Stuff

More to follow, off to La Matera…

After a successful BBQ on Saturday night with José, Ana, Jorge, Victor, Jana, El Rufles, Fernando, Ana, Javier, Monica, Daniel, Sita, Mum & Dad and a fair bit of partying around Gwod afterwards, Mum, Dad and me drove to Zacatecas on Sunday, which is one of me favourite towns in Mexico. We stayed at the Hotel Condesa (40 US bucks a night, clean, quiet, central, with views of La Bufa and around, Av. Juárez # 102, Tel. (492) 922 1160). Thoroughly recommended if you fancy a trip… It takes around 4 hours to get there from Gwod on the toll road via Aguascalientes. Anyroad, lots to see and do there. I signed mum and dad up for the city tour the next day and made my way around on foot listening to the usual podcasts (This American Life and Total Podcastrophe (check out Paul and Judy’s new WordPress site) taking photos of all around me. I even went up to the Bufa on foot and met me folks at the top. It’s a steep old climb, but the toothless bloke who was walking up at the same time felt compelled to tell me he was 84 (you know) so I can’t feel too proud of meself…

We had lunch in the old bullring, the Quinta Real hotel, where there was a 1-1 waiter/diner ratio and our food was revealed to us from under silver domes in unison at the table. Lovely, t’was, then a bit more shopping/wandering, a siesta, and then a nice little Italian place that has the only decent wine in Zacatecas- “Locando la tana” (C. Genaro Codina # 714) for lasaa and apple pie.

The next day we got up early and visited the La Quemada ruins which was stunning. I was expecting a pile of stones but it was a huge landscaped hilltop with steps and columns, you name it… After moseying to the top and back we found out it also harbours a wealth of rattlesnakes, which I’m sort of glad I didn’t know. I assumed the scurrying in the grassland and cacti were desert squirrels (if such things exist)… Mum wasn’t too keen on that aspect but enjoyed the rest.

After that we took the non-toll road all the way back to Gwod stopping for lunch at a mariscos place in Apozol, Zac for delicious, cheap fish. The scenery all the way was stunning- vast, desert plains, rustic villages and omnipresent mountains, finishing with a drive into Guadalajara’s barranca (enormous gorge/ valley thing) and back up it, which I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. Gorgeous all round… A great couple of days.

Today I’m meeting up with Ian for a bit of a Leo Sayer starting in La Fuente and ending up who knows where?…

Thanks to el “Chiva Congelado” for this brilliant explanation of insanely common Mexican gestures that will save you time in restaurants, on the beach and avoiding squeegee merchants at traffic lights… His blog’s also great if you’re interested in Belgian beer reviews from a Mexican perspective, bilingual sports coverage, and, *edit* bizarrely, pan-global teeniebop phenomenon, RDB *edit* other fine topics…

Still trying to master the “gracias” one…

So after a relaxing day breakfasting in Chop!, looking at terrapins, squirrels and hummingbirds in Colomos park and phoning the world, we made it to the Santo Coyote restaurant (Av. Lerdo de Tejada 2379; Guadalajara; Tel: 3616 6978) to celebrate mum’s 60th in style. As ever, the food was excellent. They’ve recently opened several new sections in the already huge restaurant and since we managed to hold off arriving till 8pm which, though early, meant there was plenty of atmosphere. The mariachis strike up around 9pm… FYI.

I’m not going to review this place, so in summary: Excellent ambience, fine wines, fantastic food, pricey-but-worth-it. Here’s some pix to give you a taste:

Another lovely day… met up with Ian, Adri and Larisa this morning in Cafe D’Val for chilaquiles and coffee. They’re all doing fine minus having their car impounded for inscrutable Mexican bureaucratic reasons… We’ve arranged an all-dayer for next Wednesday starting in La Fuente so catching up should continue then… They won’t be able to make it to tomorrow’s celebrations with Mum and Saturday’s official “Meet/ Rekindle Your Relationship with the Parents” BBQ, but there’s quite a few people coming so never mind. Anyroad, I left mum and dad to fend for themselves in the city centre and by the looks of dad’s photos they saw a lot and got around v. well in the afternoon heat.

