Rainstorm

[Enlarge] Out the window of the bus on the way to Celaya

A week ago, I was riding the Primera Plus bus into Celaya from Morelia on my way to San Miguel de Allende. The weather is changing now and a dramatic thunderstorm was forming as we traveled around the lakes in our route. I enjoy these rides, they are my window into Mexico. I don’t have to worry about the trucks or traffic – I just sit back, listen to podcasts, watch movies, or “rest my eyes” for a few hours as we wind our way through the mountains and fields of the Bajio.

I see a lot of beautiful things, but on a bus you can’t stop and capture them like you might in a car. But, truth be told, there aren’t a lot of places to pull off the roads either. I didn’t expect much of these fotos. The lighting was bad, the bus was jerking along the road – a 40 mph or so behind a truck and 60 or so ahead of them. Somehow my little Pentax digital managed to capture a great range of scale under the worst of conditions and some fotos that reflect the moment as I saw it flashing by me.

The detail in these is a little hard to grasp at the scale I use for my gallery and fotoblog – but I think I will have to consider getting them nicely printed one of these days. Nice to know you can get something interesting when the opportunity comes. You will find the whole set in the Commuting pages of the gallery.

wp:thumb src=”IMGP1209.jpg” cap=”Some young friends join me for a few minutes on the local bus from Celeya to San Miguel de Allende.”—> ->

Flying

[Enlarge] Do you suppose airport lounge chairs dream about traveling?

I am writing this from the airport in Mexico City as I wait for my AeroMar flight to Morelia. I now have an iRiver MP3 player and in the last minute before I left, I threw a few old radio programs on the player, determined to make use of it during the trip even though I really didn’t have time to put together a formal playlist.

So, I was flying over Mexico on a flight that stopped in the ‘new’ resort town of San Jose Del Cabo on its way to Mexico City as I was listening to an episode of the Adventures of Harry Lime titled The Mexican Hat Trick. The plane was brand new, the passengers were mostly middle-class US tourists, and I am using some very current technology to listen to a radio drama from more than fifty years ago that is supposed to be taking place in Leon, Guanajuato – a city only 45 minutes from our home in Mexico.

In this episode, Leon is described as a ‘sleepy Mexican village’ with one road, one hotel and one church with only one bell. Having been to Leon several times, I can tell you that even one hundred years ago, Leon would not have been recognizable from that description. But it was a good distraction, just the same, from the noise of the jet engines and the people next to me that were deeply engrossed in discussing the lives of movie stars as portrayed by fan magazines. For a moment at least, I considered what it would be like to podcast an ‘updated’ version of Harry Lime visiting the real Leon. I had second thoughts as the husband of the couple next to me made a joke that in Mexico they have to chase the burros off the runways for the planes to land. Del Cabo is as unlikely to disturb their point of view as the podcast would be to reach an audience that made any difference.

On my way to Cueramaro, I listened to a podcast radio show from Ritmo Latino in Saipan. I had three hours of music from all over Latin America provided by a public radio show on an island way out in the Pacific. Now, I am finishing this in an Internet cafe in Cueramaro, paying a good price at 8 pesos and hour to upload some pictures to Longs for family in Sacramento and put up this online. Yes, many dimensions indeed. —>

Trabajo

[Enlarge] My first trip to Morelia from Cueramaro had some dramatic views.

With all my digital pictures on my external hard disk and a much more capable notebook available, I took a few minutes this afternoon to put a some fotos related to my work in the galleries. Commuting is a compilation of some of the views out the windows of the buses I ride from Morelia to Cueramaro and back again on weekends when I am in Mexico. It is a beautiful trip on the luxury coaches of Primera Plus with DVDs playing movies while the countryside of the Bajio rushes by.

I also put together a series of fotos with the team from Scio Consulting in Morelia. I enjoy working with this team and the work we are doing as much as anything I have done in my working life. Working with Scio is very much a part of a long time dream we have had since we started building our home in Cueramaro. You never know how these things might work out, but following our dreams has been a wonderful experience. —>