The Guadalajara Reporter
Guadalajara's Largest English Newspaper
November is Jaguar month, and the 29th is International Jaguar Day. To celebrate the occasion properly, Mexico’s Alianza Jaguar is inaugurating a photo exhibit the night before, at the Tierra Tropical Beach Club in the town of San Francisco—popularly known as San Pancho—in Nayarit.
The opening gong for the age of international trade was struck in 1522 when Juan Sebastián Elcano succeeded in sailing around the world. Elcano’s coat of arms bears a talking globe which says, in Latin, “you were the first to encircle me.”
Trekking is a popular activity worldwide, with some trails, like the Pacific Crest Trail in the United States, attracting nearly a million visitors annually. While Mexico boasts countless long-distance trails, very few have been developed specifically for sport tourism.
While school systems around the world debate whether children or teachers should use AI, Guadalajara’s award-winning Instituto México Inglés (IMI) has already embraced Artificial Intelligence in its educational programs. In fact, the school was one of the first in Mexico to take the plunge.
In 2015, IMI began replacing traditional textbooks, teachers and curricula with iPads, coaches and a monthly challenge that turns students into investigators and researchers.
“We call them coaches because we want them to act like sports coaches,” explains IMI Director Luis Medina. “Sports coaches don’t do the push-ups for you or play the game for you. They’re there to support you, but you’re the one playing the game.”
Every morning, the children at IMI check their daily instructions, and their coach tells them what they’ll be working on that day. Then, it’s all hands on deck.
Medina explains that AI has been integrated into the program thanks to Google, which recently launched a version of its Gemini program designed for students under the age of 13.
“Each student now has their own specialized virtual assistant,” he says. “If a student didn’t understand something their coach explained in math, they can go to their ‘Math Gem,’ and the Gem will explain everything. And of course, the student can converse with the AI as if it were a person. The Gem is instructed: ‘You are an expert in math for third-grade students. Your job is to help them.’”
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September 19, 1985. I was all alone, sleep-testing a house I hoped to buy.
7:19 a.m. Strange squeaking sounds awoke me. The noise was coming from the doors. Every door in the house was swinging back and forth, and apparently, all their hinges needed oiling.
I sat up and looked out the window. Trees were swaying to and fro …
What’s it like to explore caves in Mexico? Here’s a story from 2006 that gives you an authentic answer—without pulling any punches.
While most people love to spend Semana Santa at the beach, members of Zotz—then Guadalajara’s only club dedicated to cave exploration—packed up their ropes, cable ladders, and helmets and headed for the pine-covered hills of Dos Aguas in the neighboring state of Michoacán. Zotz means bat in Mayan, and indeed, one would have to be a bit batty to vacation in Dos Aguas, a place truly in the middle of nowhere. It lies about 100 kilometers southeast of Colima City and is reachable only via chokingly dusty dirt roads that zigzag up and down mountains around 2,500 meters high.
By the time the last VW Beetle in the world rolled off the assembly line in Puebla in 2003, the Vocho, as it is still fondly called, had become a beloved icon throughout Mexico. One of the events that elevated the curvy sedan into the public eye was the unforgettable day a little white Vocho—equipped with a 30-centimeter propeller—crossed Lake Chapala.