That’s all for now. Have some photos of Dad and Sita frolicking with dolphins in Xel-Ha water park in the Yucatan…

And while we’re on the subject have a pun via b3ta.

Not as windy as it sounds… similarly low-res video of Sita, Dad and dolphins coming soon. Off to Ajijic today. I think.

…is that when there’s not much going on then there’s plenty of time to post about what you’ve had for breakfast and the last movie you’ve watched, but when your life is full of excitement, travel, friends, family and fun then it’s hard to squeeze in the time to express what a marvellous time you’re having. This is one of the latter occasions.

Tulum and round that way was simply amazing. The cabaas we rented could not have been better located, the weather was perfect (ie. not too hot, breezy, low humidity and sunny) and all them photos you see of Tulum and around, well they’re definitely not photoshopped and have to be seen to be believed. Absolutely gorgeous. Needless to say I took 500+ photos and am whittling them down a bit before sending them all to Flickr and producing the all singing, all dancing DVD spectacular.

Mum and Dad have changed their return date so they’re here for another 2 wks which means we’ll be off on day trips and adventures near and far. Yesterday was Tlaquepaque, today Zapopan and Seattle, tomorrow the centre, Wednesday, Tequila… all is going v.v. well.

In slower times I might have posted about the oscars last night. The biggest argument for not dubbing events in Spanish you’ll ever see. But no time at all.

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We had a bit of bad news about Atticus and Sita’s folks. They were attacked in the street by a pitbull on Friday night. They’re getting over the shock now and Atticus needed stitches and has to wear a cone but otherwise is doing okay. Martin saved the day by all accounts and Sally (and Atticus) handled themselves very well. It sounds like everything will be fine, but that was quite a shock. Speedy recovery to all concerned and thanks for handling it so well M & S.

See, it’s not all work, work, work here in Mexico. As some of you more alert readers have probably already surmised…

Tomorrow we’re meeting up with my Mum and Dad in Cancún airport, hiring a car and then heading off to Tulum and who knows where else. Providing I can find a power supply to recharge my camera occasionally, there’ll probably be a photo or two in the offing of white sands, blue sky and increasingly sun-burnt británicos. And one gorgeously tanned Chirlandesa…

Positively shaking with excitement right now, it’s going to be grand to see me folks and whisk them round some of the most beautiful places in the world. Read all about it next week.

In more mundane blog news, somewhere down there on the right there’s a new section: “I googled… “sun-burnt brits”… and all I got was this lousy blog”. Well that’s a widget to see what the latest search terms arriving at the blog are. It seems most people are looking for the defunct Parque Metropolitano de Guadalajara pages. But that’s another story.

Well, have a lovely week everyone. I’m thinking of doing a podcast about just that, asking random strangers in Spanish (and probably in cantinas) what they’re planning for the weekend every other week. Snapshot of a bar culture type thing. We’ll see. So many silly little projects, so little time. What are you doing this weekend? Immortalise it in the agaveweb blog comments… 😀

Part of the kitchen renovations recently executed in AgaveWeb’s corporate headquarters was getting rid of the rustic tilty-gallon-water-bottle-holder thing and replacing it with a cheap plastic pump. Unfortunately, they really weren’t thinking about the terrorism-obsessed foreign markets when they manufactured its packaging.

Spanish word of the week: Bomba. Pump. It also means bomb, for the record…

Other news, Ana’s taking us all to (a?) Temazcal this afternoon, for aromatic steam baths… Actually, I’m coming along for the ride and shall give the baths a wide berth and wander off into the country side with me camera. Steam baths are too far outside my comfort zone.

