Oaxaca Lending Library is a long-standing nonprofit with 450 members in Oaxaca founded in 1966 that primarily caters to the English speaking expats. It has a lending library with some 20,000 English and Spanish language books. OLL also organizes tours, hikes, yoga, Spanish and English language classes, and is generally a great place to meet other expats. You can see a calendar of their upcoming events here, and note how they have something going on every day.

OLL organized a Thanksgiving dinner and mini concert for 60 expats, and we decided to join them. This was a good opportunity for us to meet other expats in town. During the dinner, we spoke at length to six others and we found everyone to be well traveled, well spoken, and generally very upbeat.

The turkey was one of the better we’ve savored, the presentation was incredible, and the event was very well organized. Kudos to the OLL event organizers.

After the meal, we were entertained by a string quartet, which is part of a larger orchestra. Camerata Oaxaca is a chamber orchestra comprised of 13 young professional musicians from some of the top music schools in Mexico, and was recently awarded as the best emerging artist group in Mexico. They were clearly talented and appeared to be having fun playing some 13 pieces from Handel, Bach, Vivaldi, Beatles, to traditional Mexican. What a wonderful wonderful way to spend Thanksgiving.