The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

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Another week off

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Wow. I take a week off and Crayton writes the web’s definitive treatise on Hot Mexican Weather Girls. This ended up being the most traffic-drawing post on this blog, ever.

I’m hoping he has a few other fun ideas up his sleeve this week. I’m still not feeling well, so I’m going to take another week off to rest.

Because umm… to be completely honest… I didn’t rest every single day last week. I cooked Indian food with Alice and went shopping at Green Corner and met up with friends for lunch. Paid for it toward the end of the week, when I was so tired, I had to sit in bed all day. This week: I PROMISE. I am not going anywhere. I’m under strict orders from Crayton. (Who is probably watching the hot Mexican weather girls at work right now.)

This week I’m going to sit on my bed with a few good books and my laptop, and watch endless episodes of The Closer, because Crayton hates that show. (He compares Kyra Sedgwick’s faux-Southern accent to fingernails on the blackboard.) Gonna watch a bunch of movies, too.

If you have any movie recommendations, let me know! I’m running low on titles.

See you in another week, hopefully healthy.

The ladies of Mexican weather forecasting

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Lesley’s husband Crayton is filling in this week with a few posts.

Allow me to introduce you to Angie González.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROLCR9LzHDg&hl=es_ES&fs=1&]

González is the afternoon weather presenter (I am going to try to avoid using the term “weathergirl” or “chica de la clima,” as they’re known around here) on Milenio, one of Mexico’s 24-hour news channels. Google doesn’t turn up much about her, except that she’s from Monterrey, like many of her female colleagues. Regias, as women from Monterrey are known, have a reputation in Mexico for exquisite beauty.

At my place of work, we have Milenio on all day long on mute, and González caps off an all-day parade of heavily made-up, scantily clad young women telling us whether to expect rain. Other networks also employ attractive women, but Milenio clearly pushes the boundaries farthest in terms of attire and invitation to ogle.

I’m accustomed to the U.S. version of the weather presenter, a guy in a suit with very white teeth and a hokey sense of humor, Willard Scott-style. But that’s not to say that the U.S. is immune or above this sort of thing. Bobbie Keith kept morale up during the Vietnam War. Jill Nicolini is a traffic reporter, but appears to serve the same purpose at New York’s WPIX (and with excellent screen presence and a good sense of humor, I must say).

Weather presenters have been around almost as long as TV. (Chicago’s Clint Youle was the first national weather presenter in the U.S. in 1949.) And people are supposed to be relatively attractive on TV. As long as that’s the case, broadcasters are going to push boundaries, especially with something like weather forecasting that doesn’t require a particularly serious or grave presence. (I think well-researched post about this weather-presenting cheesecake being more common in warm-weather climates, but I think it’s probably because those places have fewer weather disasters, like snowstorms, that might require a weather presenter with more gravitas.)

I’m not going to act like I don’t enjoy seeing González and Milenio’s other presenters appear on the screen. It would be disingenuous of me to say that. But the lengths to which Milenio has gone in its objectification are disconcerting. González is a pretty lady, but she’s also an animated person on TV and would do just fine in more professional attire. Milenio ought to cut this out.

I leave you with Chicago’s “weather bunny,” Kelly Bundy:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32YKaPxAxwA&hl=es_ES&fs=1&]

America, the land of dry hands

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Lesley’s husband Crayton is filling in this week with a few posts.

Oh how I crave your American technology. Mexico isn’t a total backwater, but every time I return to the U.S., I get the feeling I’ve stepped at least a few years into the future. Look at all those high-definition channels you guys have! Your Internet speeds are so fast! And OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HAND DRYERS?

Back when I lived in the States, oh those many months ago, public restroom hand dryers were a thing to be mocked. Everyone knew they didn’t actually dry hands. They just made them less damp, enough so that you could wipe them on your pants to finish the job.

But apparently in the past year, serious advances have been made in hand dryer technology. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Dyson Airblade.

What is this strange contraption?

