Et tu, Cthulhu

Since we’re leaving the country for good (or at least for a very long time), we thought it’d be nice to do the full-on tourist thing and take a bunch of pictures - actually the only time we’ve done so in the ten years I’ve lived here - taking a little piece of Mexico with us.

So Maru and I just got back from two weeks of vacations non-essential travel. We’ve had an excellent time, spending the first week in the northern states of Chihuahua and Sinaloa - taking the Chepe train through Copper Canyon territory and reaching an altitude of about 2600m - and the second week on the southern island of Cozumel, scuba diving down to -8m.

The influenza outbreak took us by surprise - we’ve passed through the Mexico City airport three times since the 18th of April, and hope to do so again in another couple of days - but we are apparently both healthy at this point. It’d be a bummer if our flight out gets cancelled or - even worse - if we’re quarantined in Europe, though. Fortunately, the way things are looking now, there isn’t a huge chance of that happening.

On the upside, we had Cozumel almost to ourselves (we were referred to as “the only two tourists left on the island” at least once), as people kept leaving and no more were arriving. I feel bad for anyone working in the tourist business here, though, especially our friend Hilda who lent us her battered charming open VW beetle so we could cruise around the island in style.

One of the rivers winding through the Copper Canyon

SUSE rocks (I suspect Bryen will love this)

 Apparently, our hotel in El Fuerte was once the ranch where Don Diego de la Vega, aka El Zorro, grew up. I had no idea!

Ghost island Cozumel

Can you believe they actually let us through the security checkpoints dressed like this?

My talk, La comunidad GNOME para principiantes (The GNOME community for beginners), seems to have gone over well here at ENLi 2008 (the 2008 National Linux Meeting in Puebla, Mexico), with a big audience and interesting followup questions. The slides are available as a collection of plain PNG and JPEG images in a zip archive (use the link above).

I’m having an excellent time. Will post some pictures from the conference later.

Update: Pictures.

My wonderful audience

 I clearly didn’t bring enough openSUSE discs

Por primera vez Magos Herrera viene a Xalapa. Maru está organizando el evento, que será en el Teatro del Estado el sábado 3 de Mayo a las 8 PM. Date cuenta, es el sábado que viene!

Todavía hay boletos, se están vendiendo en la taquilla del teatro - 350 pesos numerado y 250 general. Parte de las ganancias van a Amigos de los Animales, A.C.

No faltes!

Update for the English-monolingual brigade: The post is about the jazz concert my wife is organizing in Xalapa this coming weekend. If you really can’t stand languages other than your own, and you have a feed reader that can filter by tags, you can filter out my posts tagged “In Spanish” and “In Norwegian”. Thank you.

It’s that time of year again, which means I have to renew my Mexican FM2 visa. Everything was going smoothly until the immigrations clerk asked for the “founding declaration” of Novell and a list of all its employees (!). I provided the former document last year, so it should have already been in their files, and the latter document is not on the official list of required paperwork that I was given.

To top it off, these are confidential documents that Novell de Mexico cannot release to me, so the immigrations office has to make an official letter requesting it. Hopefully the added potential for screwups resulting from this process won’t be realized.

Today, most Mexicans celebrate the “Día de los Reyes Magos”, which loosely translates to “Three Kings Day“. Kids get their “Christmas” gifts today, in line with the Bible’s tale of the baby Jésus and the Three Kings. More importantly (for the grown-up atheists among us), there’s also delicious cake to be had - it’s called rosca and is a kind of sweet bread with dried fruit and a little bit of rum in it.

Maru’s mom makes this cake every year, and this year Maru decided for the first time to try her hand at making her own. She turned out five totally awesome roscas, of which we’ve only managed to consume two so far - with a little help from our friends.