tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4586477719725102972026-07-01T21:02:00.214-07:00Demythifying Baja since 2009The Real Tijuanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01343224926056385215noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-458647771972510297.post-48816414783349166242014-11-08T19:24:00.000-08:002014-11-10T15:28:09.619-08:00

Our initial intention was to publish profiles of the best dentists in Tijuana. That idea proved to be impracticable. There’s a lot more to being outstanding than being recommended by a tourist or a taxi driver, and those of us on The Real Tijuana simply don’t have the time or energy to vet each dentist. We will leave that project to the medical tourism groups to sort out – our Reader Service

The Real Tijuanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01343224926056385215noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-458647771972510297.post-64185265128676834762012-09-04T17:41:00.001-07:002012-09-04T17:54:31.492-07:00

text by Fernando Daniel Martínezphotos by Infobaja staff In a workshop in the Colonia 20 de Noviembre neighborhood of Tijuana filled with Canadian and German spruces, Indian rosewood, Honduran cedar, African ebony, and other rare woods, masterpieces renowned as some of the finest classical guitars in Mexico are being made. They carry the name of Fructuoso Zalapa. Zalapa comes from four

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Fernando Jordán Juárez (1920–1956) was trained as an anthropologist and worked as a journalist. In 1949, the magazine Impacto asked him to write a series of articles on the entire Baja California peninsula. That work was later collected into two books, still in print today and well worth reading. Jordán was captivated by the anthropology, sociology, and history that he found throughout the

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Dr Juan José Parcero Valdés  by Moisés Márquez An eighty-year-old woman from the United States was able to keep her leg thanks to a team of doctors from the Tijuana Institute for Regenerative Medicine who successfully introduced stem cells into an incurable lesion left by radiation therapy. The patient was treated last year at Hospital Ángeles Tijuana as part of a stem-cell study

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This company was founded in 1924 and has installed its factory and cellars in a large, attractive building made of wood faced with American cement, which gives it an appearance exactly like granite. The latest advances in industrial chemistry and sterilzation have been incorporated into the manufacturing process of this beer, the raw materials of which are barley malt from the United States,

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The state of Baja California comes up with some unusual ways to help its tourists. Toward the end of the twentieth century, it posted bilingual attorneys in the tourist areas to resolve visitors' problems free of charge. In this century it has made use of advances in telephony to give its visitors access to government officials around the clock. SecTurE, the State Secretariat of Tourism,

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The Popul Vuh teaches that humans, the gods' creation of the current Long Count cycle, were made from maize. (The creation of the previous great cycle, which was made of wood, spoke without understanding and so was condemned to spend this great cycle as monkeys.) We continue to acknowledge our origin by sustaining ourselves on tortillas, tamales, and atole even to this day, as our own Long Count

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You might be disappointed. Our advice is going to be pretty much the same as that for choosing a dentist in Outer Mongolia. On the bright side, our dentists are more plentiful and better trained than what you might encounter in Outer Mongolia. The first step in both places is to overcome the cultural discomfort of traveling for professional services beyond one’s neighborhood. “What if I pick

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Mike is one of Tijuana’s newer immigrants from the United States. He moved here during the twenty-first century. He recently found himself involved in what the law broadly refers to “human trafficking”. In our local slang, he was a coyote. Or, as he says, “I helped people get into the U.S. without all the red tape.”Mike had been a salesman in southern California who was “transitioned” into a

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• • • SEE UPDATED INFORMATION AT END OF ARTICLE • • •  Every culture has its own expectations concerning their medical profession. The ancient Chinese paid their physician every day they were healthy in order to be treated for free whenever they were ill. In Mexico, doctors tend to be extremely Hippocratic in their approach – the idea here is that people whose social position has

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Although tequila does not come from Baja California, it is an integral part of our local culture. Tourists have been coming here for generations in search of it, so much so that a spring-breaker bar in Rosarito Beach once called itself (fancifully) The Tequila Museum. With the turn of this century, Tijuana has been setting aside a week in October to host an annual Expo Tequila. Similar festivals

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• • • SEE UPDATED INFORMATION AT END OF ARTICLE • • • Both work just fine. You can even use major credit cards. Baja has been using dollars and pesos interchangeably ever since it received its first tourist a century and a half ago. Pretty much everyone accepts both, although out-of-the-way places, which keep very little money in the till, might make change in pesos. Even the symbol that

