Monterrey is not that far from the Texas border, only a few hours from Laredo, which is about 3.5 hours from Austin. As such, it is the city I am most likely to visit in Mexico any time soon. If I start doing really well with my money, I might sneak a visit in the up and coming months (it would have to be before April, because by then it starts to get extremely warm down there.)
I discovered this ..read more
It appears that Google Maps street view has moved to the first ‘developing’ country, Mexico. All the other countries heretofore were in the EU, Canada, the US, Australia, NZ, i.e. all places with HDI’s well above .900. Unless you looked hard discovered the most blighted of urban England or the American Northeast, you weren’t likely to discover something ‘totally different’ from middle class reality.
But Mexico is a different story, having an income stratification that makes New York City ..read more
Note: I am going to start a sub-series of my blog in which I attempt to capture interesting/noteworthy ephemera on Google Maps Street Views.
Here’s the first one, in South Belfast, Northern Island, some graffiti on the side of a terrace house that says “TV License Men Beware!”
View Larger Map
All that Google Mapping last night made me quite nostalgic. And a bit depressed.
This is where I was mugged, in Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn. The tan townhouse, in the little front stoop area.
View Larger Map
This is where the handlebars fell of my bicycle, I hit a car head on, and flipped into the road, and where some kind woman pulled me onto the curb and saved my life.
View Larger Map
I lived in the yellow and red apartment building on the right ..read more
I don’t want to speak out of place, or much too soon, but let’s just say that someday I might move to California. I am still kind of cold to the concept of Californiana, as I call it — to me, California is the blonde beauty that everyone else picks, while I was always eying chiseled, rough Chicago or industrially handsome Manchester.
But I visited it for the first time as an adult in March and I was admittedly taken ..read more
Being unemployed means that you pay attention to useless nothingness while avoiding the actual task at hand, i.e. finding a job. So here I was, randomly Google Mapping the city of San Antonio, a place I don’t particularly care for, when I discovered a subdivision who must have had a fairly massochistic master developer. Or, like me, just a fan of underdog European budget hatchbacks.
(For the record, it’s located off of Rittiman Road just west of Loop 410.)
It is a ..read more
