August Morning Skies over Mazatlán Sinaloa Mexico

MazReal isn't all about parodizing the lifestyle of expats here in Mazatlán.

Here instead another set of 'What the snowbirds are missing' type photography that only occur in the rainy season during the early hours of the morning between 5 and 6.30 am. The season where NOBs* have retreated back into their temperature comfort zones.

Girk McGirk out again in his pyjamas wandering up and down Olas Altas to get these spectacular shots 

more snaps after this………..

Picture Of The Day

Mazatlán Summer News

MazReal just got back from their summer holidays in Chile and discovered that it was actually winter down there. That made the capital Santiago to be even more soulless and depressing than it normally is. Imagine yourself holed-up indefinitely in some city in the land of the cuckoo clocks called Switzerland, that inward looking piece of lush land hidden somewhere in the Alps. A scenario that would make any person want to jump off the terrace of the 21st floor apartment. Many a day I found myself teetering on the threshold of that exact floor at the thought of spending 7 more weeks trying figure out what to do with myself so instead locked myself into a cycle of drinking endless Pisco Sours and eating long leisurely lunches. I put on 2 kilos in weight from the sugary cocktail concoctions but did manage to forget at least the last 6 weeks of the experience. I was told I had spent most of it in a tent eating bird shit in Tierra Del Fuego.

Meanwhile it is summer in Mazatlán and for those of us suffering we can read the annual 'how to cope with a Mazatlán summer' article in the local expat rag. The writer of which seems to have fully acclimatized to it to such an extent that his air conditioning unit is actually switched to 'heat' as he now finds it a tad cool. In a previous blog we suggested the easiest way to cope was to hire a punkawalla fresh from the Indian subcontinent but now as we have air conned our office to within an inch of its life we can spend blissful days in arctic conditions and have no need for human powered fan-wavers.

However in the interim much has been happening in this fine city of under the new Felteen administration:

The summer is here and our new city president Senor Fultime (who used his position at Jumapen and its database of 10s of thousands of client's emails to illegally lobby voters to vote in his favour and probably tip the balance his way) has put forward his first Feltin Public Awareness Campaigns 2013-2014 for ways of surviving the 'big heat' and other useful ideas to live a better life in Mazatlán..............

Baby News

Good tips for baby, he suggests, if you live in a luxurious NoMa apartment lording over the riffraff,  is to build a cage and stick the thing (baby) in it outside so it may catch the cool Pacific breezes and probably be pecked alive by our wonderful boiled headed turkey vultures, shrieking Kiskadees and squawking Grackles. One can close the window and forget about its screaming for a few days allowing the wee tike to luxuriate in its own surroundings soaking up the atmosphere of the great outdoors.


more crap after the break

The Art Of Staying Cool and the Role of the Useful Punkah Wallah

Our part time reporter Jim Thighes-Moriarty adivses you how to keep cool.

We at MazReal don't hold ourselves responsible for Jim's views. By all accounts he has never heard of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.


Frida Kahlo looking relaxingly cool with her bangles rings and flowers?  Not today in Mazatlán however. It is like putting your face in the door of a Turkish Baths and breathing in steam and heat tinted with sweaty Turkish man sweat and the occasional wafting smell of dried prawn, burning tyres, sewerage or power station smoke (when the breeze is a southerly that is )but luckily now in my garden wafts the hint of Jasmine from my better half's Jasmine bush reminding me somewhat of drinking tea in China during those heady days when the British still ruled Shanghai. Oh how we laughed.

That pesky punkah wallah I ordered from India for me and my memsahib is a damn long time coming. They're impossible to find in this country, something to do with the wages going up to 5 centavos a day I think it was so I had to reluctantly look through my well-thumbed copy of the Skymall catalogue and go through there. Indian Wallahs charge about half the Mexican Wallah rate  and that's for a month so they are good value. I have shipped half a dozen in a box by EdFex from that wonderful country of cheap labour where the poor starving native knows his place in that wonderful country of the caste system and rich Bollywood actors and honest politicians who are allowed to shoot poor people who get in their way.

