Protests going on from early morning and people will remain in Tahrir Square all night. It’s spread all over the country and other countries. Three dead. It’s after midnight there and twitter, cell phone, TV and all the rest have now gone down but there are some iconic pics that have been coming out of Egypt. […]

Internet Friends! A Norwegian friend just posted this on a http://www.couchsurfing.com forum that made me laugh: If the stone age son did what the stone age father told him to, we would still be in the stone age And another couchsurfing forum member from Tashkent Uzbekistan who is developing innovative teaching aids to teach English posted […]

January 11th, 2010 December 23rd is the Fiesta of the Rabanos in the Zocalo. Huge radishes are grown just for the annual carving up into all manner of scenes, animals and whatever the imagination conjures up which are all on display and then judged. You can read a more detailed description of the Rabanos in […]

I will be spending this Christmas with four lovely couchsurfers who are staying with me and we will all be christmas orphans together. One, a part Lao guy born in Paris who has recently been living in Canada, who will be going to Lao for three years to work on a development project and who […]

Upside Down World has an article by a local writer summarizing the end of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled Mexico for 70 years) in Oaxaca and the inauguration of the new governor. The writer describes the ceremony on December 1…the beginning of the new administration:

In the afternoon ceremony in the former government palace, […]

I waited until the day we left for Queretaro to call and tell my friend Patsy (we go waaayyy back) that we had changed our itinerary and would be seeing her that evening. What fun! It had been three years since I had seen her and Jose…in fact since June 13, 2006 when they drove […]

From Oregon to Oaxaca Mexico! And all that worry for nothing! We’ve been reading too many newspaper articles up north. Flew through the Nogales border and down highway 15…no stops…no searches…no dogs…no federales to bribe…or narcos dressed like federales…no banditos! No cars pulled off the toll road and set afire by narcos trying to block […]

I moved to Oaxaca City in 2006 to find 70,000 of the state’s teachers striking in the Centro. They had been striking every year for more than 20 years to gain a minimum of educational standards for a state with 16 indigenous groups living in the mountains…all with their own languages. The strike gained scores […]

Looks like another week holed up with my son, Greg, and my favorite sweet golden laborador, in Las Vegas. If Las Vegas is invaded I am quite certain I will survive. 🙂 I am cooking for the freezer as is usual when I visit him. Split pea soup with ham hocks, lasagna, Oaxacan pork ribs […]

From Klamath Falls I cross the California border…past the WWII Japanese Internment camp at Newell near Tule Lake…euphemistically called the Tule Lake War Relocation Center …and head south toward Reno Nevada. I have a blown-up photo of my father herding sheep on the Liskey Ranch on the drained tule lake beds. (tules are plants that grow in water.) […]

No wonder there are so many “old people” at McDonalds! A $1.00 coffee is only 69 cents for seniors! The waitress looks up and says, you aren’t a senior are you? I say yes, 66. She says, really! Maybe just my granma looks old! A guy next to me starts bantering with her. We went […]

I’m back at McDonalds…pretty good latte here…cheaper than Starbucks. I’m sitting in my car using their free WiFi when a bent-over older (old sounds unkind) fellow appears at my open car window which is apparently an invitation for conversation.

Watcha doin’? Studyin’? You like this car? Big tires. You get better gas mileage with bigger tires. […]

After 7 weeks in Salem Oregon taking care of a lot of unfinished business and spending time with my son Doug, who will be returning soon to Thailand to join his Thai wife, I am finally on my way back to Oaxaca in my new car loaded with stuff. First stop. Klamath Falls in rural SE […]

Colorful indigenous mountain villages are wonderful to visit in Oaxaca. Having had an older SUV there for a year in 2007, I drove it back to the states where my son killed it…an oil leak in the motor. But, missing Oaxaca, I moved back down again. Then the options were frightening chicken buses that often […]

Update wed: Well, I hope the governor is good and embarrased after overstating the damage in Oaxaca and drawing intense international media attention. He has now issued a statement saying that 11 people are missing, no confirmed dead and 3-4 houses buried. Shhiishh! Oaxaca has been inundated with two feet of rain in the last […]