My mother and brother visited me in Oaxaca over Christmas and New Year's and it was wonderful. This post is not about that. This post is about me worrying about entertaining them while they were here and realizing I had no reason to worry.

I've only been in Oaxaca a little less than two months. It took me 18 years to understand Long Valley, NJ and my family had lived for over 2 generations in New Jersey before I came along (and once I got to understand New Jersey, I was ready to leave). It will take me a lifetime to even scrape the surface of Oaxaca, so I just didn't feel qualified to guide my mother and brother around here. I turned to a guide book.

Issue number 1: Most guidebooks are written by people who visit, but do not necessarily live in a place. They often have been visiting for years and do know the area they are writing about, but they don't live there.

Issue number 2: They are outdated the moment they are published. The guidebooks I could get my hands on before the family visit were written before 2006. Two years may not drastically change a place, unless that place had massive strikes in 2006. Please see this New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/world/americas/30mexico.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=APPO%20Oaxaca&st=cse) for a scraping-the-surface snapshot with all the bias a US journalist has in covering another country (I know, I used to be one). And if I had turned to a guide published in 2006 it might have warned me to stay away from Oaxaca, but please see this equally biased article (http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/travel/25hours.html?scp=7&sq=&st=nyt) about why nobody should stay away from Oaxaca.

Issue number 3: Guidebook authors are terribly subjective. They have to give their opinions about ruins, restaurants, hotels, museums, and everything else. You can't be objective as a guidebook author. If you skip a restaurant because you didn't like it or make sure to include one because you loved it, you are being subjective. I've heard anecdotal evidence in my travels that after a particularly popular guidebook gives a particularly positive review of a hole-in-the-wall place, it becomes tremendously popular...and then changes.

Issue number 4: There really isn't enough room in a guide book to describe an entire place. Unless your guide book is 600 pages about a single building, then maybe, just maybe you can do it justice. But only if that building is under 3 stories tall. Some examples: there's a poker game at the house of a friend of a friend here on Sunday nights; there's a little taco stand (really just a couple of benches and a comal (a tortilla grill) under a tarp) tucked into the corner outside a church. The best tlayudas are in San Martin Mexicapan and you'll never find the place (or at least I hope you won't). These are just three tiny things I've learned in two months and they are completely subjective (well the poker game is fact). No guidebook includes these things and for good reason, travelers don't have time to explore every nook and cranny, which brings me to

Issue number 5: Guidebooks aren't written for people that live in a place, but aren't from there. I need a guidebook that helps me find an apartment, that tells me where to buy my toothpaste, that knows where to find towels and sheets.

And that isn't a guidebook, it's other people who live here, who just moved here, whose families have lived here for 12 generations and longer. So, read a guidebook to skim the surface, to see the sites, but ask somebody who calls it home in order to discover a place, to help you skim the surface of understanding.