountains to experience a delicious, ceremonial chocolate drink.
The day consists of an extended workshop and demonstration of the drink-making process, a delicious, organic home-cooked meal, and of course an opportunity to taste one of the rare ceremonial cacao drinks of the Oaxacan people.
Responsible Travel 101
The seminar is not a how-to guide. There are no easy answers, or ten-step solutions that can remedy the issues facing us today. We delve deeper into the nature of travel as tourists and as foreigners. Endeavouring to ask questions that tend to survive attempts to answer them, we invite you to join us so that your travel might be couched in wonderings bigger and deeper than “sustainable” and “regenerative.” Some of the themes we focus on, which vary from session to session, include: the history, language, and nature of travel; the roots of hospitality; the difference between travel and tourism; approaching other cultures; language itself, the spells of the west, belonging & transience, and the costs and responsibility of travelling.
STUDENT AND PRIVATE GROUP SESSIONS
All of our sessions, whether day trips or deep immersions, are offered for and can be modified to suit the interests of student groups and private groups.