Also tomorrow morning, I’m doing the voiceover for the Camino Real trailer I was working on last year. Sound booths and everything. Should be a laugh. Though I can’t stand the sound of my recorded voice… Hey ho. I’ve more or less finished with a ton of translations too. It’s been a heavy few days…

In every one of the “Top 10 things you shouldn’t do with your blog” type posts you see, number 2 is usually “stop updating regularly” or “start a post with ‘sorry I haven’t blogged in a while”… Anyroad, that said…

Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. Service might return to normal on Thursday. Tengo un chingo de chamba.

Last night Sita and I dined in Pierrot (Justo Sierra 2355) which was billed as a French restaurant, and I have to say the food there is fantastic. It nudges out El Sacromonte of my top 3 Guadalajara restaurants (La Matera and La I Latina still stand). As per usual it was pretty much empty at 8 o’clockish because only gringos eat at that time on a Friday night. I saw a stack of reservations for 10 pm which is a more normal time to eat round these parts.

The prices are relatively high end, most main dishes are around the 150 peso mark, but they’re worth every centavo… There’s a good list of wines from Chile, Spain and Mexico and the menu’s in French, then Spanish then English. We ordered starters of Fromage (Quesos, Cheeses) and Jamón Serrano (“Special Ham” apparently) which were definitely specially imported. One of the cheeses was a fierce little number but there was also brie, gouda and goat cheese. Then the main dishes arrived. I went for the steak, almost ordering it Término Azul, but chickening out at the last minute and going for rojo, rare, instead, and young Sita plumped for the lomo (pork). They brought it and transferred it to the plate and then piled veggies and spuds all over it. It was probably one of the best meals I’ve had in this fair city. Sita’s was none too shabby neither.

If you come to visit us in Gwod and we don’t take you there then you can rightly take offence…

Thank you very much, Sally and Martin, for sponsoring last night’s gluttony. Extremely appreciated, many thanks…
[tags]Pierrot, restaurant, review, gluttony, steak, guadalajara, jalisco, mexico[/tags]

…like when you have your hair cut (or so I’m told). So I was in the mood for rejigging things, and thus, BEHOLD! “Un inglés en Guanatos”‘s latest encarnation. It’ll probably change some more because I’m using an out of the box template (called “I feel dirty”) with some minor revisions. Anyroad, hope you like it. Since my other blog now has the agave theme I thought I’d do summink completely different with this one.

Thanks, Paul and Jesse, for weighing in on the various redesigns.

So last night I went to the Lucha Libre again with Anel, Claus and co, this time in a different arena. We travelled there in the back of someone’s pick up, which made it all the more authentic. It was pricier, mind, the cheap seats were 80 pesos a pop. Still sterling entertainment as always.

Erm… I put up some shelves in me office making use of me new hand drill. I just wanted one of these but every where I went they said they didn’t make them any more and how’s about one of these. Okay, says I and now I’m ready to make holes all over the house. The next project is a new kitchen counter and with my brawn, Daniel’s DIY know-how and my shiny new drill, we’ll be there in no time.

Tonight after deciding there’s bugger all in the cinema (Perfume, Kilometro 32, Blood Diamonds and Borat have all just come out), we’re going to stay in and watch the new episode of LOST and some more Bones… But before that, Sita’s folks are treating us to a birthday meal somewhere. So many thanks in advance, Sally & Quito.

There’s more translation stuff in the works for next week… and I want to investigate an e-commerce plug-in for wordpress. Then my parents’ grand entrance to Mexico on Saturday and our week in Tulum y ¡mucho más!

Also, I’m trying to think of a pithy description of this blog for the upper right corner “about” bit… any ideas?
[tags]lucha libre, redesign, wordpress, templates[/tags]

After making Nourishing Nutrition a fully WordPress-generated site I thought I’d treat agaveweb.com to a “pimping” to use the vernacular… it now features all kinds of rounded corners/ reflectiony jiggery pokery and has some social aspects. I’m chuffed I got the translation calculator to survive the transition too.

