My oldest friend came to visit my newly adopted country over Christmas and the New Year. We met in Merida, in Yucatan, and spent a delightful couple of weeks exploring a corner of the country hitherto undiscovered by me, soaking up sunshine on the Riviera Maya, and getting to grips with arguably the best of…
Tag: Culture
San Juan Chamula
I wasn’t expecting to find a dualist heresy in rural Mexico, much less one governed and guided by narcos, but there it was in Chamula, a small town outside San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas. The town perches on the side of a mountain, roads plunging down steeply, converging finally on the central square….
Stuffed cheese, sinkholes, pink lakes and jam
As I’ve mentioned previously, they take Christmas pretty seriously in Mexico. Our Christmas decorations went up in mid-November, and as I sit here on the 11th January, they remain up. Los Reyes Magos have been and gone, the posadas, rosca de reyes and parade of gifts are all over, but almost everywhere Christmas lingers on….
The town of always Christmas
I’ve been meaning to write something about Dia de los Muertos here for weeks now. The celebrations in Mexico are something truly extraordinary. November 2nd is an official public holiday, and the 1st seems to be an unofficial one. Halloween is celebrated too, but with quite a different focus to how it is in the…
Los colores preciosos de Puebla
We popped out of town for the weekend. Myriam was working on Saturday night in the next city over, and I tagged along for the ride, keeping out of the way, trying to look like I belonged, and accepting a free cocktail in return for a small acting role. There’s a chance I will now…
Speak like a local or look like an idiot or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Spanish
One of the biggest frustrations for me since moving to Mexico has been, unsurprisingly, the language barrier. Not from a practical side, I have to say. Despite not studying Spanish at school, the occasional holiday to Spain, coupled with the similarities it has with my residual french, and the millennial’s weapon of choice in being…
The Garden of Earthly Delights – Leonara Carrington at the Museo de Arte Moderno
I had never heard of Leonora Carrington before moving to Mexico. Not necessarily that surprising – I’m not exactly an art critic, with more of a ‘I knows what I like and I likes what I know’ attitude to art, but it seemed a little odd to discover an artist born in Lancaster for the…
Dogs, fish, and no tacos
Mexico City has been an overdose for the senses, from the very first moment I saw it framed in off-white through the aeroplane window. I peered out, bleary-eyed and fuzzy-headed after a long flight, at the seemingly endless array of lights stretching away almost as far as I could see, until abruptly quenched by the…
