Similar Posts
Pollinators
(should be a moving gif)
Mexican Juegos
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…
‘Pat does Chapala’- her words…
This is my fave pic from today:
with this one a close second: 
Click the cowboys pic for a look at all the new photos from Zapopan, Chapala, Ajijic and Jocotepec. V. nice day it was, i had my favourite fish (and favourite Spanish word) for lunch, huachinango (red snapper), sita looked on in disgust as Pat and I worked our way through whitebait type fried fishy things and we took in the view of the lake. Great weekend all round. La Matera tomorrow evening for a pre-bday bash and Tuesday for continued festivities.
We came “this” close to moving house today
Just to another part of the city (near Plaza Bonita) but after a hastily put together excel spreadsheet of cost-benefit analysis decided against it… taking into account cancelling/recontracting services, removal vans, deposits, and the all important 4 extra flights of stairs it would have resulted in a grand saving of 30 bucks a month. Also there was no area for a BBQ, it would have been nice to have a bath though. Especially with waterjets. Oh the luxury. I would have needed to figure out how to waterproof the laptop though.
Anyway, deciding not to move, this month at least, is a HUGE weight off my mind. I’ve only got one more week in the big city before the US, UK jaunt kicks in which pretty much puts me out of action for a few weeks and after all the fun with plumbers, cleaners and fridge repairers in the last week I’ve learnt not to go making plans that involve short periods of time and heavy reliance on the Mexican service industry.
Today I’m working on some translation and shall also be hitting the travel agents trying to find hotels for Mum and Dad’s visit in Feb. We’ll all be flying into Cancun and from there on in it’s unbounded adventure.
Also working on Amour Fou’s website. I’ll not link to it cos I don’t want it indexed by search engines yet. But if you fancy a look (there’s only 20 dvds in the catalog for now, (Allen – Almodovar) it’s presently at agaveweb.com/amourfou with the blog at agaveweb.com/amourfoublog . I think the design stage is almost over, but the uploading of 500 odd dvd descriptions has barely begun…
Tonight, fiesta round Meghan’s. Tomorrow was going to be josé’s house warming but the Mexican Electricity Board had other ideas, so that’s off, Sunday… Bulls? Hope so because it’s been a while since I went out with me camara. Apologies in advance to vegan/vegetarian readers. And Morrissey…
Spanish Word/Phrase of the week:
“Me sale mas caro el caldo que las albondigas” roughly: The sauce is costing me more than the meatballs.
To use when you’re being shafted by service charges and such like. Eg when you’re sending a 5 peso keyring to California and the postage costs you 70 bucks.