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Featured Article #1

At Tamba Juice in Progreso, the Customer is King

The dearth of good things to eat and drink in Progreso has prompted many a ranting post on this site. The weather’s getting sweltering, and that too contributes to our huddling in the office, grumbling and sticky. Reader and fellow Brooklyn refugee Missy suggested that we to try the newest spot in Progreso, Tamba Juice, […]

Jillian | May 5th, 2008 | Continued

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Featured Article #2

No Direction Home

It’s a very simple question, or it should be, and the answer was always automatic. Perhaps you pause before you state your age or invert the last four digits of your home and mobile phone numbers, but your home address you don’t forget. We’ve lived in Mexico for a year and a half and I […]

Jillian | March 24th, 2008 | Continued

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Featured Article #3

Building Community with the New Yolisto

About a year ago, we launched a website called, “Yolisto,” which aimed to be a kind of Craigslist-inspired community classified advertising website for residents of the Yucatan. The initial response was quite positive, earning us a few posts and even a shoutout on Yucatan Living. The site worked well, and people seemed happy to have the […]

Malcolm | March 4th, 2008 | Continued

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Featured Article #4

Another Hungry Mouth to Feed in Progreso

We live at the beach and work in a funky little port town. While Merida is cool and cosmopolitan, and capable of satisfying almost every base consumer desire, out here you have to be craftier. If you’re looking for random foodstuffs from home, such as Skippy peanut butter, Almond Joy bars, Heinz cocktail sauce, Chunky […]

Jillian | February 20th, 2008 | Continued

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Featured Article #5

La Tratto, Dehydration, Star Medica, & You: A Cautionary Tale

This article was supposed to be a review of La Tratto restaurant, the hip Italian eatery that makes up part of the trifecta in the Trotter family empire of restaurants, so let’s start there and pretend that the evening progressed normally.
La Tratto is located at #479C on the Prolognacion de Montejo, between the glorieta with the […]

Malcolm | February 12th, 2008 | Continued

About this Site

We’re Malcolm and Jillian, two young Americans who decided against waiting until retirement to bail out on America, hit the road, and live out our dreams. Our blog has been around for a couple of years now, and a lot has changed. Here’s how we introduced ourselves to the world way back in October 2005, when […]

Other Recent Articles

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What You Get For…$50.00 Pesos

1 banana
1 cantaloupe
1 mamey
1 pineapple
2 mangoes
7 ciruelas (tiny plums)
8 limes
1 coco, bien fria, with straw
Everything but the sipping coconut came from the Progreso mercado. The Ciruelas pictured are sweet and amazing but others I sampled, with yellow skin, were more sour and hard. Mamey is an acquired taste, to mine like cream pie and Jergen’s […]

9May2008 | Jillian | 1 comment | Continued
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Consider Your Bouche Amused

After dropping off the Jeep for another round with Jose Ricardo we were hurrying out of town as usual and realized we had no reason to get back to the beach. Malcolm suggested we stop at the new “Asiatic” restarant in the Blockbuster/Makeup Store plaza that I’d noticed at least a month ago. It was […]

8May2008 | Jillian | 3 comments | Continued
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When I Was Red

On or about Summer 1999 I was a Communist for a long time. To get a sense of what constituted a serious commitment of passionate activity, imagine a pie chart of my life at this age with 33% dedicated to reading; 33% dedicated to drinking; 33% dedicated to pondering/wandering/moping and 1% dedicated to considering […]

1May2008 | Jillian | 5 comments | Continued
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It’s all zipwires and peanut butter for those people like 365 days a year

Despite their not having to hold jobs, pay taxes, dress themselves, worry about homeowners insurance, mortgage rates, recession or cholesterol children are going to enjoy a day of grace all day today in Mexico and tomorrow in many more countries around the globe.
If by some chance you are a child who has stumbled across this […]

30Apr2008 | Jillian | 4 comments | Continued
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Welcome to the Gringo House

Sometimes I feel a bit as if we are on display in our office. We’re not in here flinging poop and pleasuring ourselves; we’re just working. Sitting at our workstation, Malcolm at his big boy table and me at my trundle desk, we type, we grimace, we laugh ,we head-scratch, we wait under headphones and […]

25Apr2008 | Jillian | 2 comments | Continued
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Baryshnikov’s Sister

When you were a kid there were probably many occasions when you were tasked to draw your dream house. I distinctly remember being in a sunny CCD classroom overlooking the lawn with the St Mary statue and sketching an ideal dwelling of grand proportion. I still don’t understand the relationship between Jesus and having a […]

24Apr2008 | Jillian | 0 comments | Continued
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Did you know?

That the word Paramus comes from a Native American word meaning “land of the wild turkey” or “place of fertile soil”? Of course you didn’t dum-dumb.
I  also now know that Paramus saw some action during the Revolutionary War, it once boasted the world’s largest and brightest drive-in movie screen and that fair city is birthplace […]

22Apr2008 | Jillian | 4 comments | Continued
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What’s For Dinner, Dropped-in?

 
Malcolm has demanded meatballs and buttered noodles, like the child king of Paramus.

22Apr2008 | Jillian | 0 comments | Continued
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The Opposite of Joiners

It’s not that we don’t like you it’s just that we like each other more. We had the best of intentions of meeting other blogging types this weekend on Isla Mujeres, and yet…we stayed close to home. Very close. Within an inch of home’s life. The very epicenter of home: we couched. We watched movies, […]

21Apr2008 | Jillian | 1 comment | Continued
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Flash Review: La Tratto Revisted Without Seizure

Small martinis half price; gray pasta, pensioners; carpaccio plate clean; cheap al fresco.

17Apr2008 | Jillian | 0 comments | Continued
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Expatriation is Freedom (But Not the Way You Think)

During a Jillian-imposed viewing of Lord of the Rings last night, it dawned on me that I am perhaps happier now, living in Yucatan, than I have ever been in my life. And as that bearded dude droned on about the Fellowship, that computer-generated monster said, “my precious,” over and over again, and I drifted off into the […]

14Apr2008 | Malcolm | 6 comments | Continued
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