Wildcoast

My crazy Metro Marathon paid off! Sort of…if an invite to a film is your idea of a result. Sounds cool to me though. December 4th, Cinemex, here I come!

Tourist Visa News

Mexico is a pretty popular place for backpackers. It’s a pretty big place too. You could easily go over the standard 90 day visa time allowance. And oh the bureaucracy to get it extended! Actually, it isn’t that hard, but still. I did once…had to photocopy every single page of my passport, fill out a form or two and pay a few pesos. I did it at the airport, but it can be done at immigration centres around the country.

Still…backpackers, fear not! The immigration service has changed it’s rules, and everyone entering Mexico now gets 180 days automatically! It was possible to persuade them to give you the maximum of 180 days before, but it depended on the person checking you into the country. I asked twice, and got just 90 days. Twice. Mean swines!

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Butterflies are back

One day I really must make the effort to go and see the migration of the Monarch butterflies. It’s one of the natural wonders of the world. It’s also a hell of a long drive to get to their refuge. It is nice to see that their habitat is going to get some increased protection and funds to help manage it though.

President Felipe Calderon unveiled a sweeping plan Sunday to curb logging and protect millions of monarch butterflies that migrate to the mountains of central Mexico each winter, covering trees and bushes and attracting visitors from around the world. Each September, the butterflies begin their 3,400-mile journey from the forests of eastern Canada and parts of the United States to the central Mexican mountains. The voyage is considered an aesthetic and scientific wonder. The butterflies return to the U.S. and Canada in late March, where they breed and cycle through up to five generations before heading back south. Scientists say they are genetically programmed to return to Mexico, where they settle into the same mountains their ancestors inhabited the year before. According to Brower, sometimes they even return to the exact same trees - probably because previous monarchs have marked the area through a mechanism scientists don’t yet understand. The monarchs that spend the winter in Mexico do not reproduce until they return to the U.S. and have a much longer life span than those born in the spring and summer.

Source: Miami Herald

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Radio Mexico

I stopped uploading music to my blog ages ago - too mush time and effort, and a lack of new material; the latter chiefly because my CD drive no longer works. But I’ve come up with a cunning plan! I use Last.fm as my internet radio station of choice, and seeing as it has a good community section with friends and neighbourhoods, I can post an embedded player from someone’s profile each fortnight. Here’s the first…

Life in the City

I bought my little Fuji V10 earlier this year so that I would always have a camera to carry around with me. My Nikon 8700 is a bit big to haul around 24/7 on the off chance that I might see something snap worthy. I had kept passing ideal photo opportunities with nothing to capture the moment. No I have my camera, nothing exciting ever happens. Sod’s law. Still, on Saturday I managed to stumble acroos a couple of ‘incidents’….

See what happens when you let a woman drive?!?!

Okay, maybe male truck drivers aren’t much better. With low bridges anyway.

Mexico Street Art

This city is, sad to say, plagued with graffiti. It’s everywhere - on houses, shops, walls, buses. Anywhere with room enough to take a few letters of spray paint. The vast majority of it is ugly, and some is apparantly pretty sinister. Word has it that criminals use to graffiti to mark homes that are empty as a possible target for robbery. Or just to let others know not to bother - they’ve just robbed it themselves. But now and again I come across something artistsic. The photo below is of a building just 2 minutes round the corner. I imagine they probably got permission to do it, as it’s not something that could be done quickly. Whatever, it’s pretty cool.

Snowman Surprise

I came across this on a blog today. Yes, it is a bit rude. But too artistic for me to not upload it! And besides…tis the season to be jolly!

Blog Watch

I write blogs…you may have noticed I can churn out pretty vast quantities of pretty useless info, and all in a pretty short space in time. But I do also read blogs, and am occasionally inspired to repeat, rehash or otherwise twist something I’ve looked over. It’s pretty easy to keep track of hundreds of blogs…have you discovered RSS yet? There’s a million RSS readers out there, but the one built into Opera is my own reader of choice. I was reading P.M.P.I. today, which is an Opera based blog, and found a kindly reference to myself. Which inspired this post, to promote a few of the blogs I always read. Ed seems a bit down at the moment about his reader stats, so go visit his page!

There are, I think, some basic rules to a successful blog, all of which I break regularly. These rules apply to blogs I read anyway. Every post needs an eye catching title. If it provokes a bit of interest, I will read more to find out more. It needs to be short! By the time I’ve established what the post is about, I need to be at least a third of the way through it. I have a short attention span!

Other than PMPI I also check out Coxy’s Blog, This Guy Is Teaching Abroad and Mashable. Amongst many others. The first posts a lot of music and photography related stuff - I found out about Last.fm there. The second belongs to a Canadian who is also living and working in Mexico, just like me. Only, he’s been here a few years longer. And the third is tech and web. Possibly my favourite blog though is Deputy Dog. Regularly updated, it is purely a photo blog, also with something wacky. Definitely worth checking out.

Deputy Dog, the Photo Blog.

No fumar? Ay caramba!

I’ve been sitting very smug for the last 6 months, lighting up cigarettes in bars, restaurants and elsewhere when my poor compatriots back in the UK have foud their favourite past time outlawed in all public places. And I did laugh the other day when I read something about Mexico winning an international award for it’s efforts in reducing smoking - tobacco advertising is still rampant here, and half of all adults puff regularly. I suppose you can’t buy cigs in pharmacies anymore though…

But today, horror of all horrors, something far more sinister has caught my eye…

A Mexican congressional committee approved on Wednesday a ban on smoking in public places, a first step toward prohibiting the lighting up of cigarettes and cigars in a country of heavy smokers.

Jose Antonio Munoz Serrano, the secretary of the health committee, said its members will meet again on Thursday to make minor tweaks to the nonsmoking bill which will then go to the full house for approval. It was not immediately clear what type of public places would be included in the ban.

Mexican bars, cantinas and restaurants allow smoking in designated areas. But the smoking rules are often disregarded. Smoking is prohibited in public offices, but government officials often ignore the law. Only recently have private office buildings started to ban smoking.

Source.

Still, there are a lot of laws in Mexico, and most of them are upheld on what seems to be a voluntary basis!

Sack Steve McLaren

There is a silver lining to every cloud. England are out of Euro 2008 - surely Steve McLaren must go. Whether he resigns or is sacked, I don’t care, but he has to go. Strategy? He couldn’t spell it. Consistency? Maybe his digestive system. Team selection? Gee, what names will he pull out of the hat this week….

Foreign players in the Premier League aren’t to blame for England’s demise. Nor is the length of the Premier League season. There are three problems I can quickly identify. Alex Ferguson is number one. He started the trend of pulling his players from internationals, and he is personally the principle reason that the England team so rarely play together. The second reason lies with cash. There are plenty of quality players that qualify for selection. But with just a handful of teams with all the cash too many end up at just half a dozen clubs playing reserve football.

But the buck stops at reason number three - Steve McLaren. Tactically naive, mediocre at even domestic level and lacking the balls to take on anyone who interferes with what should be his sole target - winning a trophy for England. As for his ability to drive a bit of passion into his team….a wet fish could have gotten more passion from the Euro 2008 qualifying campaign.

He shouldn’t have been employed in the first place. The only nice thing I can say about him? My post from months ago pleading for his dismissal ranks number 1 on Google for the search query “Sack McLaren”.

So who to replace him with? There are three stand out candidates, and the FA should plug out all the stops to land one of them. Martin O’Neill, Jose Mourinho and Arsene Wenger all have three things in common. They know the English game. They are proven winners. They don’t take crap.