Men are strange creatures. On the hazy fumes of a drunken evening, they will compete over anything: V8 vs. V6 engines, grill surface area, lawn stripes and, after sufficient cerveza, even personal appendage metrics. But in a brightly lit taquería, when the conversation behind me turned to hammocks, I couldn’t help overhearing. For research purposes, […]
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Once upon a time, long, long ago, the village of Tlaquepaque just outside Guadalajara was where Guadalajara’s upper crust built their summer homes, places where they could escape the congestion of what was then considered to be a very busy city. Today, Tlaquepaque seems like a natural extension of the city of Guadalajara and, although […]
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I bought another watch the other day. I didn’t need it, but there is great joy in negotiating with the watch salesman. A chunky, little man works the villages along the north side of Lake Chapala in the exciting state of Jalisco. His specialty is watches with fancy faces, famous names and very ordinary insides. […]
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Many of us don’t spend enough time really delving into the heart of a Mexican city — the open-air market (mercado). Fresh fish caught that morning, fresh produce, beautiful cloth, sweet bread and wonderful food like chile rellenos on a stick and roasted pork — all are available quite inexpensively at the mercado. Venture into the mercado […]
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Tijuana: A Taste of Mexico Part I: While white sand beaches and lobster by candlelight are part of a typical vacation for many tourists, I’ve never been much interested in the overpriced and frankly elitist form of pastime that this sort of vacation offers. I’m more of a working stiff who likes to wander the […]
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Tijuana: A Taste of Mexico Part III: Recently we have heard and read much of “outsourcing” in economic terms. And it’s true that by the large-scale outsourcing of services and manufacturing, we are incrementally destroying our own economy. But the key is the term “large-scale,” since only the larger losses truly affect a local economy. […]
Continue ReadingMany years ago, before I began traveling around Mexico working with regional chefs and cooking teachers, I was a newly arrived greenhorn, both fascinated and confused by the country’s markets and their contents. One of the first sources of enlightenment for me on this subject was the writing of Vicki Cowal, who produced informative pieces […]
Continue ReadingWhen hosteling my way through Europe in my early-twenties, I made daily visits to the local shops for crucial supplies: baguettes, cheese, fruits, nutella, and wine. In those days, I was willing to stop at a boulangerie for bread before heading to the patisserie for sweets, unruffled by squeezing and thumping my way through vegetable stalls, patient to wait […]
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