The Real Tijuanahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01343224926056385215noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-458647771972510297.post-5097954313303889192010-08-13T21:12:00.004-07:002010-08-27T15:54:37.111-07:00

photos by Derrik Chinn by Cristina González Madín What do you call a calafia bus full of gringos who visit the most surreal parts of Tijuana and who take part in our most ordinary activities? Turista libre. If the mental picture of this seems a little odd, we still have to mention that the fellow who organizes these day-trips is from the United States and lives in Tijuana by choice. Derrik

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 The oldest published recipe for quesadillas, from 1831, is found in El cocinero mexicano. These are remarkably similar to the ones we still make today.Quick quesadillas  Either make or buy small, soft tortillas. In the middle of each tortilla place some cheese, which can be fresh or aged cow’s milk cheese or even goat’s milk cheese if you add a bit of salt, then fold the tortilla

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• • • SEE UPDATED INFORMATION AT END OF ARTICLE • • •  The simple answer for all visitors from the U.S. and for most visitors from Canada is No, you don’t need no pinche passport. Here at the border, we see people crossing all the time without one. Across the border, at Across the Border, Anna Cearley has been collecting up reports from readers whose experiences confirm what we say. And

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by Laura Durán Seventy percent of the land in Baja California is under environmental protection. Among the largest areas are Parque Constitución (Laguna Hanson), Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, the Biosphere Preserve of the Vizcaíno Desert, Valle de los Cirios, the islands in the Sea of Cortez, and the Colorado River Delta. Many xerophytic plants serve to retain soil and prevent erosion. Knowing

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If you’re in the right restaurant at the right time, something unusual will happen. A bunch of guys show up dressed in Renaissance clothes, carrying Renaissance instruments. They begin playing in bright tones and quick rhythms – possibly Italian, to gringo ears, but the lyrics are unmistakably Spanish – while the little guy with the tambourine capers theatrically.What happened to the mariachis

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by Laura DuránTijuana Health without Borders, the medical tourism business cluster that was created two years ago, now counts one hundred eighty organizations as members and has created the first academic program for medical tourism in all of Latin America.Today more than ever Tijuana is looking to develop its tourism. Not necessarily the leisure tourism of earlier years, because that has been

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• • • SEE UPDATED INFORMATION AT END OF ARTICLE • • • Crossing the border on 4 July 1920 Perhaps the most annoying aspect of crossing the U.S.–Mexican border is the unpredictabiity of the Customs lines. Sometimes five minutes, sometimes five hours, sometimes caused foreseeably, sometimes capriciously. To anticipate this difficulty, every “frequent crosser” has their favorite source of

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photo courtesy of Cindy Mosqueda, loteriachicana.net If you can make it to only one restaurant on your first trip to Tijuana, that one may as well be La Cantina de los Remedios. It offers a quintessential Mexican experience that can serve as the keystone to understanding all the culinary arts of Baja. The menu is Mexican comfort food, the inspiration for all our alta-cocina/Baja-Med pretensions;

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Rubén Aguilar (left) and Jorge Castañeda (right). Photo by Manuel Montoya. by Fausto Ovalle Rubén Aguilar and Jorge Castañeda unveiled their new book, El narco: La guerra fallida [The Failed War on Drug Trafficking], on 20 January 2010 at the Tijuana campus of the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIAT). The president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, used false assumptions to justify his failed drug war,

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When Jessica and Evan moved to Tijuana, they didn’t plan on starting a charitable service. They came for the same reason that many have done lately – rents are high and incomes are low north of the border. They initially thought they’d live here while working in San Diego, but Tijuana had other plans for them. They started in an apartment and commuted across the border. That got old fast,

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by Guillermo Lozano During the last year, Tijuana showed up in the news of the furthest and most unlikely parts of the world. Never in the history of the city has it received reporters from so many countries nor ones so distant. From the end of 2008 through 2009, journalists of eleven different nations came to Tijuana in order to file special reports. Sadly, they did not come to write about

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The Flavors of Rincón San Román, the first “serious” cookbook to come out of Baja, went into its second edition this year. Its recipes, which are given in both Spanish and English, come from the kitchens of the chef Martín San Román’s signature restaurants and are presented such that readers might prepare them easily at home. Back in the mid-1980s, when San Román first started cooking in

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from the OBC gallery Entijuanarte always manages to pull off something iconic. This year’s memorable event was an open-air concert combining the efforts of Tijuana’s most respectable musicians with those of Tijuana’s most autochthonous musicians and ending with more than twenty-five thousand spectators shouting “Tijuana! Tijuana! Tijuana!” The event was memorable because of the performance’s

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