Image from dysonairblade.com

The Airblade site claims that the device “literally scrapes water from hands,” which sounds painful. But all you do is dip your hands in the well and draw them out slowly as the thing basically vacuums the water off of you. BOOM. Dry hands.

I encountered the Airblade in a restroom at True Food Kitchen in Phoenix. I must have looked like an unfrozen caveman encountering this strange device, peering at its instructions skeptically, dipping my hands in gingerly. But it worked as advertised, smoothly and quietly, in about 10 seconds.

On the other side of the spectrum, but equally impressive, is the Xlerator:

ZOMG

Image from exceldryer.com

Found this bad boy at an Edwards movie theater in San Diego. Where the Airblade is delicate and refined, the Xlerator is an industrial-strength blast of air that nukes the water off your hands. Regular hand dryers feel like a summer breeze compared to this blowhard. Most impressive.

Will these technological breakthroughs change the hand dryer vs. paper towel debate? Both manufacturers claim, at least, that their devices are more energy efficent than paper towels.

Anyway, way to go America! Way to finally get those hands dry! This gives me hope that the next time I’m back home, my mother country will have tackled some other seemingly insurmountable problem. I’m thinking college football playoff.

Taking a short break…

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Haven’t told y’all this, but for the past few months I’ve been fighting a cold/ear infection that I can’t seem to shake. It goes away for a week, then comes back. This is despite me visiting doctors and taking antibiotics.

Traveling like an insane woman hasn’t helped. So starting today, I’m taking a week off to do nothing — no blogging, no running around town eating, and no cooking. Or rather, no intense cooking. Scrambling eggs is probably fine. With some sliced zucchini. But I’m not going to go on a crazy quest to create the perfect crunchy exterior on a square of grits, which is what I was doing a few days ago. (The result, if anyone cares: pan fry it for like 5 mins per side.)

Crayton will pick up some of the slack around here, and he’s already told me he has some great things to tell you about hand-dryers.

As far as the bug goes, I visited a lab this morning for a throat culture. Guessing that as soon as the docs pinpoint the bacteria, we’ll be able to nail it.

Hasta soon!

Cuenta de horrores

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

I had to go to the bank today.

Readers who have lived in Mexico just experienced an involuntary shudder of dread. It’s never fun to go to the bank, anywhere, but Mexico’s obsession with paperwork makes the experience downright hellish here.

And the thing is, my bank is actually relatively good! It’s one of the smaller ones, so there aren’t huge lines at the local branch, the people are pretty friendly, and the branch manager saw Lesley’s name on one of my forms and asked if a previous problem she had was resolved, which is like the closest I’ve ever gotten to a Jimmy Stewart, Wonderful Life-style banking experience.

(One downside of having a smaller Mexican bank: It’s harder to deliver money to anyone else. Most services in Mexico, from the electric company to a cooking class, require you to transfer money directly from your account to theirs to make a payment. This can be done through an interbank account number known as a CLABE, but for some reason, instead of just noting what their CLABE is, a lot of services will just provide a list of their account numbers at the nation’s largest banks. So for a fictional example, if I’m a client of Banco Gigante, I just look for the power company’s Banco Gigante account number on my bill and pay accordingly. It’s an intrabank transfer from one account to the other, and Banco Gigante can handle it. But if I’m a client of little Banco Chiquito, the power company probably doesn’t have a Banco Chiquito account, so I have to call the power company and ask what their Banco Gigante CLABE is before I can pay. It’s a big pain.

“Why don’t you just write a check?” you ask. HA! Checks technically exist here, but I have never seen them used. People don’t even write checks to family members. They just do bank transfers. Assuming they can figure out each other’s CLABEs. Anyway. Is this practice normal in other countries? I only know the American way, which is that we write checks, and when you get a check you assume it will clear. (Or maybe now you use Paypal, I guess.) That’s just how it’s done. But maybe the U.S. is an aberration? I do remember in India, our friend Vikas attempted to pay for a hotel with an advance bank transfer, but it didn’t go through and he ended up having to pay in cash. So there’s that.)

