Experience the Lucas de Gálvez market in Mérida, Yucatán

In Yucatán you will find unique experiences that separate travelers from tourists.
Mérida has a vivacious street scene every day. Music and dance performances are found in different plazas. Sunday in Mérida streets are closed, food stalls, a book fair, flea market, comedy acts, concerts and a bicycle tour go all day. Nights in the plaza people dance and the restaurants set up tables in the streets…that is what you get from the tourist promotions. If you are looking for the real thing in Mérida here is a sample of what you can expect to find in the main downtown market, Lucas de Gálvez, located on Calle 65 between Calle 54 and 56:


Treat yourself to special moments—those experiences that memories are made of and visit places tourists miss most with this indispensable traveling companion: Yucatán’s Magic, Mérida Side Trips. It features do it your self one and two day trips, a compendium of the authors 25 plus years of experience.

Pedro Ínfnte died April 15, 1957, in Mérida, Yucatán

PEDRO ÍNFANTE; Mexican actor, movie star, singer and aviator died fifty-five yeas ago, April, 15^th, 1957 in Mérida.

The king of Mexican ranchera and mariachi music lived hard, died young and left a beautiful memory. 

  José Pedro Infante Cruz, born November 18, 1917 in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, is the most loved and famous Mexican actor, movie star and singer of all time.
  He began his film career at age 22 in 1939, appearing in more than 60 films, and starting in 1943, he recorded nearly 350 songs. His performance in the movie Tizoc won him the best actor award at the Berlin Film Festival.
  Pedro was in love with Mérida and Mérida was in love with him.
  He met the exotic dancer Lupita Torrentera and had three children with her in Mérida.  Pedro was a ladies man as he had a wife and other women as well.
  The morning of April 15, 1957 at 8:15 a.m., aviator enthusiast Pedro Infante, while piloting his own converted B-24 Liberator bomber, crashed and was killed while leaving the airport at Mérida, Yucatán, on his way to Mexico City.
  The world mourned.
 

  A national outpouring of grief spurred the creation of three majestic bronze statues in his memory; in Mexico City, Mazatlán and Mérida.
  Cast in bronze from thousands of keys donated, by his adoring fans, this art in action figure is located in downtown Mérida at the intersection of 54 and 87.
 

  A fitting image of Pedro silhouetted against the sky he loved so much and dressed in his famous movie set attire atop a bucking horse.

  Pedro Ínfante sang and recorded, Kiss Me a Lot, his one and only song in English. In Spanish, the song is Bésame Mucho and was composed by Consuelo Velázqiez, Mexico’s greatest female composer.*  That legendary song was featured in the 1951 movie A Toda Máquina in which Pedro was the star.
  Pedro Infante’s reputation has enlarged greatly since his death.
  He was everybody’s hero; the partying cowboy, charro, people of the working class and  lovers of Mexican movies and music  around the world.
  To this day, musical tributes of homage are paid to this one-of-a-kind charismatic personality by singers of traditional ranchera and mariachi music.

  As Pedro rides off, his timeless songs, which resonate through the ages, are kept alive.

  For the interesting story of Mexico’s most famous female composer, Consuelo Velázqiez, click the following link:
  http://www.mexconnect.com/articles/1172-did-you-know-consuelo-vel%C3%A1zquez-and-b%C3%A9same-mucho
 
©2012John M. Grimsrud

2012 CARNIVAL IN MÉRIDA, YUCATÁN, MEXICO

Six days of parades hypes Mérida into a frenzied state of merriment that culminates with the beginning of Lent. The main boulevard lined with bleachers finds eager participants camped out overnight to secure a front row seat. Food and beverage venders keep the crowd well fed along with copious quantities of beer and soft drinks.

In the above collage, left;  The parade route bleachers at dawn already filling with overnight campers, center; one of a dozen entertainment stages stacked high with mega speakers and a  banner that proclaims; “The hottest Carnival in Mexico!” ; right; one of hundreds of street venders hawking juices and snacks. 

The noise level of celebration sends trembling reverberations throughout the city and exuberant revelers put on exotic faces and provocative costumes.

Click here for a video and collage of more, “Faces of Carnival”.

eBooks—Free Books and Readers

The 21^st century has ushered in the information age and certainly yielded a wondrous bonanza of publications, sound tracks and videos many of which are free along with all the computer programs you will need to make them usable on your digital devices.

Kindle for PC free from Amazon books http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

Customers can check out a Kindle book online through a U.S. library and read it on the free Kindle for PC app.

Free eBook Collections

These books can be read on many devices and in many formats.  There are over 2 million titles to choose from.   Amazon provides a list of many good sources for eBooks.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/b/?node=2245146011

Adobe Digital Editions

http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/

Free eBooks

Sample eBook library  http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/library/

Check out the Adobe Digital Editions Library, where you can browse and download free eBooks and digital magazines, including full-length novels and works of nonfiction.  With a membership in a U.S. library, you can check out online many eBooks and read them in the Adobe Digital Editions reader.

