One could be tempted into judging the quality of an English teacher in Mexico by such silly metrics as devotion to the job, quality of work, and detail of planning.
But my colleagues at school have come up with something much better: The best teacher is the one who got the most presents for Dia del Maestros […]

A couple of weeks back, I put out my list of Five Things Mexicans Could Teach Americans. This week, the gringos are returning the favor. Enjoy.
(1.) How to govern. Let on to an American that you are a political science major, and they will snicker and ask what you do with that in the “real […]

(NOTE: Five things Americans Could Teach Mexicans is put off for a week, due to the following breaking holiday news.)
You may have never heard of it, but Children’s Day is an official, UN-sanctioned world holiday. It is even celebrated in the United States, but nobody seems to give a rip about it.
“Every day is children’s day,” I can hear the […]

Cultural differences never cease to be interesting, so here are five more.
(1.) How to wait. Time is a relative concept. Einstein told us that, but we could have just asked the Mexicans. While business matters here in Zamora seem to run on a strict clock, social affairs are a very different matter. If someone says they […]

Just as different countries have different words for different things, so they also have different hand gestures, and Mexico is no exception. But try finding a guide to these critical bits of cultural knowledge in the Lonely Planet guide! Ha! So as a long overdue public service, we present the following primer:

ABOVE: Rich, as in […]

Besides sounding sexy, Spanish has this one great advantage for native English speakers como yo: Lots of the words are basically the same. Take the word “lemon,” for instance. That’s a nice and easy “limon” (lee-MON). Its twin in citrus juiciness, the lime, is a lima (LEE-mah). Or so my dictionary – I’m looking at […]

It was bound to happen one day. I resisted cell phones for years and social networking sites for longer still. But the last frontier, a genuine blog, has now been conquered. This old (okay, not really that old) newspaper journalist has finally gone digital.
If this blog serves only one purpose, I hope it will be […]