Giramonda.com

I can’t say Mind Scraps will be too interesting for the next few days. I’m not doing much more than plugging away at the hundreds of photos from my trip into the Copper Canyon (Barranca del Cobre). View the first of several batches on Flickr:

Arrived in Chihuahua, Mexico by El Chepe (Chihuahua Pacifico train) from my trip to the Barrancas del Cobre late last night. The train chugs on as desert slowly morphs into a sloping land of strange rock formations – some eerily resemble petrified spirits of eras past. Then, the rises and dips become more drastic and [...]

All the houses and buildings here in Chihuahua are made of concrete. I’m familiar with concrete being abundant, as it is in Honduras and Guatemala, but I feel like the two latter still had some wooden and rock buildings scattered about the concrete masses. Here… it’s all concrete. A giant concrete slab in the middle [...]

01.03.10
The nights are chillier than I anticipated. It takes a bit of will-power for me to unearth myself from my burrow each morning. I sleep on an extra mattress on the floor, layered in clothes and buried in blankets – head and all. I seem to be much colder than anyone else though. What’s up [...]

25.02.10
Spin Pizza with Bob. First, Sonoma salad complete with red leaf, spinach, raisins, goat cheese, grapes, apples, glazed pecans and Blood Orange vinaigrette. My caramelized onion and goat cheese pizza was sweet and savory all at once. Washed down the pizza with house Chianti. An excellent little wine and pizza joint in Kansas City, MO.
Karlos [...]

In the recesses of the Sierra Madre Mountains in Northwestern Mexico lies the Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon), a natural wonder considered to be yet more spectacular and raw than the Grand Canyon. It is in the gorges, twists and bends of the Barranca del Cobre that the Tarahumara keep their ancient customs and rituals [...]

They observe the ceremonies.
They protect the forest.
They run.
“At the heart of who they are is running,” Will Harlan.
“Where we see giving as something extra or something that you should get praise for, to the Rarámuri, giving is just so ingrained in who they are that it’s not something that you have to go out of [...]

Bob came by for lunch. He has treated me several times so this time I cooked him a veggie stir-fry with my infamous salad. Of course, I’ve learned yet more about Bob and his most interesting life pursuits. Looking forward to kicking it with him this weekend before I go.
***
Had an invigorating swim and sauna [...]

I keep coming back to this idea of posting every day. Still working on making it stick. I tend to have two posting seasons: flood season and dry season. Ha. But, after discovering the journal entries from my first trip abroad in Italy (which I just published in Unearthing Firsts), I am once again inspired [...]

It was my first experience abroad. July 2004. Eighteen going on nineteen. Finally travelling to the country of which I had always dreamed. I scribbled much less than I experienced. But, there are some nuggets of reflection to enjoy from my one month studying abroad in Bergamo, Italy:
July 03 2004
Charming Italian man with piercing blue [...]