Few activities were available when Phyllis Rauch moved to the lakeside area with her late husband Georg in 1976.  “Had there been more to do, Georg probably would never have written the memoir of his World War II experiences as an Austrian-born Jew inducted into the German Army,” she says.

Humor often translates inadequately into other languages, and can even fail to connect when crossing borders into countries that share the same lexicon.

The issue of road safety has again raised its head in the wake of the death of a seven-year-old girl who was struck by a city bus that careened off the street and plowed into a group of children waiting outside a primary school.

“I was a wild child” Victoria Ryan told me one stormy Patzcuaro summer afternoon. “I was certified by the State of California as incorrigible.”

On November 21, 1564, five ships and 500 soldiers set sail from the Jalisco coastal town of Barra de Navidad under the command of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi with the ultimate goal of setting up a colony in Las Islas Filipinas, the archipelago discovered four decades earlier by Ferdinand Magellan.

Like many travelers before me, I was drawn to Mexico by its fiery and flavorsome foods. A Mexican friend in my home city of Bristol, had assured me that if I loved the burritos from the generic Tex-Mex takeaways of England, then I would be like a child in a sweetshop when I arrived in her country. My friend, Jackie, has since moved back to Mexico where her parents run a traditional restaurant in Oaxaca. I was invited to visit the restaurant last Saturday as friends and family would be celebrating her mum’s birthday via a day of delicious food followed by a 1970s-themed disco. Needless to say, I was there like greased lightning! This is the story of the delicious food that I encountered on that trip.