Monday, April 8, 2013
Huatulco Posted on April 3, 2013 by Robin March 20, 2013
Huatulco
March 20, 2013
It was around 90F when we reached our destination of Huatulco (pronounced Wha-tool-co), at the lovely daylight hour of 3 pm. A nice blow in our favor carried us in at around 9 knots. For fuel conservation, we typically keep our speed at around 7 knots. About a 30 hour passage with smooth seas. Just like we like it!
Nice flat seas
With every mile South it becomes increasingly hot and humid. Meanwhile, the number of people who speak English becomes fewer and fewer. The normal procedure when we arrive at a port/marina is to radio in, announce our arrival and receive info about the channel entrance, slip assignment, etc. Our last few arrivals have been a confusing mess when it comes to communication. Somehow we get through.
Beach Huatulco
Luckily, most harbormasters speak English but this is not so with Port Captains. Our spanish emmersion no longer compares to a toe in the shallow water. We are now swimming in the deep end. I found it funny that Pedro who spoke pretty good English and greeted us at the dock, said “slow down lay dee”. Really? You want me to slow down. Have you heard the rate the spanish language is fired at you? Pedro became a fast friend and was a big help to us.
Huatulco, though we had never heard of it, was a pleasant little town that is a vacation area for locals. The town centro is the shining star of the Mexican town. Now that we have figured that out, we try not to miss one. It would be easy to go from marina to marina without really even seeing a place. Huatulco’s centro was quaint and park like. Lots of kids playing, good shops and restaurants. We had a great wood fire pizza at a place called Mama Mia. Yes. At this point, we do look for favorite “home” foods often. No matter how good, you can only eat so many tacos.
This stop also represents the jumping off point for crossing the notorious “Gulf of Tuantepec”. You know you are embarking on something to be cautious about, when all the cruising guides contain bold warnings about a body of water and mariners and sailors up and down the dock are holding little meetings around charts and weather websites. Hype or not you don’t want to be caught off guard. We joined in, did our homework, contacted the port on the other side for a recommended departure and set out with a buddy boat. Our new friend Tom on s/v Shemya, also heading to the canal. Catch you on the other side.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Saturday, April 6, 2013
RIP Jesus ‘Chuy’ Silva Jr: Bodyboarding champion Posted: April 5, 2013 by kirisyko in Bodyboarding, Water Tags: Arica, Bodyboard, Canary Islands
RIP Jesus ‘Chuy’ Silva Jr: Bodyboarding champion
Posted: April 5, 2013 by kirisyko in Bodyboarding, WaterTags: Arica, Bodyboard, Canary Islands, International Bodyboard Association,Mexico, Puerto Escondido
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Jesus “Chuy” Silva Jr was one of the top riders on the world professional bodyboarding tour, representing not only himself but his native Mexico. He helped popularise the sport – once better-known as boogie-boarding – around the world, and not least in his home town of Puerto Escondido on Mexico’s Pacific coast.
His late father, Jesus “Chuy” Silva Sr, who died in 2009, had previously turned the Mexican resort into a magnet for “stand-up” surfers who now flock to tackle its famous pipeline, el tubo, by day and empty its bars of Tecate beer by night. While Chuy Sr was an internationally known stand-up surfing hero, Chuy Jr, at the age of four, decided to make his own mark by riding the short, rectangular bodyboard, usually on his belly, sometimes using the DK “drop-knee” technique of kneeling on the board, winning his first national event at the age of 12. Chuy Jr has died at the age of 25, not on the waves but on the motor scooter he used to get himself and his boards to the Zicatela beach in Puerto Escondido.
“Puerto Escondido is the heaviest beach break in the world,” said Rob Barber, who runs the UK’s only bodyboarding-specific school, part of the Newquay Activity Centre in Cornwall. “Waves travel through extremely deep water at great speeds and then detonate with great power on the coastal shelf, with consistent tubing waves of up to 40 feet attracting the world’s best wave riders. To Chuy, these were his home waves.”
