Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital of Chiapas, is not one of Mexico’s great colonial cities loaded with old-style charm and historic architecture, traditional images to provide an irresistible draw to tourists – much to its regret. Every so often, Chiapas’ politicians and state officials – nearly all of whom live in Tuxtla – express a vague annoyance […]
Remember the End of the World? Three years ago, in December 2012, you couldn’t avoid it. Every media outlet in the world had at least some half-garbled report about how the ancient Mayans had some prophecy that their calendar would end on 21 December 2012, and that this would mean a global finale. The History and […]
Catch Cuba while it’s still there, people say… Get a taste of the island and its revolutionary quirks before the opening-up of relations with the USA sweeps all its strange tropical-Soviet otherworldliness away, and it becomes just like any other country, like… (what? In this part of the world, maybe, the Dominican Republic, that shining success story). Cuba […]
You first see it as you come down a long slope, rising up ahead of you out of the sunflower fields of Andalusia like a CGI-created palace in some post-Tolkien fantasy movie. Closer up, its gleaming maroon-and-white domes and eight strange towers have a look that’s more a mix of local Andaluz baroque, Buddhist stupas, […]
In ancient mythology the Strait of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy was the home of Scylla and Charybdis, two fearsome monsters of the kind the Greeks loved to come up with – both were female, and both, at least in several versions of their story, had previously been renowned beauties, who were turned into scabrous horrors […]
Ruddy-black slices of sausage stand neatly piled up across plate after plate on long tables, in a sports hall on a Saturday morning in mid-March. Around 10am little groups of four or five people take their seats at one end of each table, and arrange their papers, and their forks. They have work to do, […]
One in particular stands out among several unusual instructions given to new arrivals renting cars at Iceland’s Keflavik airport. ‘Please, always park your car facing the wind’, says the impeccably charming, smiling woman behind the desk, ‘never with your back to it’. Apparently, they have a significant problem with tourists who ignore this request, park […]
Es como París… It’s like Paris… I first heard this from an Argentinian about Buenos Aires years ago, long before I ever had the chance to go there. And it’s odd to see, now that I have been, how often Argentinians in general and Porteños, Buenos Aires natives, in particular still bring up this old image […]
Morecambe is a fading, or probably now better to say faded, old seaside town on the Lancashire coast of northwest England – it seems required to say this to start off with, because even in the south of England a town like this is probably more remote than Machu Picchu or Marrakesh, or maybe just […]
Went to Manchester a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in years. And I was amazed: what’s amazing is just how new so much of it is, and how shiny new its new bits are. Go to Salford Quays (OK, not technically Manchester, but obviously part of the same entity) and you enter […]
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