Hound Dog
Oct 8, 2010, 8:35 AM
Post #46 of 57
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Re: [Peter] Drinking and Driving At Lakeside
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“In Mexican culture, the less we identify problems, the more we live in peace.” - Mexican Police Chief
Actually, I think the police chief was shining on the foreigners after becoming sick of their obstinate bitching. We have found, in Chiapas, that locals in our community do not depend on statistics from official agencies that are suspect anyway but on the community street scuttlebutt and we presume the same is true at Lakeside. This makes sense after 400 plus years of oppression and corruption and the need for local community groups to fend for themselves rather than call in crooked police forces or municipal authorities.
When we first moved to Lake Chapala in 2001, The Weather Channel had a very active and quite sophisticated weather forecasting feature on Mexico and all of Latin America. The channel was well done and entertaining but The Weather Channel discontinued at least that part of the show broadcast into the Lake Chapala area about a year or so later. It seems there was a total lack of interest on the part of locals in what they could expect in weather developments in the future. It also seems that The Weather Channel took weather prognosticating seriously and had serious minded , often male, anchors delivering the good or bad news. Today, in both Jalisco and Chiapas, when we turn on our local cable news shows, we get the weather reports from Guadalajara or Tuxtla Gutierrez which cover both states respectively and the country as well. The difference is that in both Guadalajara and Tuxtla Gutierrez the weather forecast is at best shallow and perfunctory and normally delivered by drop dead gorgeous broads in mini-skirts, low-cut blouses and stilleto heels standing before the green board with that pointer and shaking that old T&A. The problem seems to be that The Weather Channel did not understand its market. After all, the stoical Mexican might say; why the hell do I need to know what is going to happen when nothing ever (usually) happens in this benign climate anyway and there is nothing I can do about it in the first place. Now, five minutes of T&A is another matter and it really doesn´t matter what she says or points at as long as she realizes "it´s not the meat but the motion" that matters.
I am reminded of when we first moved to the Jovel Valley (San Cristóbal de Las Casas) in 2006 and found ourselves in a cool high mountain valley adjacent to a hot low-altitude plain (Tuxtla Gutierrez). We thought that might be an inviting climate for tornadoes and asked locals if tornadoes ever occurred there. They replied that, yes, there used to be quite serious and destructive tornado activity in the valley but that they had developed a corps of local machete experts who are called upon whenever a tornado is spotted approaching and the machete squad chases the tornadoes and cuts them to pieces with their machetes so we should not fret about such things. Loacls are quite proud of this achievement.
Getting back to Lake Chapala. When we first moved here in 2001, we asked our Mexican contractor what we should do to prevent home break-ins at our place and he replied; "In Mexico, if we want to break into your house, we´ll break into your house no matter what you do." So, we figured the best solution was to take the proper measures to make our home less attractive than those of our neighbors since Mexican burglars, like burglars everywhere, will normally opt for the most inviting targets. Remember that old bear joke where two hunters were hunting in the north woods and suddenly came upon a grizzly? As the grizzly charged toward them, one hunter dropped to his knees and started putting on his running shoes. The other hunter, incredulous, yelled, "Are you crazy, you can´t out run a grizzly!". The other hunter replied, "I don´t have to outrun the grizzly, I just have to outrun you."
(This post was edited by Hound Dog on Oct 8, 2010, 11:57 AM)
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