Nook from Barnes and Noble

Download the Free NOOK app for PC. Over a million eBooks, newspapers, magazines, and thousands of free eBooks just a touch away.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nook-for-pc/379002322/

Project Gutenberg has 36000 free eBooks for Kindle, Android, iPad, iPhone.

http://www.gutenberg.org/

iBooks; If you have an Apple device such as iPad or iPod, you may download through the iBook store many free books. (You MUST have their device.)

Calibre - eBook mangement

Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books.

http://calibre-ebook.com/

Audio books - Free

You can download free audio books from these sites and listen via your computer or transfer to an mp3 device.

http://librivox.org/

http://www.archive.org/index.php

With a membership in a library in the U.S., you can borrow and download audio books. 

My Books and Short Stories  - Some are free

Click here.

Yucatán’s Magic – Mérida Side Trips: Treasures of Mayab

Finally the book for traveling adventurers who want to see more than just trinket shops and crowded tourist traps has arrived:

Just launched — our new book, Yucatán’s Magic – Mérida Side Trips: Treasures of Mayab

–Built one stone at a time like the Mayan pyramids–

Over a quarter of a century of inspired exploration and recording of our travels in captioned photo stories has led my wife and me to compile an impressive collection of outings that are the foundation for this book, built one story at a time.

We present the best of the best after over twenty-five years; places, excursions, and outings. Each place we have visited we liked for different reasons; tranquility, history, view of village life, and connect with the Maya past and present, change of scenery and a look at a uniquely distinctive region. 

Available for Kindle and  in paperback.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005POWVU8
Available as an EPUB e-book, click here.  
From Barnes & Nobles for Nook, click here.

Runs on fat

It is curious that with the advent of the automobile and the airplane, the bicycle is still with us. Perhaps people like the world they can see from a bike, or the air they breathe when they're out on a bike. Or they like the bicycle's simplicity and the precision with which it is made. Or because they like the feeling of being able to hurtle through air one minute, and saunter through a park the next, without leaving behind clouds of choking exhaust, without leaving behind so much as a footstep. ~Gurdon S. Leete

Quintana Roo – The road from self-sufficiency

On a recent two month trip Jane and I became acquainted with the shopping in Tulum.

At the “Pool” produce/vegetable market, we found all under one roof things we scour Mérida for with its one million population.

Our curiosities led us to this story.

This diesel monster truck deadheads without cargo from Tulum to the Valley of Mexico, a distance of 1,000 miles or 1,500 kilometers in 30 hours, burning over 2,000 liters of fuel and returning with 28 tons of produce. This trip is made twice weekly in the high tourist season and only supplies the needs of one customer.

At the time Quintana Roo became a state there were no food imports and the people were completely self sustaining…that was 37 years ago.

By an ironic and twisted fickle turn of fate the Maya of Quintana Roo, México staved off the Spanish for 400 plus years because of one man, Gonzalo Gurerrero.

Read his story…link. http://www.bicycleyucatan.com/gonzaloguerrerochetumal.html

The Maya of Quintana Roo remained independent and self-sustaining. Land belonged to those who worked it…it was simple. Not like their Mayan brethren in adjacent Yucatán under the oppressive jack-boot of the “hacenderos” or Spanish hacienda owners who took their land, plundered their spiritual heritage and impoverished them into servitude.

Quintana Roo was a pristine tropical paradise abounding in seafood, dense tropical jungles of exotic flora and fauna and scarcely any infrastructure…that was then.   

October 8^th, 1974, this all changed forever when Quintana Roo became the 30^th state in México and the “federal land registry” established ownership with property perimeters.  When Quintana Roo first became a state it was seldom visited, had nearly no paved roads and tourism was unheard of outside of the newly created resort town of Cancún. Besides being undeveloped it was a smugglers paradise for clandestine merchandise that strangely found its way into Mexico by night.

Now the land grab would begin in earnest.   

Not until the 1970’s were highways built and Quintana Roo became recognized as one of the most beautiful resort areas in the world.

In 2011, just 37 years later, the pristine tropical forests have been stripped of their exotic timber; conch, lobster; reef fish and even the coral reef have been pillaged and plundered beyond restoration.

Infrastructure has arrived!

Airports, super highways, mega shopping malls, five star all-inclusive resorts, giant cruise ships queued up to disgorge thousands of visitors daily and land speculators, and hotel developers. Shopping plaza builders are bulldozing the jungle with no end in sight.  

Today the state is no longer self sustaining and exports are nearly non-existent.

© 2011 John M. Grimsrud