On the way to Catemaco - Arbolillo

A few years ago this windswept village on the coast of Veracruz between Veracruz City and Alvarado on the way to beautiful downtown Catemaco was not even worthy of a "tope" (speed bump).

Since then, beginning with a lonely restauranteur offering fresh shucked oysters and other succulent seafood, the village has boomed and now maintains almost 20 competing "eating" palapa & concrete establishments a good baseball pitch from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

Competition is so hot, entrepreneurs import women from nearby Tlacotalpan, famous for their beauty and outstanding attributes, to provocactively wiggle at passing motorists.

Where those fresh shucked oysters come from, I have no idea.

But thank G., there are a now a few speed bumps to focus motorists attention.

Licking Catemaco

Photo: Haras de la Gadelière

During the HOT days in beautiful downtown Catemaco, which are now fortunately becoming less frequent, my household salivates over a chance to lick on a "percherona" ( giant icemilk concoction on a stick).

I never questioned the name until recently when I searched for the name, and mostly found horses.

Apparently Catemaco and Los Tuxtlas are famous for this delight of mostly frozen fruit flavored ices, wrapped around a stick, about 1 1/2 inches square, 3 inches long, and wrapped in a plastic sleave. Probably other towns have the same thing but don't use the name.

Percheron horses are some of the largest and heaviest in the world. During the Middle Ages in Europe they were the equivalent of modern tanks. The horse name is French, and that country has an almost worse history of messing with Mexico than the US. So I sort of wonder why those things are not called "Buffalos" or something.

¡Ni modo! If you want to slurp off one, bring a bath towel! The napkin that comes with those delicious monsters is only good for the first 3 licks.

Retired

Mexico was crowned as the world's best place to retire in 2007 by International Living Magazine.

Amazing! The rest of the world must be in a pretty sad state.
The world's top retirement havens in 2007

Ironically, rich Mexicans seem to think the US is the best place to retire, and for the same reasons.
Mexicans buy Miami real estate

Truckin..

WASHINGTON: A U.S.-owned commercial truck became the first to drive deep into Mexico on Friday, days after the U.S. Senate voted to quit funding a program allowing Mexican trucks to do the same in the United States.

Catemaco: If this driver ever returns to the US - he will be able to tell so many horror stories about road conditions, federal police rapes and military halts, that the US Senate can close its squinty chauvinist eyes and ignore the whole subject in the future.

The current blah blah over the interchange of border crossing privileges for trucks is ridiculous.
Any Mexican trucker that has survived a few years on Mexican roads would cream any US redneck 18 wheel driver. Current safety inspections on the Mexican border would make anyone on the Canadian border flinch.

Mexican long haul trucks are primarily of US origin and maintenance standards are on par with any entrepreneurs' necessity to protect a multi hundred thousand dollar load.

rollem...

Electric Catemaco

This is not a lie!

I was awakened this morning around 3:30 by a humongous thunder storm.

So I flipped on my computer muttering to myself how great beautiful downtown Catemaco's electrical service is, and that I should mention something positive about it despite the apparent haphazard connections crossing every street and in front of most homes. After all, in my five years in this town, through storms and hurricanes, I never had a major outage.

Famous last thoughts!
By the time I had raided the local ice machines to guard my food treasures imported from far away Veracruz city, electrical power returned at 3 pm, and I took back every nice thought I ever had about the electric company.

It also did not help to read my 2653 peso electric bill for 864 KW of TWO months service, with an unused AC. That is 2.9 pesos per KW, app 26 cents per KW.

Average US cost per KW is 9.5 cents per KW, including a few energy pigs like California and New York. Average US consumption is above 800 KW PER MONTH. Obviously I am only half ass average.

Isn´t it wonderful how cheap Mexico is to live in?

Actually electricity is cheap, if you live like the majority of low electricity consuming Mexicans (think cold water showers, hand washed laundry, 40 W light bulbs and outrageous propane gas bills).

Those Mexican consumers who depend on heavily subsidized utility bills, whose charges are staggered in categories and by consumption, regularly cause small civil wars when users get moved from a highly subsidized category to a lower one. And that includes a bunch of gringos who brag about their utility bills in their first blog posts.

Death to the gachupines in Catemaco

"¡Mueran los gachupines! Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!" ("Death to the Spaniards and Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe) was the battle cry of Miguel Hidalgo when he called for independence from Spain for Mexico the morning of September 16th, 1810.

The event is now commemorated September 15 in the evening as the "Grito de Dolores" (`Cry of Pain' or 'Cry of Dolores', the town where Hidalgo first shouted it, depending on how nationalistic you feel). This is possibly because many Mexicans have a hard time relating to events occurring early in the day. (Oops, I lack a quote for that one, except for a superficial judgement of my appointment schedule with bureaucrats, but not workers.)

The actual "grito" (shout) ocurred at church service on the morning of the 16th of September.

BUT, to honor Porfirio Diaz, Mexico's favorite dictator for most of the end of the 20th century, the holiday was moved up half a day to celebrate his birthday in the evening and the event has now been institutionalized to occur near midnight on September 15th. The event has now become a two day holiday, the first day to issue shouts, and the second to recover from hang-overs.

Beautiful downtown Catemaco restaurant owners and flag sellers are supporting this welcome diversion. They offer customary recipes such as champurrado, pozole, chiles nogados and other life threatening delicacies on the eve of September 15th, for surcharges of up to 500 pesos to surviving "gachupines" with reservations, and discounted flags of Mexico at roughly one dollar per square foot.

VIVA MÊXICO, CABRONES Video
(English lyrics garbled translation)