You Can Take a Girl From Her Hoops, But You Can't Keep Her From Making More

The universe has, once again, provided. Alex and I were wandering around this afternoon, completely directionless, hoping to find a store that sells tubing that I could use to make hula hoops. I remained hopeful, but Alex was trying to be more realistic. We didn't know the Spanish word for the tubing so we couldn't ask anyone for help locating it. Moreover, stores in Oaxaca are extremely specialized -- there's a store, for example, that just sells cooking oil. Another sells corn tortillas (but not flour...you have to somewhere else for those). And then, there it was, sitting in the window of a store that sells generators and grinding machines: a large coil of 3/4" polyethylene tubing. They even had the right sized insert couplers. We bought enough to make three hoops and had them cut the tubing on the spot. After another adventure I managed to track down several different colors of electrical tape. And, now, dumdadum, we have hula hoops!