Categories
Joshua Files mexico videos

To Mexico – in one week!

This time next week I will in at Healthrow airport waiting for a flight to Toronto, Canada and then to Cancun, Mexico!!!!

Gosh I’m looking forward to it. The family are taking a break to do a Joshua Files Roadtrip. We had planned to follow in Josh’s footsteps from Chetumal all the way to Catemaco but honestly the driving would just be too tiring.

So we’re doing a cut down version. I will be posting much more about this, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, especially for Lucas, I dug out this TV ad for Josh’s favourite cupcakes, which he eats on his bus journey through Yucatan in ‘Invisible City’.

The are called ‘Pinguinos’ and are like Hostess cupcakes – white vanilla cream inside a chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting and a squiggle of white icing on top. And a childhood favourite of mine.

Mmmm, additives.

Categories
cuba ice shock mexico nostalgia salsa videos

Nostalgia for…Beny More

I wasn’t alive in the days of Beny More (pronounced More-ray), the Cuban singer and band leader who went to live in Mexico and became a massive influence on all the Cuban salsa bands.

So why do I get these gorgeous pangs of nostalgia when I listen to Beny More? Why does it make me think of a Cuba and a Mexico I never even knew?

My theory is that as a tiny child I was exposed to this music. I do know that after my mother left my father, I spend a great deal of time with my two grandmothers. One, Abuelita Josefina (known to her old friends as ‘Pepa’) had a wonderful memory for lyrics and knew many of the songs of Beny More. Beny More often appeared in popular Mexican films, which went through a golden age in the 40s and 50s.

So maybe that’s it; maybe I was sat for hours in front of the TV while my grandmother knitted (she was mad for knitting). Maybe that’s where I acquired this overwhelming craving for gorgeous night clubs where Cuban bands play for beautiful people, sipping daiquiris between dancing the son, mambo and cha-cha-cha.

This Cuba does not exist anymore – I’ve been to look for it. It’s all timba and reggaeton now. That’s great, but, ah nostalgia. I once spent a whole afternoon lying next to a pool in Santiago de Cuba, listening to the piped music of Beny More. That’s as close as I got.

Categories
nostalgia

Things I Miss About Being A Kid

Sitting here, waiting to go out to buy Harry Potter 7, is enough to make me understand – if ever there was a mystery about it which for me there isn’t – why Harry Potter is SO great.

For adults I mean. Simply put – it makes us feel like kids again. Like Disneyland, swimming in the sea and…in my case, almost nothing else. (If you’re very good at things like surfing and skiing you probably get this feeling from that too, but last time I skied I was trembling with fear and then I snapped my leg across the top of my boot – and heard it crack.)

I miss being a kid, even though you’re relatively disempowered and have homework and exams, and you can get teased and bullied, I mean, there’s no doubt it can be tough, BUT:

What a great feeling it used to be to wake on a Saturday morning and know that beyond the hour or two of chores that you might have to put in, the day was yours. I used to lie awake in bed making plans which would go something like this:

1. Call for Eoin across the road.
2. Mooch into the village to buy sweets and comics.
3. Go to Eoin’s house to read comics (Roy of the Rovers and 2000 AD), eat sweets and watch TV.
4. Get ready to go watch Man United (if we were playing at home)
5. Drop by the sweet shop on the way to the bus to get supplies for the match.
6. Leave for Old Trafford around midday.
7. Get to the match early to get a good standing position, usually on the railings at the front of the Stretford End Junior Paddock.
8. Amuse each other with silly stories and voices (mainly Eoin’s)
9. Go home (hopefully triumphant but if not then full of mock-bitterness and disappointment)
10. Watch “Doctor Who”
11. Hopefully have a teenage babysitter of an evening, and persuade them to read to us from their totally inappropriate book of horror tales, or if a girl, to tell us about their dates with boys.

(A close second for a Saturday when United played away, was scoring some new William, Mallory Towers, Tintin or Hardy Boys books at the library, or trespassing in the garden of the nearby grand house.)

Ah. Days where you don’t count the minutes of time wasted, responsibilities ignored, calories and the effect of sugar on your teeth.

Well, I’m having one of those days today and the housework can sit there and my kids can Make Their Own Entertainment.

Categories
nostalgia raves

Der Echt Nutella

It’s okay, I wondered too. Der Nutella, die Nutella, das Nutella? I didn’t want to get it wrong after all. Luckily, the InterWeb provides answers to these questions and more.

http://www.wer-weiss-was.de/theme143/article1542260.html#1542260

According to a Nutella FAQ, it can be any one of the three articles.

So…Der Echt Nutella.

Nutella is actually made by an Italian family company, Ferrero, whose skills with hazelnut and chocolate know no bounds. They also make the Ambassador’s favourite sweets, those exclusive Ferrero Rocher.