Anyroad, spanish-speaking or not, I’d appreciate your thoughts… Click thee hence to: agaveweb.com 2.0

Nb. spanish speakers, once I work out if i’m using tú or Ud I’ll sort that out… and there’s little bits here and there to tran

…about whether the the snap.com preview things currently popping up all over the intertubes are a good or bad thing. Here at agaveweb we value your opinion, cherish your patronage and are forever buggering around trying to make reading this rubbish less painful. Please be so good as to click either the Polls tab above or THIS HERE LINK that says POLLS! in block capitals and make your feelings known. Swift action will be taken according to the results. Don’t be intimidated by the 100% “marvellous” results. Cos that was me checking the system worked.

One vote per IP address now and enjoy the AJAX AJAX. Thanks in advance for your valuable feedback or “retroalimentación” in dubious Spanish.

My Fortress of Solitude

Here’s a pic of where I’m blogging from these days. Just decorated it with some prints from around these fair shores and a Big Lebowski poster (or “Identidad Peligrosa”) from Amour Fou your friendly neighbourhood video rental shop. 20 pesos no less.

We’re back from the land of the unpronouncable names and Nahuatl for “the place of the fishermen”. Try navigating around with names like Tzintzuntzan and Ihuatzio. Very good scrabble scores all round. It’s an incredibly beautiful area, which I won’t attempt to describe I’ll let the photos do the painting of thousands of words. Suffice to say it’s an unmissable part of the United States of Mexico abundant in flora, fauna, cuisine and even lightning and rainbows. Here’s the Flickr photo set of the Michoacán pix and here’s some of me faves:

In other news, i just noticed that me dad done gone and went and gotten himself a blog.

Via b3ta: They’ve remade the “I’m a PC” Mac adverts with Mitchell and Webb for the UK audience. Some are word for word versions of the US ones. Some aren’t… Also here’s Biff out of Back to the Future singing all the questions he’s asked.

Anyroad, we’re off to the hills today along with most of the population of Gwod who are having their puente weekend. As ever, more photos than you can shake a stick at on Monday/Tuesday. A bientot…

Monica had to go back to LA yesterday to check on her mum who took a turn for the worse with her Lupus. Hopefully things’ll stablise/improve a fair bit and Monica can come back in a couple of weeks.

My favourite searches ending up at Agaveweb for Jan 2007:

“gate.com sucks” – have to agree
“safeway coinmaster” – perennial favourite
“take away restaurants in bristol” – ¿?
“roggy mcgee” – Sita’s cousin’s dog
“para abrir un restaurante que necesito ademas de las sillas” (To open a restaurant, what do I need? other than the chairs…”) Good luck, mate. Tables for one thing.
“como superar los miedos a la oscuridad” (How to overcome fear of the dark). That one probably went to Mi vida regida por el ridiculo though, what with the theme of darkness, fear, darkness, fear… I’d recommend changing the bulbs to increasingly low wattage over a period of months and starting a diet rich in beta-carotene post haste.

Have some oranges.

Ever eager to boost the number of pueblos mágicos we’ve visited, we’re off to Patzcuaro this weekend. Allegedly about 3 hours away and “hidden high in the mountains of Michoacán” if Wikipedia’s to be believed. It’s a bank holiday on Monday… Día de la Constitución or somesuch.. Jana and Victor know a grand place to stay so there’ll be six of us living it up there. Good times…

The weather here’s taken a turn for the nippy. It even rained yesterday. Not part of the plan at all. Anyroad, today the idea today is get some lesson planning done for tomorrow and maybe go to the torture exhibition if it’s still on.

Also I’m enjoying the music of this young lady found via Pat’s blog in Providencia, Guanatos, Jalisco, Mexico.

Have a photo of Las Cabaas in central Gwod. Used to be a hospice, y’know…