Annual MazReal Real Mozzie Alternative Awards Part 1 of 2

Expats living in Mazatlán are looking for alternatives to their regular haunts, alternatives to the same places that win the awards year after year. The MazReal Real Mozzie Alternative Awards have become an essential guide to all the places and activities where the hip expat wouldn't be seen dead not going into and wouldn't be seen dead not doing. 

Our staff have trawled the city suffering food poisoning, bed bugs, the plague, muggings, decapitations and scrofula to bring you this list of places where, if you are seen exiting from, will make your name light up amongst the discerning expatriates in our wonderful community. Places and activities that will really elevate your standing within that community. 

This list is compiled by the editors of MazReal and expats themselves who feel these are the new pursuits and activities that will make a retired person's life worth living and will further add a spark of frisson to your lives. 

The Best Thing To Do With Visitors

Shotgun fishing.

There was so much back and forthing going on in this category between Shotgun fishing (women voters) and Marlin torturing (men voters) that MazReal staffers got so pissed off with all the extra work that they voted in favour of the women as the best day out for visitors is to shoot fish rather than torture them with a large hook and then weirdly throw them back in for the fish to have to go through with the same thing again! 

Forget the hassle and expense of actually hiring a boat and crew so you and your visitors have to spend hours of inactivity and seasickness waiting for a tuna or marlin to bite and then the hours of pain and suffering as you play around with it on the end of your hook, try this easier method and just shoot them with a shotgun or toss a stick of dynamite in the sea or river. We all know that this country is awash with weapons and explosives so even the ladeez have the opportunity to do what manly men spend an inordinate amount of time and energy doing. So while the men are giving themselves hernias and strained testicles reeling in a marlin you women can pick up a gun and blast the fish out the water.

Wandering aimlessly around Plaza Machado as an activity that garnered some votes but this winner suggests that that relaxed ambience is becoming so out of touch with what the 'real' Mexico is all about. The 'real' Mexico, according to statistics and blogs from Mexicans is Pancho Villa, Narco Corrida Bands, street food, pre Columbian history, baked elotes, death, revolution, Day Of The Dead, surrealism, tortillas cooked on a hot stone, shotgun fishing and Electroshock therapy .

What to do, where to go? Our advice? Forget killing fish and make a trip up the Mazatlán garbage mountain and give sustenance to the 'recyclers'. 

Contact MazReal for gun and explosive hire and you will redirected to a corner of a street at midnight in Olas Altas from where a dark windowed SUV will pull up and hand you your 'fishing rod' and 'tackle'.



The Best Petsitting Service 

Zeke's Dog and Cat.

While you are out and about enjoying your time on the town with your pals, your pets needn't be clawing at the doors, howling and tearing up the upholstery anticipating your return, Zeke's Dog and Cat is the answer. We have had nothing but good reviews from fellow animal loving expats regarding entrepreneur and animal lover Zeke Crapston who has a pet training school somewhere in the backstreets of Olas Altas.


He has a novel way to take your pets out for a walk, a method that will make sure your pets will have run off their surplus energy and some of that excess puppy fat by the time you get home. Amongst other dog and cat activities, your beauties will have the opportunity 'drive' Zeke and his car to El Quelite where he will have a beer and a meal with his friends and then they can take him back again. This is the perfect way to give your pampered pooches a good workout and allow Zeke a day out and to save him the cost of gas at the same time.
No wonder Zeke's service got the most votes. More awards after the break

MazReal The Movie

MazReal Productions announce a new experimental short movie (temporarily titled MazReal The Movie) currently in pre-production soon to be filmed in an around Mazatlán this coming Mexican winter...................

Featuring Mariela Mexia, Javier Díaz Dalannais and Tere Chaides. Three of the most exciting actors working out of our city. Directed and written by Matt Mawson with collaboration by Dave Robb, Nan Robb in the art department and producer Carol Lewin

Check out the website and follow in all the excitement here: mazrealtwo

Editor: This blog has been given a 'family friendly' rating so responding to concerns from members of this fine community we have replaced the original image that has caused debate and added a cute pic which has nothing to do with the forthcoming short movie that draws on subjects of ancient Mesoamerican sacrifice and bloodletting and the history of violence in this fine country. So those people sensitive to exploding eyeballs and casual violence can be forewarned to stay away.

This image was in fact taken on our recent African safari to a dairy farm where those people sick of seeing big ferocious animals tearing each other apart red in tooth and claw on game reserves can go and see milk production and little calves with big eyes waiting to be fed. In fact our researcher gave the cute little critter his finger to suck and it bit it clean off.

Centro Mazatlán Restaurant Roundup

Foodie  Quincy 'Porky' Mondragon reporting:

You can't swing a cat* in Mazatlán without it hitting a restaurant, eating house or bar. Mazatlán expats of all persuasions from all these fabulous countries - ex totalitarian states, monarchies and weird republics that we represent can consider ourselves extremely lucky because there is a restaurant on our doorstep that will cater for our exotic palates.

We all know that expat news magazines exist only as an excuse for the editors to eat out every day and get their bills paid by the restaurant so consequently the reviews are always positive and the subsequent advertising revenue keeps them afloat. So we sent out, incognito and in disguise our food photographer cum expert eater and regular glutton, Quincy Mondragon, to get an objective look-in at what is on offer in Centro. As you can see he tells a positive story and paid is own way. Well......sometimes.

Il Mostro

Il Maestro, that charming restaurant down some steps hidden behind trees on the 'quiet' side of the Plaza continues to charm diners with its superbly consistently fabulous ambience and one must not forget it also serves food  - Italian food and the chef, The Great Fabrizzio, is an artist who uses pasta in a truly fabulous expressive way. 

