San Blas, Día de la Revolunción
For a short 3-day trip, we rented a car for our first Mexican driving experience and drove northwest to the coast of Nayarit. We stayed in San Blas, a small town on the beach that was devistated by a hurricane a few years ago. We and about 10 other people shared a 3 mile section of beach with soft sand, and perfect bodysurfing waves.
Also during our trip was the national Revolution Day celebration on November 20th, when the town hosts a huge parade with school groups in costumes, the Mexican Navy. and a group of guys dancing to “Macho Man” and wearing hard hats…hmmmm.
Took an evening trip to a small town called Sauta, where in 2006 I worked on an immigration story for a week. Unfortunately, we only stopped there for the evening rodeo, and the workers who spend 9 months a year in Virginia, hadn’t returned home to their families yet, so I didn’t see anyone I knew.
On the way home, we stopped in Platanitas, a wonderful very very little town and had THE most delicious meal of fish on the grill (see last photo.)
Our great friends Pete and Angie are here from Roanoke this week, and we are so excited to have our first visitors.
Santa Maria del Oro Birthday Trip
For my 35th birthday, we were taken on a great day trip to a lake at Santa Maria del Oro, with Annie, Jose, Panzon and Elena. Stopped off in the town of Tequila to, well, buy some, and taste the heart of the agave plant, from which the famous liquor made. The lake made for a wonderful place to swim and relax. Thanks to the Annie-Jose family for a great day.
Mini Multimedia Workshop
Fabiola Ruvalcaba from Josh Meltzer on Vimeo.
My friend, Miguel Martinez, a photographer at the Spanish language paper Mundo Hispánico in Atlanta, Georgia, was here for a week visiting family in his native Guadalajara, and he asked me if we could have a little mini multimedia workshop while he was here. He’s pushing the envelope at his paper to include some multimedia on their website and was hungry to learn more.
So, while here we worked for two very long days and evenings on a short story about Fabiola Ruvalcaba, a partially blind Judo star, who won the silver medal at the 2008 Paraolympic Games in Beijing this past summer. We shot a short interview and photographed her at the gym and at home to quickly put together this video story.
It was a great experience for both Miguel, who returned I think feeling very encouraged to try more multimedia at his paper, and for me, getting another opportunity to edit and work in Spanish more. We basically ran out of time to edit the video shorter, which it needs to be, but it was an experiment and a great start for Miguel.
Critical Mass, Guadalajara
I know that two wrongs don’t make a right, but after living here for three months, and using our bicycles to get around most of the time, we were seeking some sweet revenge on the buses, cars and even pedestrians. Every first Thursday of the month, over 3000 cyclists gather at Parque Revoluncion to ride about an hour on some of Guadalajara’s busiest and largest roads, blocking traffic, frustrating buses and cars and making a lot of noise. Perhaps the best was going through the tunnels that bypass certain neighborhoods and getting passed in the tunnel by a double-decker bike ridden by a guy in a gorilla suit. Ah Mexico.
Dia de los Muertos – Day of the Dead
We traveled to Patzcuaro in the heart of the state of Michoacan for a long weekend of camping with our good friends Naomi and Jose, Fulbrighters from Queretaro, and Annie, Super, Panzon and baby Elena. Thanks to a gracious invitation from Octavio, a Spanish tutor of Missy’s we had the luck to camp in Quercus, a wonderful little community outside of Patzcuaro, where we were treated to cool evenings, a wonderful campfire, and the lovely sounds of three collies howling through the night, roosters starting at 4 a.m. and a party up on a hill.
On the Day of the Dead, we traveled by boat to the small island Janitzio, on Lake Patzcuaro, where tens of thousands of people came to eat, drink and visit the communities on the island. Simply amazing amounts of delicious food and drink on the streets, as we climbed up a very steet set of steps to the top. We headed in for the night a bit before the huge crowds began to gather on the island.
The next day we saw Annie and Super and family off from the small community of Tzintzuntzan, a P’urépecha town which has the most beautifully decorated cemeteries. I shot very few photos because I felt that flying in and out of cemeteries and shooting on the fly was disrespectful for the families who had spent the entire night by the graves of their family members.
We tried to visit the archeological sites at Tzintzuntzan, but were greeted by a sign at the door that said it was free entry on Sundays, but only for Mexicans…so not wanting to take part in their racist rule of the day, (can you imagine such a sign in the U.S. “free only to Americans today”) we didn’t pay their entry fee.
Yes We Did!
President-Elect Obama….finally!