The Nokia N86 I’ve been using can also take panorama pictures. Judge for yourself (best in large).
All posts by chivacongelado
“I’m young and want to move abroad, but don’t know how”
During the past few years recent college graduates have been asking me what to do if they want to move abroad. This is not a comprehensive guide, but can give you good ideas if you have that kind of wanderlust.
- Understand it’s not going to be easy. Many others are planning to do the same thing, and there’s no more difficult people than those who work for any country’s immigration authority.
- Decide what you want to do: study or work?
- Check were you want to go, what is the study/labour market like and what are the requirements.
- Contact the embassies of such places to get more information.
- Check what are your options and your budget (if for studies, scholarships are always a good option, if for work or a traineeship, associations like AIESEC can also help)
- Map your strenghts and weaknesses vs. what is required of you.
- Try to understand what are the cultural & language challenges.
- Keep an open mind and an optimistic spirit. Will take you places.
Improving Mexico City public transport
Mexico City has a great subway network, with 175 stations connected over 11 lines. Even if it has 3.8 million of users every day, it has been completely surpassed by the growth of the city, as you can see in this picture from Periférico, the main ring road.
The problem is compounded by two factors: sprawl and quality. The subway only covers the Federal District (and not completely), while the metropolitan area includes also municipalities in the states of Mexico and Hidalgo. Furthermore, most people who can afford a car try to avoid public transport, as it is perceived to be unreliable, dirty and unsafe (as anybody who has used a microbús can attest).
I would like the European model of reliable public transportation for the masses to be available in Mexico, rather than the American automobile-intensive way, but it needs more political will than there currently is.
And the swine flu was gone
After the huge media coverage surrounding the A H1N1 situation in Mexico in April, it was a relief to see how calm everything on that front was when we were there in June & July.
The only signs I saw during our trip that anything like that had happened were info posters like the one above in some stores and the availability of hand disinfectant in many public places. The only people wearing handmasks I saw in my whole trip were Asian tourists arriving to Mexico City airport. Needless to say, neither I nor anybody I know was affected.
Since it’s summer, the situation in Mexico has calmed down, unlike what is happening in the South American winter season. I find it funny that hasn’t made the news as much.
One of my friends was working at the National Institute for Respiratory Diseases in Mexico City in the middle of the crisis. Funnily enough, he says he was not busiest during the outbreak but afterwards, to return the hospital back to normal.
Elecciones locales en México
A summary in English of this topic in this note from AP.
Nos tocó estar en México justo antes de que tuvieran lugar las elecciones para el Congreso de la Unión, presidentes municipales y uno que otro gobernador. Además de la contaminación visual, por lo que pude ver la calidad de las propuestas era francamente patética. Para la galería del horror teníamos varios ejemplos:
- Un partido autodenominado Verde que proponía la pena de muerte (WTF?).
- Un candidato delegacional del PRI cuyo lema de campaña era “Seguridad o Renuncio” (¿para qué votaría por tí, si vas a hacer las maletas inmediatamente?).
- Una ex-deportista sin experiencia, con poca educación pero aún así se postulaba a una delegación del D.F. (Me caes muy bien Ana, pero no es suficiente para que votara por tí).
- Un partido de derecha sin liderazgo, con pocas propuestas creíbles y que no supo movilizar a sus simpatizantes.
Con semejantes alternativas, no me extraña en absoluto que se haya registrado un crecimiento tan fuerte del voto nulo. Como dice el siguiente afiche:
Y sí, trágicamente para muchos fue su mejor opción.
Como todos sabemos, el gran ganador de estas elecciones fue el PRI. Tanto cacarear durante años con sacar al PRI del poder para terminar regresando a lo mismo. Sólo espero no le hayamos terminado de dar en la torre a nuestra naciente democracia.
Bicentennial fever
Most Latin American countries celebrate the bicentennial of their independence struggles within the next 2 years. In Mexico 2010 also marks 100 years of the Revolution, so all sorts of commemorative public works, books, films, summits, works of art, etc. are going on at the moment, reaching their peak next year.
One very annoying development is that politicians have jumped on the bandwagon, renaming all sorts of old avenues as Bicentennial this or Bicentennial that. Rather than doing their usual hullabaloola, they’d rather focus on the kind of country we should be building, but that’s material for another post.
The many faces of Mexico
It’s funny how people always assume that Mexicans are all brown, without taking into consideration the history of the country. Before the Spanish arrival there were already different peoples in what is now the Mexico, and with the conquest also came people from Asia, Africa and the rest of Europe.
Unilke other parts of the world, we have mixed for hundreds of years, so there is not the same kind of racial relations as there is in the United States (in my humble opinion, Mexicans are more classist than racist).
It’s difficult to focus only on skin colour when even members of your own family can look completely different from you.
The “Mexicanisation” of the Mexican middle class
I’ve mentioned it before (1,2) how the middle class in Mexico seems to to have been slowly growing and to start becoming more “brown”. While I don’t know if this trend is still continuing given the current drastic contraction of the Mexican economy, I did find some anecdotical evidence of this trend while observing the local tourists around me in my recent trip to Mexico, both those coming from recent holidays in Europe and those spending their holidays in the country.
If true, that is definitely one welcome development.
Forest accommodation
My Finnish mates made fun of me because I went to a hotel in the woods next to a lake 100 km west of Mexico City when the Finnish summer cottage cultural institution offers something similar closer to home.
The hotel is called Rodavento and is located in Valle de Bravo, Estado de México, and is part of a chain of adventure hotels. We did mountain biking and zip-lines, besides being surrounded by the lush nature.
It was both exciting and relaxing. A great getaway, I’m definitely planning to return later.
Lucha Libre again!
We visited the Arena México again this time, and had a lot of fun. One of the main attractions currently is a wrestler called Máximo, whose character acts as if he were very over-the-top gay, for example trying to kiss the other wrestlers instead of hitting them. In such a homophobic and macho country as Mexico I would have assumed it to be polarising, but he seemed to be a favourite with the public.
It is not hard to see why as he was frankly hilarious. You can judge yourself below: