Expatriate Pastimes

It is always good to get away from Mazatlán for a few months so one can laughingly look back down into the petri dish and gain a fresh perspective on the expatriate population living there and how they pass their time. In my experience of being a professional expatriate and expatriot all my life I know that expatriates have a natural missionary zeal (ie. the conversion of much of Africa, China and Latin America into the Christian and other dodgy faiths) and like to partake in social get togethers sharing their hard earned knowledge over tea and moonshine and try to get you into all manner of secret societies and crazy cults. 

Mazatlán is full of expats from every country north of the border and one or two from elsewhere and here's some of them........

The MazReal photographer took this fantastic photograph of some the wonderful expats living in Mazatlán. They laughingly agreed to get together in this group pic on the beautiful Olas Altas beach

The overspill from the beach spilled out into the Plaza Machado where we captured them again having a wonderful time standing around cheering something probably the fact that the new clock erected at the Plaza is now showing the correct time at least once in every 12 hours.

Here are some examples of what they get up to in their spare time and a small example of the societies and clubs they belong to in this fine city of eternal noise, dust and dried prawn smells:

More expat shenanigans after the jump............

CRAPPAS

Here we see that feisty Canadian expat Constance Sweat originally from somewhere in Idaho Hawaii posing. Her whippin' boy husband can be seen in a dark corner shaking with fear and recovering from a sound thrashing after he wanted to approach her favourite fridge and get himself a cool beer and a sausage. 

Constance is the Chair of the Cool Refrigerator and Pots and Pans Appreciation Society. The society and its shadowy members known as the CRAPPAS cult are gaining notoriety for their nefarious fridge-type nocturnal activities where they get together and share fridge related stories and discuss how best to keep food cool on those spaceships that will coming to take them off to the galaxy K41H where they may continue their fridge and pan worship far away from the prejudices encountered from the local Catholic faith and their weird Mary and Jesus worship activities.

UFKIDSOC

We all know that Mazatlán's US expats are all ex-hippies from communes in 60s Southern California whose own children were allowed to run riot and terrorise the neighbourhood in peace and love activities, their grandchildren are subsequently allowed to do the same and get together and form their own villainous criminal societies that would make the Sinaloa Cartel blush. 

Our photographer was allowed access to one such meeting of the Under Fifteen Kidnapping Society or the UFKIDSOC while they are discussing ransom demands, drop-off points and who to send out to get ice-cream and pop while a terrified victim who has had her ears sliced off sits trembling in the background. This group of notorious young tearaways have managed to operate under the radar of the local law enforcement agencies only because this band of hardline kiddies has amassed a fortune in this popular Mexican business of kidnapping and they singularly keep the underfunded Mazatlán police force funded with the usual under-the-table funds that allows them to keep themselves and their yachts on the French Riviera operating.

So when you see those youthful tourist police cruising around on their new bicycles wearing crisp Polo shirts and packing shiny new weapons, give a thought that it is these kiddy kidnappers who keep them smiling and paid in tortillas and willing to sacrifice their lives for you.

Trevor Trickle ex-sheep shag shearer from Kangaroo Butt Stroilia currently residing in an Ice Box up Ice Box Hill. Mr Trickle is a mobile Kissagram, rent-boy, gigalow, bum-boy, pot-wash, dog house painter and gazillionaire who made his fortune when he woke up in the bed of the CEO of Goldman Sachs and threatened to take the pictures to Foxy News. 

He drives slowly along the Malecón dressed in WWII garb shouting "I'M HERE LADEEZ. COME AND GET IT" tossing 500 peso bills into the slipstream. These smiling mannequins from the Moda Tela fabric store near the market have been added to  the picture to add credibility to this useless Strylian who has since been hounded out town and now by all accounts he back shearing and shagging sheep down the yellow brick road on an outback down-under ranch near Dingamalloo in Yamma Yamma county in that fine imaginary country of OzStrallia.

LADCOCK

This strange and elusive society of the Ladies Cooking Society or LADCOCK meet up once a week and sometimes are found naked in pies. No one has ever found out what they get up to under the pie crust but the smiling faces and vicious expat flying rumours suggest it has something to do with hallucinogenic drug testing for the US government. 

Like the US corporate AgriChem farms that are taking over the empty wide open Mexican spaces where they have carte blanche to conduct hazardous chemical trials on maize and grapes and sugar cane and peasants. Trials that would be banned in most other countries. Here in Mazatlán there is a bevy of willing female expats who want to learn to cook nice food and have signed up to cooking classes where they get together and eat the resulting wonderful organic food and vegetable recipes. According to undercover journalists Woodward and Bernstein, these cooking classes masquerading under cover of the Mazatlán Saturday Organic Market Co. are in fact hallucinogenic drug trials conducted by elusive US Pharma drug companies who impregnate the so called organic produce with mind-bending chemicals. The results are used for research by the US government in how to take over foreign countries without spilling blood.

These women meet at coffee mornings after unknowingly imbibing copious amounts of class A drugs and have a good time chatting and listening to Terry Riley in C, Janice Joplin, Velvet Underground, Psychedelic Prunes, Laurie Anderson and other beatnik music. Sometimes they meet, as above, naked in a pie and other times fully clothed on the kiddies roundabout and swings in Bosque de la Ciudad and sometimes on the planet Zog-I-Antaeris in the constellation of the Great Bearded Chimpanzee.

CAMEMBERT

Men are also known to join clubs and indoctorinate the local populace. Here is a snap of the Canadian Men's Beard Group or CAMEMBERT. (Sometimes they are mistaken for the Mazatlán Expat French Cheese Appreciation Society or MEFCHAPS). There is also another hairy group of expats, the US  Ponytail Growing Group of Men or PONGOM who sit around in vests, short pants and drink beer discussing dry wall but they are rarely seen on the street as a group as they are generally targeted and bombed by the terrorist group The Shining Pate (Calvas Luminosa) or shot by the Mexican Fashion Police.

In the facial hair department most Mexican men just go with the Zapata moustache but this active evangelist group of hirsute expats from the cold northern climes meet and try to encourage the growth of full beards. They sit around drinking tea discussing the pros and cons of the rise of Socialism and its variants by the fact that Karl Marx grew a bushy beard and Lenin had a trim pointy beard while the Tzar of Russia's beard was trimmed to a fine degree by unpaid peasants. The general lack of facial growth on the visages of US politicians and Tea Party women also causes a healthy and lively debate where automatic weapons have sometimes been used to calm things down. To the right is the only women member of CAMEMBERT. She is just there to make tea and bake cakes as bearded men are thought incapable of even boiling water never mind washing their own underpants.

WOPS

The Womens' Pipe Smoking Group affectionately known as the WOPS or Borkam Riffs because of the sweet smells that trail behind them. They meet every early morning of the week and stroll along Olas Altas smoking and discussing shag tobacco. This wonderfully relaxed group sometime mix a blend of prime Moroccan hashish with their fine Borkum Riff fine cut shag from the Netherlands. There is a waiting list to join these women of the below the knee dress wearing persuasion who want to become involved in this sedate pursuit of strolling and chatting and puffing away on their smooth Calabash Meerschaum pipes like steam locomotives struggling up a hill. The youthful countenances of this group suggest tobacco smoke is good for the complexion and has general health benefits.

There is in fact an offshoot of this women's group that take on all comers and some men where occasionally walks are organised along scenic routes in the countryside outside Mazatlán. Even MazReal members have gone along with keen hiker and organiser Natalia on her countryside pursuits. Smoking pipes are encouraged as they can teach the locals encountered the health giving properties of inhaling fine shag tobacco smoke.

That wonderfully informative ERM! Magazine have awarded WOPS the Health Evangelists Of The Year Award.

EXPAPAZZISOC

The Expat Paparazzi Society as the name suggests are a group of old people with handbags, wearing floral dresses, funny hats and braces shoving their cameras into anyone who has a face. The members of EXPAPIZ.....something-or-other have no scruples and are particularly brutal in their single-minded mission of capturing 'The News' of what is going down in our fine gringo community. They will wade into any situation swinging their deadly handbags to gain access to the prime spot and flash away without asking the permission of the startled subject.

Even the bloody-coated and sharp knife wielding butchers down at Central Market are terrified of this group when they descent upon them snapping away and sometimes quite literally putting an eye out in their attempt to get close and grab a snap of the long suffering vendor as he chops up a pig's head or professionally reduces half a cow into bite size chunks of beef. The vegetable sellers duck down and  hide behind their stalls when they see the EXPAPAZZISOC barging their way through the crowds of local shoppers literally trampling underfoot old ladies, blind beggars and Chihuahua dogs.

This group cannot be classed as real expats because they originally came in by cruise ship a few years back and were left behind when the US government suggested that is was too dangerous for the liner to stay in port for the days sightseeing and ordered it immediately back to safer waters fearing that The Sinaloa Cartel and their fleet of submarines would hold the poor terrified US citizens to ransom. This group, as they still have a valid return ticket, are waiting until the US Gov. deem it safe to come and pick them up. But in the meantime they are making a nuisance of themselves and even the notorious and brutal ZETAs have made a non-violence pact with them fearing that their peaceful cartel members may at sometime loose and eye or tooth from the swinging handbag.

Those wonderfully informative expat magazines, The Atlantic Oyster and ERM! magazine, have awarded them Spunky Expats Of The Year awards.

ZATHDAC and THUZDAC

These expats having a fine old time are members of the Zaragosa Thursday Dance Club or ZATHDAC. There is a difference from that other expat dancing club, the Thursday Zaragosa Dance Club or THUZDAC who meet on the other side of the plaza, in that the ZATHDAC dance in mud.

Everyone who has experienced mud dancing will know that the act of shuffling around in wet sticky stuff is truly wonderful and life affirming like letting it all hang loose and not worrying about the consequences and the trials of removing dry mud afterwards. They feel that the  rival THUZDAC group can only look on in envy and are jealous that they did not get the mud idea first because dancing on plain old concrete is plainly boring.

The two groups have not yet come to blows but one hopes that they will as who can resist watching a group of elderly men and women mud wrestling to the strains of jaunty Latin music. ERM! Magazine have awarded them both the Expat Dancing Club of the year award.

SOBA

No one knows who these bunch of idiots are but we can only suspect they are the annoying Song Bird of America Appreciation Society or SOBA dragging their iPod across the tidal flats near Esquinapa. One can only guess that these four shadowy men work for the Arizona State Government and use the patriotic Arizonian bird songs to indoctrinate Mexicans into thinking twice about heading north to illegally work across the border. The Phoenix desperado, fascist and gun tottin' lawman Sheriff Joe Arpeggio recently said :

"Those pictures of me drunk and stoned out of my tiny brain naked in bed with 4 Thai rent boys wasn't really me. It was a conspiracy perpetrated by members of the illegitimate Communist Obama and Mexican Expatriate Government that illegally took over this fine country in a coup 4 years ago. And the man in bed was actually that illegitimate Kenyan-Hawaiian Communist tradesman Obama."

That picture above of the SOBA members is the last known image of those Laurel and Hardy idiots as it is presumed they have all had sex changes and now live in the favelas of Rio charging themselves out.


MENSUNWAGS

Expat men are known never to wear anything resembling a suit even when attending funerals, prize givings, ERM! Magazine editorial meetings and celebrity cartels dinners at Plaza Machado. As we all know gringo men never wear anything but long shorts with big flappy pockets on the side full of stuff, vests and flip flops occasionally sandals even when they come to an art galley opening or dinner get together. Some of them even gave up cutting their hair when they retired.

Wearing a suit has subsequently become a novelty so the Men's Sunday Suit Wearing Gang or MESUNWAGS have found a way of getting into a suit and jazzy hat and they just stroll around trying to look as though it is the most natural thing to do. They have become hardened over time as the non suit wearing male expats jeer and throw things at them for letting the side down.

HURRAH for them is what we Italian suit wearing employees at MazReal say. Good on yer for persevering as suit wearing may yet make a comeback on the dusty streets of our adopted home.


CAMEXPODOWEGU CLUB.

This may look like a member of the Canadian Mexican Polka Dot Bikini Wearing Gun Club but it is fact an expat from Medicine Hat in Saskaloonytune State, May-Anne Naze, who got bored with the women expat lifestyle of coffee mornings, barbecue lighting competitions, organic food get togethers and dog neutering meets and joined the Sinaloa Cartel as a hit woman now known as the notorious Viola 'Six Gun' Solo. She can be seen smilingly holding up at gun point the hapless photographer threatening to shoot off his left ear if he didn't hand over his suncream, shirt and jeans as the Sinaloan sun can get a bit harsh on her fair Canadian Scandinavian skin.

The T.G.I.F club started by a a group of notoriously heavy drinking expats from a lumberjack sheep station in Burrumbuttock near Gooloongong Dog Swamp in New South Wales in that fine country of Strallia. The expat Strallians were found drunk and singing lewd songs in the hold of a cargo ship berthed in Mazatlán harbour exporting New Zealand Kiwi Fruit and Tiri Ke Kanawa.

The drunken sots told the Mexican authorities that the last thing they knewwas that they were attending a Christening and Temperance party with the Quakers at a sheep station in the Nulaboor Wagga Wagga Plain in central Strallia. These trouble makers meet every night not only on Fridays as they proclaim and get completely soaked in alcohol. The picture explains what they are all about and why we at MazREal have organised a kidnapping gang to round them up and deposit them down a well on Islas Tres Mujeres.

The Society of Mazatlán Single Men or SOMSIMEN find time to get away together on weekends and stay in their weekend homes of mud and sticks on the tidal estuary of Esquinapa. The naked woman mud sculpturing competition was won by Zeke Moskowitz with his creative example of what he would imagine Charlize Theron would do if she came to pay him a visit. His somewhat sad demeanour suggests that Charlize would probably not take advantage of his invitation that he sent her three years ago. 

That wonderful Mazatlán expat news magazine that contains nothing but real estate ads has awarded him Sculpturing Personality of the Year Award.

The P.I.G Club

The Pain Is Gain Club is a fanatical almost rabidly obsessed fitness club obsessed with speed that meet on wheels on the Malecón. Pain is Gain is a mantra normally chanted by unhinged African dictators or Cartel bosses who kill and torture lots of people very painfully to gain the top job and by Generals in wars to spur soldiers onwards to their deaths. It is also chanted by this group of speedy expats on wheels who race up and down the full length of the Malecón from Playa Bruja to El Faro (stopping there only because the sea comes next) shouting "PAIN IS GAIN" at the tops of their voices. 

Heads down, arms pumping, elbows jutting out and legs ablur, the object of these over zealous fitness fanatics is to nearly crush and maim as many people and dogs taking their morning or evening constitution stroll along the sea's edge. The idea is to score points by not actually knocking people over but giving them the fright of their lives as they weave and speed their way through the evening crowds. 100 points when a elderly couple are shoved aside and so on down the scale through to punching children and toddlers who get in the way. Pets aren't spared. They are actually brutally targeted and run over especially if they are a cute Chihuahua on the end of a leash.

Their obsession with speed enduses men to shave their heads and legs and wear tight black lycra and women pull their hair back tightly and also wear tight black lycra. Sometimes they will have surgery to streamline their facial features by reshaping the nose into a point and pulling the skin back to smooth the wrinkles out till they resemble lizards with a stretched crazed smile permanently etched. We don't know how many there are in this group as they generally look the same but as they go backwards and forwards so fast darting in an out it is difficult to tell what the hell is going on. Sometimes, however they will wear stripey tops and an old fashioned toupee to confuse the police into thinking they are bees.

ERM! Magazine awarded this fellow or fellows Fastest Anonymous Person Of The Year Ward voted by you.

V.E.R.A

There are so many Expat societies alive and well in Mazatlán that we have only managed to describe a few in this Part 1. We have evidence of many more secret societies and clubs that meet behind closed doors and down tunnels and up trees and these we will be describing in Part 2. These secretive get togethers can be dangerous to the extreme and once in it is difficult to get out without remorgaging your house or selling your children and grandmothers into slavery. Suicide is generally thought of as the best solution.

Now we come to the reason that MazReal is no longer in Mazatlán because we gained access to these places and are now in fear of our miserable lives shacked up in a garden shed down near the docks in Limehouse London.

That image above of the man with an intense smile is the leader of the ultra-orthodox underground secret society of vegans and rawcooked foodism cult (V.E.R.A) known as Dr. Payne and sometimes known as Cardinal Syn of the Catholic Church of Manila and also know in EMINEM! Magazine, that wonderful magazine of Mazatlán expat news as the Mazatlán Personality of the Year  Dan 'Mississippi' River for his undying work with homeless animals.

However hiding behind that smile is an personality so undernourished by proteins and that the need to eat raw food thirty times a day has addled his tiny mind and turned him into a raving raw food evangelist. Some raw foodies have entered his influence and never been heard of again and the stories from investigative journalists from that wonderful magazine of Mazatlán expat affairs, The Atlantic Oyster, even suggest he may have eaten them for the protein. He is thought to be waiting for a space ship so he and his disciples can escape the meat eating frenzy on earth and live in isolation on the planet  Krypto in the Gaylord galaxy.


Bye bye till Part 2.

©MazReal 2012.