Just a Photo

Here’s a completely random picture I took a few weeks ago.
 
 
 
San Francisco, CA

The Commute Home

Mexico City has an unfortunate and well-deserved reputation for automobile traffic.  My normal commute home is a well-planned route designed to avoid the worst of the traffic; I take a bus from ITAM, which braves city streets and the freeway (and traffic) for about a mile to metro Barranca del Muerto, from which I take [...]

Fried Bread Breakfast

Every morning on my way to ITAM I pass a set of food stalls in front of the entrance to the Barranca del Muerto metro station.  A common item at many of these stands are tamales — not just the normal steamed variety, but fried in a bowl of hot, smoking grease.  These tamales, which [...]

Wake Turbulence Epilogue

In the news today, Communication and Transportation Secretary Luis Téllez again discussed possible discrepancies with the certification of the pilot of the doomed flight two weeks ago in Mexico city.  (The first instance is mentioned in this past post on the cockpit voice tapes.)
To this point, I’ve tried to refrain from giving my own personal opinion [...]

Inflación

Although the world-wide economic woes are dampening much of the holiday (and consumer) spirit back home, they’ve put me in a strange place….  For the farther the Dow Jones drops, the better the dollar-to-peso exchange rate (Yahoo! finance) becomes.  A rate that started at 10 pesos : 1 dollar, rose to 12.5, and is now [...]

Save me Jeebus?

On a recent morning, not too long ago, I came across a church processional.  At the front of the parade, were two men lighting off fireworks every minute or so.  The fireworks were small rockets attached to the end of a short stick; they’d light the fuse, and hold the stick up with their hands, [...]

In Pictures: Escandón Street Scenes

The neighborhood in Mexico City in which I live is called Colonia Escandón.  Escandón is just south of La Condesa, one of the more touristy and affluent districts of the city, and just west of Avenida de los Insurgentes Sur, reportedly the longest avenue in the world.  Escandón is a mix of both blue and [...]

Part Time Job

For the last week, one of the (many) pharmacies by my house has been advertising.  A man, presumably, dressed inside a cartoonish pharmacist costume, has stood out in front.  Two large speakers are built into the back of the costume and the guy stands there, bobbing up and down, to a rhythmic and repetitive “doot [...]

Turbulence & a Learjet

Earlier today, the Secretary of Communication and Transportation Luis Téllez held a press conference to discuss the analysis of the cockpit voice recorder from the first of the black boxes. 
The results of the analysis seem to indicate that turbulence, likely caused by the preceding Boeing 767, was the cause of the accident.  In particular, the [...]

The Mexican Government Reacts to the Crash

The black boxes from the Learjet arrived back in Mexico this morning.  El Universal reports that Communication and Transportation Secretary Luis Téllez will examine the contents sometime tomorrow (Friday), so I assume that we’ll have an announcement shortly thereafter.  In the mean time, I wanted to continue my running commentary on the reaction to the [...]