Chuy Jr – his English-speaking friends loved saying his name because it’s pronounced Chewy – was a language teacher during the day, a bodyboarder at dawn and sunset. He was Mexican national champion in 2008 and 2009, when Mexico was one of bodyboarding’s greatest venues, and he went on to compete in world championship events of the International Bodyboarding Association, including those at Arica, Chile, and in the Canary Islands last year. His problem was in finding the sponsorship that was easily secured by his US rivals, but one of his proudest achievements came in an event in Tijuana in 2009 when he outscored the great American, Jeff Hubbard of Hawaii, the IBA world champion that year (as well as in 2006 and 2012). Silva didn’t just ride waves, he flew over them, doing back flips, rolls and “inverted airs” high above the crest.
He was born in Puerto Escondido in January 1988. “I first got into football, karate and swimming,” he said in a blog shortly before he died. His father’s reputation as a stand-up surfer was hard to follow but, having been given a boogieboard by his dad when he was four, Chuy Jr decided he could enjoy his waves better on his belly rather than his feet. Although people born near oceans had been riding makeshift planks or boards for centuries, if not millennia – notably in Polynesia – the boogieboard created by the Californian, Tom Morey, had added a sporting dimension in the 1970s. Young Chuy took to his board as though it was part of him, helped by swim fins (flippers) to give extra propulsion on the crest, face or curl of a wave.
When news of Chuy Silva’s death spread around the internet, tributes poured in from around the world. The International Bodyboarding Association wrote: “Chuy was a great personality with many friends around the world and will be remembered deeply forever… This is a sad day for bodyboarding… RIP Chuy Silva – your legacy will live on!”
His death, from head injuries sustained while coming back from a bar in the small hours, caused a massive debate in his home town, not over surfing or bodyboarding but over the safety of motor scooters. In a small town which is still largely poor despite foreign tourism, motor scooters are the equivalent of the family car, with both parents often seen with two or even three children clinging to them. Helmets are not mandatory, and are, anyway, usually beyond the family budget.
Jesus “Chuy” Silva Cabrera: professional bodyboarder: born Puerto Escondido, Mexico January 1988; died Puerto Escondido 13 January 2013.
Friday, April 5, 2013
My Spanish Notes ¿Por qué no te echas un coyotito?
My Spanish Notes
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Posted: 04 Apr 2013 08:22 PM PDT
If there's one word in Spanish that probably everyone in the US learns, it's the word siesta. I doubt that I need to explain what it means, but just to make sure no one gets left in the dark, a siesta is a nap.
 Me voy a tomar una siesta, me estoy muriendo de sueño I'm going to take a nap, I'm really sleepy Those of you who are really astute may have noticed "I'm really sleepy" is not a direct translation of "me estoy muriendo de sueño". Literally "me estoy muriendo de sueño" is "I'm dying of sleep". Sure it's understandable, but we just don't say that in English, or at least I've never heard it. OK, It's time to get back on track. Tomar una siesta is a great way to tell people you're going to grab a few winks, but you're not going to impress anybody and it's kind of boring to be honest, at least when you compare it to some of the other options you have. Let's take a look at these other options. Echarse una siesta Antes de salir a la fiesta me voy echar una siestecita para recargar pilas Before I leave for the party I'm going to take a little nap to recharge my batteries A siestecita is just a diminutive of the word siesta. Use whichever one you prefer. Now we're starting to sound a little more native. But we're not done yet, we're just getting started. Echarse un sueño Voy a echarme un sueñito I'm going to get a little sleep Sueñito is another one of those diminutives and it comes from the word sueño which officially means dream or to be sleepy. You can also use the word sueño if you're not big on diminutives. Our next phrase involves the word pestaña, which means eyelash. Me voy a echar una pestaña, estoy muy cansado I'm going to take a nap, I'm really tired And of course you can use it in it's diminutive form. Me voy a echar una pestañita de 1 horita no más I'm going to take a little nap for just an hour, no longer So far all the ways we've looked at to say we're going to lay our heads down for a little bit are pretty neutral and should be recognized by all Spanish speakers, but this next one might be exclusive to our Mexican neighbors. Echarse un coyote Ahorita que no está el jefe, me voy a echar un coyotito Since the boss isn't here right now, I'm going to take a nap ¿Por qué no te echas un coyote? Why don't you take a nap? And there you have it. Three ways to say you need to recharge those pilas and one additional way to say it if you want to sound muy Mexicano. ¡Hasta la próxima!  |
Tech May Be Whistled Language's Demise APR 5, 2013 11:30 AM ET // BY JENNIFER VIEGAS
Still from the series "In the Americas with David Yetman."