Even the good banks can’t get around that insatiable Mexican need, in government and in business, for clients to produce documents proving every detail of their lives. The phone bill is proof of residence, but the cable bill won’t suffice, unless you get digital phone service through your cable provider, I learned today. I also did not have an acceptable visa, not because my visa isn’t legit, but because they just don’t encounter visas like it very often. But they decided they could make an exception for me. Thanks, guys.

Once my transaction was approved in principle, the mounds of paperwork began. Banks like for you to sign, not just initial, every page of a contract. Including the copies you’ll be keeping yourself. They also like for your signatures to match as closely as possible, and they will scrutinize your handwriting like fortune-tellers to divine whether you are the same person who just signed that other page five seconds ago. (Actually the worst experience I had like that was in the tax office, where the clerk kept made me re-sign my name about five times to get my signature matching perfectly with the one in my visa.)

It took three hours to get my business done. On the plus side, they gave me free coffee.

El Super Tazón (or The Super Bowl in Mexico)

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

Wow, that was an impressive victory by Los Santos in el Super Tazón. I don’t know how to say “onside kick” in Spanish but:

“First down” = “Primer diez”
“Second down” = “Segunda oportunidad”
“Touchdown” = “Anotación”

Interestingly, Mexico has four different ways to watch the Super Bowl. You can watch on one of the two national broadcast networks, Televisa and TV Azteca, and on two cable networks, ESPN and Fox Sports. No matter what you watched last night, El Who’s halftime performance was weird, with the vocals out of sync with the video. We chose Fox Sports for the broadcast. The announcers, who called the game from a studio with occasional “color” feeds by cellphone from a guy who was actually in Miami, just seemed a little more knowledgeable than the rest.

American football (as opposed to “football,” which is soccer, guys) is quite popular in Mexico. In my first year in el DF, the Steelers seemed to me to be the most popular team based on the jerseys I saw, so I’ll be interested to see if that changes now that we have a new champion. The Cowboys are perennially popular, along with the Pats and the Broncos. I’ve spotted a good number of jerseys of my team, the Bears. I think the north of Mexico is pretty exclusively Cowboys territory, but the capital is a little more diverse.

Someone once told me that the Steelers – the Acereros – are popular in Mexico because the NFL first started broadcasting in the country in the 1970s, when the Steelers were pretty much everything one would want in a football team.

I ‘ve posted a bit before about how to watch American football in Mexico. You can get the Sunday Ticket here if you are able to get a satellite TV receiver. There’s no (legal) way to do it over the Internet here, though you can sign up for Internet broadcasts in other countries further away from the U.S.

That’s where the NBA has the NFL beat.  I’m addicted to International League Pass, the gateway to U.S. professional basketball. I can watch my Phoenix Suns play every night, along with every other game in the league. Thanks, Internet!

OK, i just checked. “Onside kick” is “patada corta.” Now you know.

(Oh! I almost forgot! Some people like to watch the Super Bowl just for commercials! Not so much in Mexico, where there are just regular commercials for cars and such, nothing special. To watch the Real Super Bowl Commercials, expats must rely on the Internet once again. Pass the guacamole!)

Programming notes

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While Lesley’s studying at an ashram in India, her husband Crayton is guest-posting. Please be kind to him.

First off, India was a blast, and I’m not going to say a whole lot more about it because I know Lesley will have lots to tell you. I can confirm she’s arrived safely at the ashram, and I can’t wait to see how it goes for her.

(OK, one India- and cooking-related thing and it’s a total SPOILER ALERT for this blog – I got through Mexican airport customs screening with our entire inventory of recently acquired weird Indian spices and teas and stuff. This is great news, since the Mexican customs agents can be somewhat arbitrary about confiscating stuff, like the time they took Lesley’s quinoa because it was “seeds.” Do you know what this means? It means that Lesley will have all-new strange ingredients to experiment with! And she will inevitably put them in tacos! Stay tuned.)

So now here’s our chance to talk amongst ourselves. Over the next couple of weeks, this blog will have much less in the way of food-related content and probably a good bit more about beer and sports. But I’m open to suggestion! Any specific male-perspective-type questions you have about Mexico?