Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

The sulphur smell that occasionally wafts from the seaweed piles along the beach can be offputting, but I grew up in a farmhouse at the bottom of a gently sloping cattle pasture, so I've lived through worse. Cows do not cease urinating in the winter, but in the winter much of it freezes on the surface rather than soaking into the ground and gradually absorbing. The end effect of that is that in the spring, as the yellow snow melts, literally rivers of urine would flow across our front yard, and the water coming out of our showers and taps turned yellow for weeks.

So let me be real clear — I've got no complaints about the occasional kelpstink. These days I get up, relax for a while, walk along the beach to my “office” and am on the same sort of highspeed connection I enjoyed in the Toronto apartment. My cost of living is dropping to quite literally a third of what I had been spending, and my stress and “must do drugs now” levels are certainly improving. If you're a programmer, web designer, or other potentially telecomputing worker, consider these options. Hell, you could live in a resort down here for the cost of having an apartment in Boston or New York or Toronto.

Now that I'm a little farther from the long legal arm of Studex™ I'm going to start finally prepping my ear piercing gun review article (pros and cons — it's not all bad… just mostly). Above is a picture of their “piercing” stud for things like navels. In our testing it was totally useless (as any piercer can tell you just from looking at it), but that will be expanded on in detail in the article.

I was a little worried about getting into Mexico. Not so much gaining entry — although there's always the long shot that some psycho anti-fan of BME calls the border officials and makes fake claims about me (sadly, it wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened). I knew we should be allowed in — all our paperwork was in order (proof of foreign income, bank records, rental agreements, and so on) — but as much as you're allowed to stay for six months as a tourist (I can work on stuff for BME, DroidMetamorph, and so on, but I can't go working for a Mexican company of course), you're not really supposed to bring in this much computing hardware without importing it (and paying 17%).

Luckily it really was just a matter of walking up to a desk, getting a stamp, and being waved through. I think I could have brought double this much stuff if I'd chosen to. It wasn't until we were actually in La Paz's airport (we'd already cleared customs and immigration in Mexico City) that what appeared to be military police asked to inspect our big steamer trunk (and nothing else). They were very friendly though, never felt threatening in any way, poked around a minute, and let us head on.

The only thing so far that makes me nervous about Mexico is this Napoleonic Justice thing… the idea as I understand it is that instead of being innocent until proved guilty, you're guilty until proved innocent. I don't know if I dislike that idea as someone who's not always been on the right side of the law, or as someone who's got a general lust for justice… In relation to the first half of that, it's my feeling that if breaking a law doesn't hurt anyone (sodomy laws, whatever), then it is not a just law. That said, I think I'll tolerate a few of those and have no interest whatsoever in going to a Mexican prison.

Cold turkey!

For the first week we're staying in a resort hotel about five minutes from downtown La Paz. It's only a hundred dollars a night for a large suite with a big bedroom, balcony, living room, and kitchen. In the pictures above you can see the view from our balcony looking over the bay and into La Paz, the interior of the hotel's lounging areas, and of the earthquake warning sign outside our door. I'm doing my programming on my big laptop with a second as backup. The rooms here have slow telephone internet access but there's a business center with a LAN they don't mind me plugging into.

The only real “problem” so far is that literally nothing I've seen to eat other than slices of melon are vegan. Everything is very heavy on the egg, dairy, and meat… So I've got a few days of working (I have to do a feature article, and a major code overhaul by the first, to say nothing of a major BME update, although that'll likely go up on the 3rd) on beans and rice or whatever they can improvise. Not that it's that different anywhere else (and BCS is supposed to be the easiest part of Mexico to eat vegan in).

Other than that, and Rachel told me I shouldn't admit this because it makes me look like an idiot, but I thought people might be interested in my racial perceptions. Even though it's very racially diverse, especially in the metropolitan areas, Canada has a virtually zero Hispanic population. In the short term my brain's neural nets are cataloging crowds of people as Asiatic in origin (although my conscious brain overrides that before you start thinking I'm totally stupid). I don't imagine that will go on for more than a couple days, but it's really totally weird watching someone shift races in front of your eyes!

The other racial observation is that the more indigenous blood a person seems to have the poorer they appear to be, and the wealthier they seem, the more European they appear… Isn't it odd how the original “owners” of the land always seem to get shortchanged? But I suppose that's the same everywhere in the world, isn't it?