Second Annual Resort Homes Conference
If you are interested in Mexico’s dynamic second homes market and want to combine business and pleasure, then save the date and make plans to attend the MINT Second Homes Conference and Expo on April 19-20, 2007 in Cancun, Mexico, which will be officially opened by Lic. Rodolfo Elizando Torres, Mexico’s Secretary of Tourism. TradEx,...
Babel: The Children are not Alright
With Babel, Alejandro González Iñárritu has created a multi-layered, cinematic collage that takes us around the world where adults have problems, true. But the poignancy of the film lies in the fact that no matter where, privileged or poor, children are subjected to harsh absurdities lurking like a sub-terra contagion. González Iñárritu, the current master at...
Spanish Idiomatic Expressions
Idiom: a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words; a commonly used phrase that means more than it says. The man in my life had run the León Marathon in Guanajuato a day earlier, and I was searching the sports section of a local...
Music to Build a School
During Zihuatanejo’s languid, steamy, summer months, after the tourists and snowbirds have flown north, Zihua’s musicians finally have time to take a deep breath and relax. That doesn’t mean that they stop playing however. The hottest live-music venue in town simply shifts to Ed Litchfield’s house in El Hujal. Several Saturdays each month, with a...
Tails of the City
“You become responsible forever for what you have tamed.”-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “The Little Prince” Ninety thousand. All of us blink incredulously at the implications of this mind-boggling number, but this is what we came up with in our relatively conservative calculations. One hundred female cats could theoretically produce 90,000 offspring in only three years. 90,000...
Fruit from the Garden
Fruit is a reminder of the garden of Eden, when everything nice to eat was there for the taking and all meals were alfresco picnics. When a plant fruits, it broadcasts chemical signals, wantonly crying out to be eaten. This is a reproductive goal, ensuring that the plant’s seed is spread. Sexy stuff. And even...
A Wearable Tribute to Mexico’s Cultural Diversity
Huipiles, Mexico’s festive native blouses, look good on anyone, from indigenous women to gringas. They come in colors and patterns to suit all personalities and body types, but all share a basic boxy shape. Mexican artisans elevate this simplest of garments to an art form by decorating them with embroidery, ribbons, lace, beadwork, inlay and...
Magic Carpets, Oaxaca’s Master Weaver Preserves a Zapotec Tradition
When you enter The-Bug-in-the-Rug store in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, you are greeted by the master weaver himself, Isaac Vasquez, a friendly, soft-spoken man with salt and pepper hair. He invites you into his workshop, housed in the sunny courtyard of his family compound. Your eyes are immediately drawn to the carpets on the adobe...
The Palms of Paradise
They are the standard of vacation, the flags of beachy climes. Their shape makes them one of the most easily identified plants in the world. Palms belong to the Arecacea (Palmae) family, order Arecales. There are more than two thousand species, most of which are native to tropical and subtropical climates. The widely recognized growth...
The Incredible Trajectory of Benito Juarez
Scour the annals of Mexican history, from Independence through the present day, and you will find no man more admired than Benito Juarez. The 19th-century president is almost universally beloved by his forebears, with only those unaware of him withholding their veneration. A full-blooded Indian from humble origins, Juarez dedicated his career to modernizing Mexico,...
Long Legs on the Beach
Ok, so I may have conned you into reading this with that title…but this is just another article about birding in Zihuatanejo. Most of those long legs belong to a group of egrets and herons, easily found in the canal at Playa Madera, which empties onto the beach, so I’m not too far off. I...