We are travelling in the "after times". Mexico lifted all COVID restrictions for travellers in June 2022, and while there are "cubrebocas son obligitorios" (masks are compulsory) signs in many places, the signs are either out-of-date or are just disregarded by many.
That being said, a lot of locals are still wearing masks on the streets and stores -- more than in Canada. In parts of town frequented mostly by locals, at times more than half of people are wearing masks walking down the (usually crowded) streets. In confined quarters, the percentage is even higher. Every single person in our shared taxi to Capulapam wore a mask for the two hour ride....and wore it correctly. Most shopkeepers, waiters/waitresses, and cab drivers routinely wear masks too.
Things are very different in any crowd made up of tourists. In the central square of the city, fewer than 10% of people wear masks. At the ruins of Monte Alban, we were almost the only masked people on site.
Enforcement of COVID measures is spotty. Mostly there is none: simply signs about spacing and masks and arrows on the floor that are ignored now. But there are holdouts. When we visited the craft market in the village of Santa Maria Atzompa, we had to put hand santizer on our hands, step on a mat soaked in disinfectant, and suffer being sprayed all over with disinfectant before we could enter! Masks were definitely obligatorio too. This morning everyone in the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca Santo Domingo was wearing a mask, so I suspect we would have been obliged to put one on if we weren't already wearing. It's also not uncommon to be offered a handful of disinfectant when you enter a museum or store.
There are other lingering COVID effects too. Major tourist sites are still offering only "COVID" opening hours: Monte Alban opens at 10am, instead of 8am. The city museum at the ex-Monastery de Santo Domingo is only open Tuesday-Saturday. The ruins at Mitla are only open Wednesday to Sunday. In theory the number of people admitted is limited to 100 at a time too, but that rule is supposedly also in effect at Monte Alban and was being ignored when we were there last week.
Worse, too many places are either permanently or temporarily COVID-closed. The community museum in Santa Maria Atzompa is "temporarily closed", with no sign of reopening. Even worse, so is the Museo de Arte Prehistorico Rufino Tamayo, one of the premier museums in the city (and perhaps the country). If they simply ran out of money, what's going to happen to the artefacts? The museum contains the personal collection of the late artist Rufino Tamayo, who selected pieces based solely on their artistic merit. It's an astonishing collection of archeological treasures that includes items from every region of Mexico. But the doors were locked during opening hours, and nobody seems to know what's going on.
Another lesser loss is the Amate Bookstore, an excellent bilingual bookstore that had been around for more than 20 years. It catered both to tourists and to ex-pats with a carefully curated selection of books about Mexico. I'd been looking forward to visiting, and had been planning to use it to stock up on books for the rest of our trip. I was kind of crushed when I discovered that it was a COVID casualty.
But over all, there are flocks of tourists, streets and markets are crowded, tour buses patrol the city. You'd never know that we all spent much of the last 3 years at home, waiting for vaccines, waiting out wave after wave of COVID. In 10 year's time, I wonder if we'll notice COVID era signs in the background of photos and marvel? Or if they'll mostly be cropped out of photos and out of memories? Certainly when I tried to find a few photos to illustrate this blog entry I discovered that I hadn't taken any photos that included COVID signs, and very few pictures of other people at all, let alone pictures of people wearing masks.
------------------update-------------------
We tried visiting the Museo Rufino Tamayo again yesterday, and found these signs plastered over the doors. There is definitely something going on, and local protest about the continuing closure.
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