The John and Jennifer Mexican Tour 2007 continues in fine style taking in local sights, learning exotic vocabulary (”pinche”, “tahona”, “abarrotes”) and honing the use of the pinche subjunctive… I wish pinche telmex would hurry up and double our bandwidth as promised a month ago so I can upload the dozens of pictures without slowing down the interweb to a crawl though…

So in summary (cos it’s getting late, I’m knackered and tomorrow morning there’s a potential breakfast meet up with Ian and family, and the following dates / days might not be quite right…), Sunday was Tlaquepaque for better than average crafts with prices to match followed by a meatfest BBQ on the “lawn”. Monday was rejigging flights and a quick look at Chapultepec’s cows.

Tuesday was Ajijic for crafts and lakeside wandering and breakfast, followed by furniture hunting in Tonalá (a failure, forgot there’s no market on Tuesdays there…) but fun all the same. Evening meal in MaComeNo, highly recommended italian place in Avenida Americas.

And today: mum, dad and me went to Tequila and were v. happy to discover that El Columpio was open for visitors, that’s the olde worlde distillery where they make tequila using centuries-old techniques (so old that they don’t / can’t be bothered to qualify for their product to be labelled Tequila…). A v. friendly bunch there and Cofradia also gave a fine tour through their new museum and cellars. We added another 4 litres to our well stocked bar today…

And while these photos were uploading I read a fine article written by one of my heroes, Simon Pegg, about US/UK humour found via the always interesting Separated by a common language maintained by an American linguist living in England:

Photos will accumulate in my Flickr set here…

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 cabañas 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…

So as I mentioned in me last post, Ana took us to the Temazcal yesterday, not along the road to Chapala as first thought, but between Jocotepec and San Juan Cosala on the “Chapala Riviera”. It was quite a sight. I made the right choice in not going to the saunas there, as, just as I suspected, there were touchy-feely new-agey rituals involved. But everyone looked cleansed as they emerged from the experience. Cleansed and hungry…

It’s got gorgeous views of the (surprisingly full) lake and all manner of aztec follies scattered around the immaculate grounds. Worth a look definitely and there’s a 100 pesos per person special on Wednesdays apparently if you’re up for pushing your body’s temperature controls to their limits and hugging sweaty strangers. Anyroad, all photos from that particular outing hence.
(UPDATE) and here’s Mamá de Chili’s version of events.

This morning I read 2 pages of A4’s worth of description of the Camino Real project for the voiceover on the demo. I really hope they get the funding it’s going to be an amazing project, I get credit somewhere as Zummerzet Voice-Over Bloke and author and translator of the historical essay. Go, as they say, me.