Hotel Laffayette Guadalajara

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This weekend I finally got round to seeing some live football in Mexico. I'd been meaning to go for ages but in the end this was a game worth waiting for. It was "El Clasico" - the local derby between Guadalajara's two biggest teams, Atlas and Chivas. I went with Isobel and Oswaldo, one of our Mexican friends who had taken us to Lake Chapala a few weeks ago. <br><br>Estadio Jalisco is a really impressive 70,000 capacity ...

... in the next blog post, once I collect all the fantastic picture people took last weekend. <br> Meanwhile, I´m going to share an aspect of Guadalajara that I´m particularly enamoured with: street life. Unlike back home, streets here are more than just a conveyance from one place to another. They house a vibrant informal economy, peddlers of everything from windshield wipers, 30 ...

... second I was about to grasp it. Looking down I was confronted by the biggest insect I have ever seen in my life! At first I had no idea what it was, but my American friends recognised it as a Praying Mantis from its distinctive posture. It had a fearsome leap but eventually we managed to trap the beast in a glass and release it into the shrubs outside. <br><br>I could sleep easy again. Or so i thought.<br><br>The next night I was awoken by a tickling sensation as ...

... of Tequila and Mariachis it is still a distinctly Mexican city.<br><br>On the first weekend I took a walk with Isobel and a few of the Americans down the railway tracks near our house. After about half a mile we reached a shanty town next to the line, where we spoke with a few of the local inhabitants. One was a former gang member from East Los Angeles, who had been deported from America and was living estranged from his family there. His story was just one of many ...

... consisted of a plate of lettuce with four slices of cucumber on top and a few dashes of avocado on the side. That was it. No dressing or anything. You could tell a Mexican salad would be awful. <br> I was staying in a suburb of which I have forgotten the name but it is Guadalajara&#8217;s artistic capital. Today I had no time for art, I had to buy a new lock (left my last one in New York), get a dictionary and have my barnet cut. I found the lock in some markets, the ...

... clothes, but quickly realized all I was capable of was lying in the grass, oozing snot. That's how I've come to miss two long runs in a row, and have started to think that it might not be realistic or wise to attempt the Guadalajara Marathon on October 19th. I have a little notebook where I clip out pictures, quotes, and write about my training. One of the first things I wrote in it was this: "You'll know you're a ...

... picked me up with her friend Santiago and we went to see the Man On Fire painting in what used ot be an orphanage...then we went to the "San Juan" markets, or "Saint Johnny" which has everything you could possibly think of... I bought a bag and some shoes. We were tough bargainers. We had lunch there, enchiladas. Then into the main zocalo of Gdl to see the theatre (a copy of one in Paris) and the cathedral... it's so beautiful, everywhere you look is a big ...

... plaza with a building between us and the governor's palace). We ended the night at a little salsa bar with a bunch of international students from the Tec. The next day it was shopping in the morning with the girls, lunch with the group, the more market shopping with the boys in the afternoon. That night we hung out at their hostel, then off to a disco. Sunday morning consisted of high noon mass at the ...

... wouldn't fit. Anyway, at 5 in the morning it was reasonably quiet, so we went to the station which was supposed to be nearest a cheap hotel. The hotel wasn't where our Let's Go guidebook said it was; maps in that thing are unreliable beyond ridiculous, so we got a little night tour of the backstreets. Garbage everywhere. The street were drowning in filth, heaps and piles of it. We found our hotel and crashed for a few hours, and when we hit the streets again around ...