MARK SICOLI
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In some remote parts of Oaxaca, Mexico, local men can carry on whole conversations across long distances of the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range. Rather than shouting across the rugged terrain, they make themselves heard though a complex series of whistles.
Researchers suspect the whistled talk could be as old as the earliest languages. But while some young people in the Oaxacan Cuicatlán District can still speak the language, the days of the unique form of communication is likely numbered.
Modern innovations, such as cell phones and walkie-talkies, are now more commonly used for long-distance communication. And the whistled language's roots -- the Chinantec spoken language -- is also itself threatened by the more prevalent usage of Spanish. A recent research project, "Documenting Whistled Speech Among Chinantecans," aimed to study the language before it's too late.
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"Whistled speech made the local Chinantec language portable across canyons, fields and along the steep slopes where the village houses cling to the hillsides, making travel physically challenging," project leader Mark Sicoli told Discovery News.
"Such rugged, inaccessible landscapes are the types of terrain where whistled versions of spoken languages have been developed in places as far from Mexico as the Canary Islands, Africa, Greece and Turkey, New Guinea, and St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea," added Sicoli, who is an assistant professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Linguistics.
Sicoli and his team traveled to the region in order to document and archive examples of whistled conversations transcribed in written Chinantec and translated to Spanish and English.
Sicoli also developed a map navigational task, which asked one speaker to whistle directions to a second speaker to follow on a map. The successful use of the whistling demonstrated just how effective this unique form of speech can be.
Most Chinantec words turned out to have a whistled counterpart. The archive, for example, includes whistles that translate to sentences like: "Do you have any edible fungus growing in your corn field?" "Where are you going?" "What are you going to do at noon today?" and "I'm going to eat tacos for dinner tonight."
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"Due to its acoustic range, whistling can substitute for standard vocalized speech over both short and long distances, alleviating pressure on vocal chords and overcoming the difficulties of communicating long distances over difficult terrain," Sicoli explained.
A short-distance whistled "conversation" is more like regular mouth-puckered whistling, while long-distance communications may involve the sports stadium-type finger in the mouth whistling. The researchers found that the language is spoken mainly by men, although women often understand the whistled language, even if they don't speak it.
Daniel Everett, a professor of global studies and sociology at Bentley University, pointed out that "many of the world's languages may be whistled. English's limitation to consonants and vowels is a restriction to one channel of discourse, while whistled languages illustrate that human languages need not be so constrained."
Everett added, "When we study languages like these, we learn that the perimeters of human capability are more encompassing and contain more richness than we would have otherwise known."
It is unclear when whistled speech first emerged.
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"Hypothetically, whistled speech could be as old as the earliest languages," said Sicoli, adding that it could even have been a component of proto-language -- the precursor of human language used by earlier hominid species.
"Whistling itself is something that has been self-learned by at least one ape," he added. "Bonnie, a female orangutan at the National Zoo in DC, taught herself to whistle for what seems to simply be the pleasure of it. What Bonnie shows is that, anatomically, whistling would have been in the range of potential sound-making behavior of archaic Homo sapiens, including Neanderthal and earlier hominids like Homo erectus and Australopithecines."
While whistled speech is likely very old, it may be fading fast as technologies like phones and radios make it possible to communicate across long distances and as Mexico's main language, Spanish, infiltrates more of the country.
"When a language is lost, we lose knowledge of ways and content of human speech and minds that can never be recovered," he continued. "Thus parts of the puzzle of human identity and the joy of human experience remain forever hidden from us."
For a description and audio of the language, click here.
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