Granny Farquhar-Fiennes-Clinton and her trusty slaves

I am just carrying on the family tradition as can be seen above from the family instagram snap of my grandmother reading the horse racing pages from her verandah in Poonaville while she gets a pedicure from the foot wallah and a waft of breeze from the family Punka Wallah called Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Jnr went on to govern India and be a real thorn in the side of the British Ragamuffins.

More colonial nastiness after the jump

Mexican Heat and the Curse of Snowbirds.

 Occassional MazReal writer Gerald Hawsley* gets pissed off with heat and takes it out on Snowbirds.
  

“Hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun”. Bob Dylan incorporates this line in his song about Durango perfectly evoking the summer up there although he's probably never been there at all and nor have I but down here on the coast we could sing the same line “hot friggin'chilli peppers in the friggin' sweltering sun” referring to Mazatlán. Anyway it can just as easily refer to my little bit of Mazatlán. 


I am of Anglo Saxon, Austro Hungarian, pale Scandinavian, northern temperate climate blood with a hint of Dalmatian from my father's 12th wife and servant girl and inside my office or library as I prefer to call it as there is a Kindle lying on a chair, it is a constant 360 degrees Celcius (to our friends from the north that translates as some other number in degrees F) even taking into account the four fans aimed at me, my steaming computer and my termite eaten chunky Concordian-built plywood desk. 


I use fans and have no air con. Whilst writing I am surrounded with fans blowing hot air. I have a ceiling fan 5 meters up spinning to within an inch of its life constantly clack clacking its moving parts, behind me straining on its electricity cord there is a large airplane propeller encased in a black rusting cage aimed at the back of my head which, if I had hair, it would be tearing it out. There is a smaller ‘fill-in’ fan oscillating to my left cooling my left side naturally. A Sumo Fan (that always tickles me), a plastic squatting Sumo wrestler cradling a fan that I bought from the souvenir section of a backstreet Macau whore house, gently cools my nose and eye brows. It is still 600 degrees C and although the fans blow the hot air around they do apply a veneer of chill.

My Amazonian Teak desk built by Indians from the Peruvian village of Iquitos obliquely looks out the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the street where for much of the day catching the street breeze sits a gaggle of old men on the large window sills street side. My window sills are the perfect width and height to sit on and these old men waft away flies and sit and chat and mumble about stuff that is happening around them. Between me and them is 30 centimeters of space and a net curtain so they cannot see me but I can see their silhouette and I can clearly hear every mumble, fart and cough. If I was an impatient man I would rattle the bars of my cage with a stick and tell them to get the fuck off of my property but I like the soothing background chat as it never lets me forget I am in Mexico.


I listen to them out the corner of my ear and learn a few words like pinche this and pinche that. But most of what they say is unintelligible for me because they all have loose fitting false teeth which rattle as they talk and sometime José doesn’t even bother to put his in so his mumblings become even more indistinct and kind of slurpy. Occasionally when they get really annoying I switch on my ultra sonic dog preventer which interferes drastically with their hearing aids causing them to sometimes spew out their teeth and roll around on the street howling and tearing at their ears. Oh how I laugh sometimes because they haven't figured out what is happening.

It is so hot in my library cum office that the net curtains don’t waft inwards in that romantic way bringing in a breeze instead they lie flat and tight against the metal bars from the hot air pushing them outwards. Occasionally I slink off and lie draped in the hammock on the patio. Expired there I order my imported Filipino boy I named Abdul to gently push the hammock backwards and forwards so the movement will agitate the air. I sometimes shed my kit and stand under the garden shower till the cool water already in the pipes becomes hot from the sun-heated water in the tank. ( I got to remember to replace the black tank with a white)The subsequent effort of drying soon adds a fresh sweat and its back to the library half-dried to stand in front of the fans.

More complaining after the jump. Snowbirds with delicate sensibilities are advised to stop here.....