Pasta is an expression of Neo-Realistic starch and is well understood by The Great Fabrizzio at Il Monstro. His fettucine, though wry and puckish in an almost mischievous way, owes a lot to Barzino (that other conceptual minimalist chef at Pepino and Herschels's on the 'noisy' side of the plaza) , whose use of fettucine as an instrument of social change is known to us all. The linguine on the other hand is quite delicious and not all that didactic, true there is a persuasive Marxist quality to it, but this is hidden by the sauce. Spinoza(That avant-garde post modernist pasta chef at the third of the Great Three Pasta Artists of The Plaza whipping up dishes at La Tramoyses's virtually opposite Il Minstrone on the 'uproariously loud' side.) on the other hand has had great success in espousing his Marxism by subtly including it in the tortellini (yum yum yum).

I tripped and fell down the steps knocking over tables and diners whilst looking for the great Il Minstro behind its cover of trees and began my meal with an antipasto, which at first appeared aimless, but as I focused on the anchovies, the point of it became clearer. Was Fabrizzio trying to say that all life was represented here in the antipasto with the black olives as an unbearable reminder of our mortality. Fabrizzio has always worked better with chicken and one can say that his Chicken Parmigiani says more about our involvement in Afghanistan than any book can. (Barzino, however, always worked better in veal than chicken or even fish and it was a shocking oversight by that great ERM! magazine when reference to him was omitted in their cover story of Rauschenberg).

The cozy interior of the delightfully charming Il Mostro on The Plaza

I had heard from the chef, The Great Vasili at that wonderful Russian restaurant, Molinka's, that Fabrizzio hesitates when it comes to his spumoni so for the main I tentatively went with the spaghetti vongole which before his psychoanalysis, clams held great terror for The Great Chef and he could not bear to open them and consequently blacked out. But his later attempts prove he has regained his lovely touch after Stravinsky's influence with his Concerto in D for strings. In point of fact the vongole is now a great example of atonality.

For dessert I had tortoni and I was reminded of Wittgenstein's remark: 'The Monads have no windows.' How apropos! The prices at The Great Il Monstro, as Charmion Von Wiegand once told me, are "reasonable without being historically inevitable." I agree. 

So can we prove the existence of God using Liebniz's philosophical pasta model that:
(a) some pasta is linguine
(b) all linguine is not spaghetti
(c) no spaghetti is pasta, hence all spaghetti is linguine?

No, how ridiculous! By this logic one would have to say the 'fetuccini and the linguine are not the rigatoni.'

We can conclude as Gødel declared over and over "Isn't this spaghetti wonderful." And a meal at Il Mostro proves just that.

A n elegant couple of expats in typical evening wear supping at a table al fresco at the charming Il Mostro

Hits: Philosophical food that imputes the very notion to Krishna.

Misses: Working conditions reflect English factory problems and the waiters are made to serve 10 hours a day with napkins that don't meet current safety standards.

More fine dining after the jump

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............

Expats Come In All Shapes And Sizes.........

The IS the end you know. MazReal and all its journalists and hangers-onners and slaves and stevedores and rent boys and female sharp-shooters and chauffeurs and gay body builders are de-camping and heading back to Europe to earn some real money. Not plastic stuff like you get get in hot humid countries but real wonga made out of rags like you get in temperate climates.

Our shiny, slippery plastic stuff has run out and we have to get off our asses and do something called 'work'. The word that strikes fear into the minds of most people and the end product of which is dosh, loot, spondulics, green stuff, filthy lucre which the government takes away in tax that goes to support our wonderful health service and education so everyone may have access to medicine and learning.

Some people call it Socialism and that is another word that strikes fear into the minds of most people living north of this Mexican border whereas the rest of the world see it as a nice word. A word that is designed to help other less fortunate people, people who people again north of the border would term lazy people desirous of hand-outs so they don't have to get off their collective asses to work. Anyway I cannot imagine any of those naughty Tea Party-type people with those naughty extreme and selfish thinking minds living here in Mazatlán south of the north border.

Tijuana is the border crossing of yore that many expats would have crossed but not before taking advantage of all that that fine city has to offer before passing into conservative Protestant America.

I have always been wary of living amongst expat communities as I was raised and spent much of my early life in one as a result we tended to avoid the community or at least take time sounding out people whose views and ideas are compatible. So the longer we have been here the more we have ventured out and seen what a great bunch of people live here. There are individuals we avoid like the plague by hiding our faces, wearing false beards, ducking into doorways and sprinting to other side of the street to get away from but they are far and few between and generally only appear with the cool weather.

These are the stories of twelve of the varied and colourful members of expat community we have residing in this fine city of Mazatlán. You may have even seen them or partied with them or drank with them.

Here's one of them - The short-arsed, hairy bearded lady originally from Benson Arizona. George Jenson is her name. She is always hanging out on street corners nonchalantly leaning on things and just banging on about this and that and throwing vicious accusations around most of it selfishly untrue and thoughtlessly made up. Luckily she is only seen here in winter months otherwise I would have hounded her out of town to live a life of sleaze below decks on a shrimp boat . After a few months at sea she would look like Charlize Theron to a grubby shrimp sailor.


more expat shenanigans after the jump

Art - Mexican Artist's View Of Disney Land

Disasterland is Mexican artist Rodolfo Loaiza‘s ode to pop culture, cosmetic surgery, drug use, and obsession with celebrity reflected back at us via some of The Walt Disney Company’s most valuable trademarks.

Narcocorrida?

Hugh Cornwell from the Stranglers sings his song - Golden Brown - a song about heroin (he said so himself) with a Mariachi Band. So it seems this is  Mariachi narcocorrida