By Jeanine Lee Kitchel I feel like I’m becoming a connoisseur of calamities. And believe me, I’m not happy about it. In 1989, I lived through the Loma Prieta quake disaster (the earthquake that stopped the World Series) and in 2005 Wilma came calling at our door, literally. We live on the beach in Puerto [...]

By Jeanine Lee Kitchel Novedades/Cancun’s Saturday headline was disturbing. In encapsulated question marks, it read: Are Police Behind The Executions? The executions, of course, being those of the (now) four people linked to smuggling allegations whose bodies were found this week in Cancun. The last three victims, all Mexican, were found Friday by following red [...]

By Jeanine Lee Kitchel All Mayaphiles will love the August issue of National Geographic which not only gives insight as to why the culture declined but explains how the arrival of a warlord from the west may have affected Maya civilization. New clues gleaned from another decade of deciphering Maya monuments point to Fire Is [...]

By Jeanine Lee Kitchel With government owned Pemex the only show for in town for buying gas, you’re pretty much stuck with a one-cost price tag, everywhere. But at about 60 cents per liter, that breakdown brings gas here to roughly $2.45 USD per gallon, cheap by world standards. A few months ago, Novedades/Cancun reported [...]

By Jeanine Lee Kitchel Was there a Margarita behind the margarita? Of course. But contrary to what you may have imagined, this woman was not a Mexican beauty but instead a fledgling Hollywood starlet. And although other Margarita namesakes have surfaced and vied for this distinction, this starlet has all the trappings of the real [...]

  By Jeanine Lee Kitchel   Although Pakal, the great Mayan ruler of Palenque, lived far from Quintana Roo (now synomynous with the Riviera Maya) his neighboring southern kingdom in Chiapas had much in common with the Maya of the Northern Yucatan Peninsula. And if Pakal could see the changes that have challenged this once [...]

By Jeanine Lee Kitchel It’s no secret that I was seduced by Mexico 20 some years ago when I was traipsing around south of the border. Mexico offered romance, escapism, excitement. Mexico was then (and still is) a state of mind. It was my Neverland. I had photos of Mexico beaches, long and windswept, tacked [...]