Colima

Here are our beautiful wives posing at our house this week at our "grub club" Jamaican dinner. We wanted to form a dinner group, but did not want to feel the pressure of calling it a "gourmet dinner group," so we settled on the prosaic title of "Grub Club." Pixie is surrounded here by Jeanne and Susan before we enjoyed our Jerk Chicken and other Jamaican delicacies.

Of course the big event for this week was our brief foray to Colima to celebrate out thirty fifth wedding anniversary. Colima is best known for its two volcanoes, one still active, nearby. Unfortunately, the weather was hot and too hazy to get a good view of the volcano, but here is a file photo of the volcanoes so you can get an idea of how impressive they are:

Colima itself is a fairly large city quite near the Pacific to the beach at nearby Manzanillo, so they don't stop. Colima has been the victim of numerous earthquakes over the years so it doesn't have the beautiful colonial buildings other Mexican cities do, although it was actually one of the earliest cities the Spanish settled. We stayed in the center of town on one of the two central plazas, saw some pre-hispanic archaelogical artifacts, and ate some wonderful Mexican food. We saw almost no gringos in Colima, quite a switch for us. Colima is famous for its Colima dogs, pottery dogs which represented the polular hairless chihuahuas which were popular then, especially as food. The indigenous people made pottery models of these dogs which they buried with people to help their way to the afterlife. Here are some photos of these well-preserved artifacts:

The plaza was beautiful and classically Mexican, surrounded by long buildings on all four sides which included restaurants and shops in the porticos. There was an ongoing chess group which drew lots of curious onlookers. We attended a band concert in the gazebo on Sunday night. You will notice one purple -haired Mexican nina in one of the photos, a rarity here. Here are more photos:

Closer to home, we have had a big event for the past few weeks. Our calle (street), Santa Margarita, has been the street from hell. It was rough and we had to drive very slowly on it to keep from scraping the bottom of the car. Everyone has been complaining about it. The crew came in a few weeks ago and has been doing the backbreaking work of fixiing our road by resetting the cobblestones. They work in the hot sun from 7-6 each day. Here's a photo of them working:

On a walk the other day, Maggie and I ran across this group of goats grazing in the road. Maggie, presumably thinking they were dogs, was anxious to meet them, but the goats were not pleased with her "friendliness."