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…

I promise to post something Mexico related one of these days… in the meantime: Top 40 Demotivational Posters

Righty, we’re off round Mario‘s

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.

… and found this comparison of 1963 and 1991 editions very interesting. They never bothered to make one with Anglicisms mind, with Postman instead of Mail Man etc.

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…

Here’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…

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.

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.

I’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.