???????

Sita just pointed out that we were in the midst of an earthquake. A couple of tequila bottles were wobbling on the shelf. The bunnies didn’t notice anything though, so there goes that theory… Anyroad, i’ll check online to see if anyone else reported owt and post a link if something happened. Ah, life on the San Andreas fault. I’m glad I’m not still teaching, the earthquake drill was never properly explained- it’s all duck and cover under desks and then if you think it’s stopped then go outside. How you decide this was never fully explained…
Update- 10:30am : It was a 5.0 near Paso Robles again about 200 miles south of here…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW-dlvDdYT0

Trying to post a video here all done via the iPhone http://youtu.be/qW-dlvDdYT0 here tis on the YouTube

It all started with Mario and Angelica kindly inviting us round their´s on Saturday night. A few bottles of wine and plenty of botanas after arriving, the first tentative steps were made toward “Family Games Night”. Aranza brought Parcheesi, which is like Ludo with strategic elements. It´s popular in Spain though I´ve never played it before. After a few teething troubles (you roll one die, not two) we were completely absorbed in getting our tiddlywinks (fichitas) to circle the board and get home, and taking great malicious pleasure in blocking and eating other players´ fichas along the way. We lost.

Next up was one of my favourites, a Jenga type game, but with a twist that enabled the makers to dodge the patent issues and call it Stacko. Each jenga block was either red, yellow, green or blue and had a number from 1 to 4 on it like Uno, so if the last person removed a red #3, you had to go for a red block or one with #3 on it which makes it a lot harder. Luckily they´re all made from polished plastic so it´s not quite as hard as the artesanal wooden jenga thing we have.

Anyroad, all this nonsense went on until 3am and then some as it turned out we’ve all got quite the competitive streak. Many thanks, M & A 😀

Sunday we got up late, unsurprisingly. I went to the baratillo (huge Tapatian street market on the other side of town) and took a fair few photos. I stumbled into this church too, which is an architectural oddity, I’ve no idea what it’s called.

Afterwards I nipped by Amour Fou to pick up some stuff and got persuaded to play Mexican Scrabble. It was going great guns, practically every letter is worth 4 points and there were about 8 blanks (each worth 1 pt). However it started to get tricky as the board filled up and there seemed to be an endless supply of letters. I counted and there were 200 tiles to put on a 15×15 board (225). Madness I tells you. I don’t think the manufacturers of this game had every tried to play it. Cos unless you start placing your tiles vertically, upwords style, there’s no chance of finishing. And how they dared put in 4 Ws beggars belief. It’s not a letter that features much in the Spanish dictionary, it’s almost always just foreign words like Whiskey, Walkie-Talkie, Windsurfing and gWyn…

After that, Uno, which was a lot more fast moving than Scrabble with a 90% board coverage.

At my photo journalism seminar yesterday one of the attendees was complaining about having bought the Mexico edition of Monopoly and one of the squares having less-than-popular ex-president Vicente Fox on it. What were they thinking? I’d love a Tapatian (Guadalajaran) version of it, mind. I reckon the market’s ready… Collect the utilities, SIAPA, CFE, TELMEX and MEGACABLE…

Yesterday was Mother’s day in Mexico. It’s a huge thing. First off, everyone made their excuses and left work at middayish to head off to crowded restaurants all over town. No one was without roses they’d either received or were about to give. In Gigante the usual musak was replaced by someone urging everyone to buy mother-related goods (tortillas, white wine, cleaning products…) and businesses closed up early. I didn’t even have to stand on the bus home for once. One of these days I’ll post about Mexican phrases involving the word “madre”, but first I want to dig out El Laberinto de la Soledad, cos Octavio Paz has some pertinent things to say if I recall correctly.

Last night I barbecued again cos Sarah was coming round for some webdesignery advice. For some reason it didn’t turn out that well. I should pay more attention in the meat isle to what I’m buying. In fact they should have pictures of what your meat should look like when you’ve cooked it on the labels, to help men choose whether they want arrachera or milanesa… Never mind. Sarah brought us a bottle of diamante negro tequila, which is potent but fragrant with the agave. As a digestif it did a good job of cutting through the culinary dubiousness we’d eaten.

My Aguascalientes photos got linked to by an Aguascalientesian (made that word up, hidrotermico?) and he let me know. Which is nice, so in the spirit of reciprocity, here’s a link to his blog.

And finally, just for Sarah who can’t make embedded video play on her laptop, here’s a “mamada” I saw on the internets about Star Wars’ emperor on the phone… You come for the self-absorption, but you’ll stay for the lo-res comedy…

Cherry coke, indeed.