• Scrambled Eggs and the Beatles

    Last night we went out to a place called El Palacio de las Vacas, or something similar, and while it rained buckets and we discovered they don´t serve alcohol and they played the Beatles in the background. I´d already drank my own weight in coffee before going out and had another cafe de olla while we were there and was spouting off half remembered Beatles anecdotes. One, how Paul McCartney dreamt the tune to Yesterday and then woke up and thinking he must have heard it somewhere else. Anyway, i googled a bit more today and it turns out (according to the internet…) that the words he heard in his dream were:

    Scrambled Eggs,
    Oh my baby, how I love your legs.

    Which is a much better lyric, if you ask me, and something I will always hear in my head when that song is playing. Then I can´t remember if I read this in Q or something, but someone was asked why they preferred Lennon to McCartney and their answer: When John wrote a song about his childhood he wrote Strawberry Fields Forever. Paul wrote Penny Lane.

    Exactly. George was my favourite mind.

  • Post for the sake of posting

    Just an update on stuff… Friday: Drinks and mates round our house… Saturday: A successful Flickr Photo tour round the Parque agua azul and tianguis cultural, followed by La Fuente, a dodgy torta ahogada, then a fine meal round V & J’s, Sunday: The morally dubious world of Toros!, well baby toros not weighing more than 500kg, which involved seeing a kid almost get killed, another one knocked unconscious with a broken nose, and 6 feisty animals ritually slaughtered, fun for all the family and a great photojournalistic opportunity… Monday: Photojournalism Seminario and translation and web designery, Tuesday, ditto with La Fuente tacked on to the end and today the State Archives to dig up information on Lucha Reyes who is going to figure largely in Sita’s next chapter. It’s an interesting building, the library place, what with murals and stuff and everything… Nice to use a microfiche thing again, it’s been years…

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    IMGP2867Here’s a money saving tip to make this post vaguely worth reading… Bring your own latex gloves if you plan to handle ancient newspapers and you’ll save yourself 5 pesos. Probably.

    Basically between chamba and sightseeing not much time for posting in this blog. Generally no news in these pages is good news, worry if I’m posting 3 times a day…

  • Ouch

    This guy survived with a broken nose, but the toreador before him broke several ribs.
    Changes are afoot at this blog, just need to get on the CSS… Try voting for this picture if you can find the 5 stars below the ads in your browser.

  • Toros

    Self explanatory really… from Guadalajara’s Nuevo Progreso Plaza de Toros yesterday.

  • El Condor Pasa

    If indeed it is a condor. This photo’s here because I liked it being a shot from above or the same height as this bird. It’s taken from the top of La Quemada, ruins in Zacatecas.

  • South side of Lake Chapala

    The largest lake in Mexico’s at record levels right now. In the good way. A good a reason as any to go fishing.

  • Glass blowing and icon fiddling

    If only to stem the tide of “What have you been up to since seeing them charros on Sunday” questions that have been filling up my inbox, here´s a summary.

    Photojournalism classes: 2 per week, 4 hours each in the Hospicio Cabañas in the centre of town. Intriguing stuff, if a little long. I´m remembering why I gave up academia in the first place. I can´t deal with people talking in dark rooms for hours on end. But it has its highlights and the bloke doing the seminars has a lot to teach, definitely glad I signed up…

    Yesterday, some fine tuning of the tequila pictures for G.Tulum tequila and a visit to the place where they´re making the bottles.

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    They’d actually already finished making the bottles for my client, but they were busy making bull and machine gun shaped bottles for someone else.

    lentetapatio5.2I’ve also been doing bits and bobs for www.sit2007.org and today and last night I had a go at designing a logo for the Flickr’s Vivir Guadalajara splinter group the recently christened El Lente Tapatío… Here’s the latest iteration, judgement tomorrow…

    This morning I read Sita’s latest chapter and it’s excellent as usual, all about the neo liberal politics of tequila protection. And it’s actually hard to put down. Right now Sita’s watching Ay, Jalisco, no te rajes as part of her research and is gasping at every plot twist and loving it. I think I’ll join her. A bientot, mes amis.

  • Charro’s Lasso

    Had another fine afternoon watching the charros do their stuff yesterday. Interestingly the lassos they use aren’t that flexible, they have to be quite stiff to keep their shape as they’re flung around the air. The way they are coiled up before use is also of paramount importance for a successful lassoing… More Tapatian charreria pix coming soon to these pages.

  • Charros!

    I promised to take Sita to the charreria before we left the city, but in the end she couldn’t make it and I went on me own with my trusty camera and zoom lense. I’ve nothing more to add really to my last post about it when I went with Anne and Stu. I took 297 photos in 2 hours and then cherry picked the best 50 which are now over at Flickr… Best entertainment 1 pound 30p can buy you, I reckon.

    This photo’s from one of the first events, where the charro has to gallop at full speed then do an emergency stop when the instructor taps his notebook on the dashboard within a chalked area. Then they measure the stopping distance. The shortest wins the charro a round of applause.

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    I start my photojournalism course today. I’m going to be networking to try and get some kind of press credential too… I might resend that email to the Gazette to another desk there as the sports people are too busy attending skittles and Great Mills League football matches to reply.

    Julia y ofelia

    Had a nice soirée round Javier’s yesterday too, he lives in one of my favourite areas of Gwod (well, Zapopan technically) called Seattle and met a couple of new peeps. One of whom might want a website for their ecotourism business.

  • I miss decent adverts…

    Mixup of the original.

    In other news, I just opened the door to Sita’s office and was attacked by something that looked for all the world like some kind of crazed diurnal bat. I armed myself with my camera and went to investigate upstairs where it had fled…

    Just a moth. A huge bloody great moth. Brooding on the window with murder on its mind. With big mothy mandibles. It’s still there… I’m sleeping downstairs tonight.

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    more here…

  • Chapalando

    So Sita took the Schipperke back to the states yesterday. There’s a tongue twister in there somewhere… Everything went perfectly smoothly apparently. Sita’s back tomorrow afternoon. It’s strange being able to pick up keys and put shoes on without a 25 pound black dog leaping out of the shadows and expecting a walk.

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    Yesterday I though I’d take advantage of having the car and being dogless and headed of to explore the banks of lake Chapala. Jocotepec was first on the list, which was having a little market so I stopped for tacos and bought some new headphones and wandered round the centre. Nice place. But I couldn’t live there. Pueblo chico, infierno grande… Same goes for San Luis Soyatlan, even though it has beautiful views of the lake and smells of roasting corn on the cob. I stopped several times for agave fields and views of fishermen in boats on the way to Sahuayo, Michoacan and had an amble around the centre there. It had a huge fruit and veg market but they weren’t used to tourists with cameras so I didn’t take that many pics. I’d only heard of Sahuayo thanks to Flor de Sahuayo tacos, and according to Fernando it’s also famous for zombies but I forget why. Anyroad, it’s a really pretty town. It still had its decorations up from el Dia de Independencia and had loads of little shops and hardly any chain stores which is admirable. Photos abound over at Flickr.

    I’m listening to the new Rilo Kiley album as I work today and it’s a big disappointment. A real shame, because their last album, More Adventurous was fantastic. Its a Hit, and Portions for Foxes being my favourites, slices of country tinged indie pop… Maybe it’ll grow on me.

    No word from the Taunton Gazette peeps yet…