But the Germans embraced Nutella with a passion back in the 1970s (or even earlier), which is where I first encountered the yummy treat, living there for 6 months as a four year old. When we left to live in Manchester, England, Nutella was the pain thing I missed, for years and years, until it started to be available in the UK, sometime in the late 1980s.

I remember going with school to Germany and coming back laden with 8 bottles of Nutella.

I wasn’t being greedy. You couldn’t get it in England then!

I remember staying with my German exchange penfriend, the lovely Erik, and being super impressed when one morning at breakfast the Nutella ran out. And his Mum simply went to the larder and pulled out another! Who stores more than one jar of Nutella at a time??? The Germans, that’s who. They love it.

I have always strongly suspected that Ferrero make a special formulation for the German market. Their Nutella is the echt Nutella as far as I am concerned. It is more chocolately and nougaty.

My good friend DB bought me a jar from the German deli in London, to help me with my writer’s block. I ate a few spoons before going to bed last night. God it’s good.

I couldn’t be sure this early, but I think I sensed a flicker in the old story brain. Maybe it was the combined effect of the Nutella and having seen Harry Potter 5. I’ll have to eat some more, to see if it really works…

Categories
Joshua Files mexico nostalgia writing

Mayan site of Chichen Itza One of the New 7 Wonders!


Chichen Itza
Originally uploaded by
Aleksu

The results are in – it was the final days of lobbying wot done it!

The Mayan city of Chichen Itza has been named as one of the official ‘New’ 7 Wonders of the World.

The photo is one of Aleksu’s – a contact of mine from Flickr who takes gorgeous photos. He’s been urging people to hit the 7 Wonders Website voting for Chichen.

Chichen Itza was the first Mayan ruin I ever visited, aged 15, on a hugely memorable trip to Yucatan with my father, stepmother and three sisters. We were driven there on the slow dusty road from Cancun. Not by my father – who stayed in Cancun to play golf – but his chauffeur. This was before cars routinely had aircon. It was a sweltering August day – at least 45 degrees Celsius and close to 100% humidity. and the site was crowded – even in 1981 it was Mexico’s most popular archaeological site after Teotihuacan. My sister Pili passed out from heat stroke in the ladies’ bathroom.

We walked around the site in stunned, exhausted silence. I was nursing my usual sunburn and was in agony most of the time. (Sunblock didn’t work in those days; I always forgot to wear a T-shirt for a critical hour or so, for which I always paid in tears of pain). I tried climbing the main staircase of tht Temple of Kukulcan aka El Castillo (pictured above) and got about twenty stairs up before I turned around and had an attack of vertigo. I knew without a shadow of doubt that if I climbed to the top with my sisters I would have to be helicoptered down. I managed to climb back down those 20 stairs but my legs were shaking all the way down, even though I used the trick of descending on a diagonal.

I went into the tunnel in El Castillo to try to climb the Temple of the Jaguar that sits under the newer, flashier Toltec-influenced pyramid. There was a crowd of tired, hot, breathless tourists waiting patiently to ascend a tight staircase just wide enough to permit a line of people going up and a line of people going down. It was like a steam oven in there; everyone was being slowly poached. The skin on my shoulders felt like it was on fire. I took one look up that staircase and felt like I’d got as close to hell as I ever wanted to be. A wave of claustrophobia gripped me; I almost shoved people out of my way on the way out.

Chichen isn’t my personal favourite of the Mayan sites. I prefer something more Classic Mayan, with the Puuc or Rio Bec architecture, ideally in a more jungle-setting, like Palenque. However Chichen has two sites, including an older, Classic Mayan site which is Puuc style.

Chichen’s buildings are spectacularly preserved – by now all four faces of El Castillo are restored, when I first visited it was just two. This pyramid is precisely aligned to capture the sun on the sides so that it lights up triangles on the main staircase and the serpents head at the base. This happens only on the Spring and Winter equinoxes and it has the effect of creating an undulating serpent-of-light on the staircase. I’ve never visited then because the crowds at that time of year are insane. (There must be a Youtube video of it…I’ll check).

Despite the constant pain of my sunburn I was impressed beyond anything I’d ever experienced. I’d never visited any Mexican pyramids before, for some reason I’d never been taken to Teotihuacan (near Mexico City). I’d had a fascination with the Maya since aged 11 my father took us to stay at the Acapulco Princess, fashionable in the late 1970s/early 80s, and – I was told – built in the style of a modern Mayan pyramid (although the website says Aztec but still…) But to see the real thing, to experience something of that atmosphere, to imagine the citadel filled with warriors and priests, ball-players and sacrificial victims…was quite, quite amazing.

We returned late that evening to the hotel in Cancun. I went into the hotel bookshop and bought the shortest book I could find about the Maya. It turned out to be one of those Erich-Von-Daniken type books about ancient astronauts and their supposed influence on early civilisation. I lapped it up. I hardly slept that night.

If any of you read ‘Invisible City’ next February you will see just how far that day left its indelible mark on me.