James Bond and the Latin Chick

Auditions have started for the new Bond girl to star alongside Daniel Craig in the next Bond film, and they are looking for a latina chica. The casting director has just looked at Mexico’s talent, so who knows….what’s Spanish for Pussy Galore? I must confess I don’t know much about Mexican actresses, apart from Salma ‘Hollywood’ Hayek and Paola Nunez, a star in one of Mexico’s most popular soap opera.

Santa Muerte, Day of the Dead, Halloween

A big Mexican holiday is approaching - Day of the Dead. Mexicans everywhere have plastered their homes with black and orange paper decorations, special orange flowers (the name of which escapes me at the moment) and are preparing their ofrendas - a table with Day of the Dead ornaments, more flowers and food and drink for their dead relatives to come and feast on. But all is not well. The American version, Halloween, has invaded Mexican culture, which has rather upset the Catholic Church. Even worse, the ’saint’, Santa Muerte has an ever growing following, with many consider to be verging on Satanism. I found a cool photo essay on Time’s website about Santa Muerte, the best of which I have put in a slideshow below. Myself, I will probably be off to a graveyard in Paola’s dad’s hometown on Thursday night, with an evening in the Zocalo on the Friday to take it the sights and sounds of my favourite festival!

 

Pownce

I’ve buily up a ton of invites to this invite only beta app - but only two ‘friends’. And I don’t know either of them! Pownce looks really good - you can send messages, files, links and events - but needs a personal community to get anything out of it. An Opera community? Mexico? Blogger? Who knows…

Anyway, if anyone wants an invite, just add a comment to this post or send a PM, with your email addy, and I’ll oblige.

High Heels Olympics

How is this for slightly bizarre….Mexico City hosted a race for women, 500 of them, over 100 metres. In high heels. There were some casualties…

TEFL Scams

I’ve got another mail for TEFL information, this time through Facebook - I told you it was cool! As ever, it seems only fair to share…

I have seen your name come up a few times while searching TEFL information.
Can you tell me about any reputable companies that offer the TEFL course? I am trying to get info on taking the course abroad but I’m concerned about web scams. Everyone wants a deposit.

Internet TEFL scams, the scourge of the industry! From a few years of reading through TEFL forums and sites, being concerned about web scams isn’t a case of paranoia….there seem to be so many of them out there. How to spot the good ‘uns from the bad ‘uns, that’s the million dollar question. Requests for a deposit isn’t really a sign - legitimate TEFL sites want a deposit too, not just the crooks!

There are steps you can take to make sure that you don’t hand over cash to a fly-by-night outfit intent on fleecing as much money as possible before changing their identity and doing it all over again. Research is key. Dave’s ESL Cafe is one place to go, but beware - even though Dave’s is the biggest TEFL site out there, there are scammers running ads on the site.

Dave Sperling earns a fortune from the advertising on his site, and it is alleged (justifiably so in my opinion) his lust for cash exceeds his ethical principles. He’ll not only take anyone’s cash for an advert, but should anybody say anything negative about an advertiser, their post is removed and they face a ban.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of helpful contributors there. If a company is getting a good write up by a number of posters, then that can only be a good sign. You can always post a request for information and see if anyone sends you a Private Message with the dirt on the dodgy schools. Communicating with teachers about their experiences is by far the best way to go.

There are also a couple of sites dedicated to outing the pirates that might be worth checking out. Tefl Watch and TEFL Blacklist are two that I know of, that are regularly updated.

For Mexico, my own personal recommendation is Teachers Latin America. I know, I always tout them, but I promise I’m not paid a commission! I’ve only taken the one TEFL course, obviously, so they are the only ones I have personal experience with. I should add a disclaimer - I do still keep in touch with the course director, Guy Courchesne (still can’t pronounce the name, sadly!) and go along to occasional Mexico City teacher do’s. But that’s a good sign, I would have thought - how many scammed people keep in touch with someone who robbed them?! I thought the course was good, and value for money.

AirTalkr

For any tech hungry early adopters who happen to stroll by here…I’ve found a new Instant Messenger that looks really promising. There are a multitude of IM clients out there now that link up all your IM accounts into one package. AirTalkr does the same but with something extra - Web 2.0 support. Twitter, Flickr, MySpace Blog RSS and YouTube all get into the client. Along with Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, GTalk and AOL messenger clients.

It is a Beta, so don’t expect perfection if you decide to give it a go. I have noticed a couple of slight annoyances - the icon in the taskbar and menu is blank, and it is resource hungry. Hopefully this will be resolved, and a few things added. I would like to see FaceBook included, and more tabs on the Flickr panel - view photos from my contacts for example. I had a look at Flock’s new beta browser recently, and it has some excellent social netwroking tools. But I don’t want to use Flock - maybe AirTalkr can put all those social netwroking gizmos in my messenger client.

Great Buildings

If you’ve ever looked through my photo album, you’ll have noticed I like architecture! So maybe this post is in keeping with my blog from a visual point of view, if not written. I found this section in the Guardian today, and managed to transfer the flash show to my blog. Enjoy.

Museums and Sundays

An astonishing thing has happened to the Centro Historico of Mexico City! The whole area is usually full of street vendors, selling anything from tourist trinkets to pirate DVD’s in market stalls from underneath a virtual sub-city of red plastic sheeted market stalls. But this weekend - they are all gone. The mayor has decided to be rid of them, once and for all! I suspect once is a more operative word than all though.

So we had quite a pleasant stroll through a much cleaner and quieter Zocalo, and visited a couple of museums along the way. We kind of accidentally stumbled upon the Spanish Cultural museum, before trundling off to an old favourite - the San Ildenfonso.

Blog Action Day

Maybe you’ve heard, maybe you haven’t - today is Blog Action Day, when all bloggers are supposed to post an item about the environment. Oh well, why not….

I have an obvious suggestion, given my recent exploits on the metro system. If you can’t use the two wheels of a bicycle to get to work, try the 64 wheels of a train instead. Especially if you live in Mexico City - the system is thoroughly under utilized. But wherever you live, just for one day perhaps, go to work on your metro/subway/underground/MRT network.

DivShare Slideshows

For a good few months I’ve been using DivShare to host and link to photos and files for my blog. It’s free, with unlimited space and maximum file sizes of 200mb. They service is fantastic - you can upload images, videos, podcasts, documents and then share them on the web in a huge number of ways. Makes Microsoft’s new SkyDrive online storage look feeble and limited by comparison. I really recommend bloggers to give them a look. You can also create Slideshows direct from your dashboard. Here’s just a few of the snaps I took on my recent epic Metro journey!