Vacation News

France Vacation Rentals - US $110 Per Night

Our house is ideally located between the Sea and Ski resorts. All this and a lot more can be reached within 2050 minutes. It will accommodate a family of 810(max13), but is also perfect for 34 couples coming together, and is cozy enough for just 2
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Tibet Travel Club -

High Spirit Treks &amp Expedition Nepal We Specialize the trekking all over the major parts of Nepal and China (Tibet),peak climbing of the major peaks of Nepal, Mountaineering ,Expedition, wildlife jungle safari, cultural tour, sight seei
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Turkey Bed & Breakfasts - 40 Euro Per Night

Artemis Hotel is located in Selcuk, near Ephesus, 5 kilometres from the Agean Sea. This renovated hotel boasts 20 wellappointed rooms, bar, restaurant serving traditional dishes, internet facilities and shuttle service. Guests can avail heal
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Alabama Motorcycle - 900 Euro Per Person

Nepal trekking agencies specialized Mardi Himal,Jomsom.Poon hill Trekking MT EverestBase Camp,Annapurna,langtang,manasulu,Makalu,Kanchenjunga,Mustang,Including upper dolpa and more other restricted area of Nepal,India,Tibet,Bhutan…
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Kenya Bed & Breakfasts - 2,500 Shillings (Kenya) Per Night

We are a Guesthouse Offering cheap Accomodation &amp Meals in KISUMU,KENYA. We are located 5 minutes from the Town Center, 10 minutes away from the Airport and 20 minutes drive to the ancestral Home of Barrack Obama.We offer bed &amp breakfast,Lunch/dinner
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Arkansas Personal Growth -

I am relocating to Eureka Springs Arkansas and am going to be holiding classes in Hypnotherapy, Dream Analysis, Reiki ( 1 Masters), Ho’oponopono, Crystal therapy, Food Combining, Stress Reduction, and more! Plus group guided experiences such as So
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Photo by mayatolsa, via Flickr.com

From Mexconnect.com: The world’s largest natural crystals (of selenite, said to enhance sex drive) have been discovered in caverns in Chihuahua.

Early in 2001, news emerged of a truly extraordinary discovery in caverns deep under the earth in the state of Chihuahua. Miners tunneling through the Naica Hills, south of Chihuahua City, in search of silver and zinc, found huge mineral crystals, far larger than any natural crystals previously seen anywhere else on the planet.

The monster crystals, over six meters long, are made of selenite, a crystalline form of the mineral gypsum (the number one ingredient in blackboard chalk!). For its pale translucence, this form of gypsum is known as selenite, named after Selene, the Greek goddess of the moon.

The Naica (”shady place”) hills have been actively mined for more than a century. Even though early prospectors discovered silver here in 1794, the first formal mining claim was not made until a century later in 1896, by one Santiago Stoppelli, and large scale mining only began in 1900.

Photo by Shirley Twofeathers, via Flickr.com

Ten years later, super-large sword-shaped crystals of selenite were found in a cavern at a depth of 120 meters. Over the years, a steady stream of geologists and mineral collectors have visited this 70-meter-diameter cave, since renamed the Cave of the Swords, which is now equipped with paths, lights and a ventilation system. Even with this system, the temperature in the cave is a stifling 40 degrees C! Several typical examples of selenite crystals from this cave, ranging in length from 1.2 to 1.6 meters (4 to 4.25 feet), are displayed in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

But these specimens from the Cave of the Swords are small fry in size when compared with the latest discoveries, 300 meters below the surface, in the Cave of the Crystals. In two relatively small chambers, each the size of a small apartment, miners found incredibly large selenite crystals, some over six meters long. The crystals combine to form massive fifteen-meter-long columns, “the size of pine trees”, as well as hundreds of formations shaped like sharks’ teeth, jutting about a meter up from the cave floor. The overall effect is, in the words of Richard Fisher, an Arizona-based photographer and adventurer, like walking into an enormous geode.

Photo by Shirley Twofeathers, via Flickr.com

Photo by toltequita, via Flickr.

Cuernavaca is the Capital City of the State of Morelos, mexico. Located only 45 minutes from Mexico City (one hour and thirty minutes from the international airport) by the way of the Mexico - Acapulco expressway. Actually world-wide known as “The City of Eternal Spring” due to its excellent template climate with an annual average of 20ºC.

The ancient name of Cuernavaca is “Cuauhnahuac” in Nahuatl which means “Place near or by the side of the groove”.  Founded seven centuries ago almost a mile high in the Sierra Madre Mountains. Today the pyramid of Teopanzolco  rises in a residential neighborhood; a half-hour from where Mesoamerican high priests at Xochicalco studied astronomy in 600 A.D. and arranged the calendar. There remain other vestiges from pre-Hispanic times such as a 14 ton. engraved stone called Chimalli, the great lizard carved in stone found at San Anton   and the Chapultepec Eagle, only to name a few.
Until 1910, the state of Morelos was the third major sugar cane producer world wide, after Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but peasants slaved without hope on the enormous sugar cane haciendas. When the mexican Revolution began, most haciendas were burned to the ground. Some of them have been restored as luxury hotels.

Photo by Envious Emerald, via Flickr.

Cuernavaca is a modern tropical city that hosts a score of scientific research institutes, and industrial park with over one hundred industries, seventeen universities and extensions of the National University in Mexico City, and a global assortment of retires diplomats, business executives and government officials. This casual city also attracts people who seek a sunny place for creative or intellectual inquiry where they can find cultural stimulation and spirited conversations. Residents have included Erich Fromm, Diego Rivera, Carlos Fuentes, Helen Hayes, Malcolm Lowry, Ivan Illich, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Barbara Hutton, Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, to name a few.

Cuernavaca has also been established as an international learning center for Mexico’s Language, Culture and history. At present, there are prestigious Spanish schools devoted to the high academic standards and strict ethical code of teaching Spanish, art and culture from Mexico and Latin America to foreigners.

For many years, Cuernavaca has been known as a resort where both Mexicans and foreigners come to enjoy the clean air, relax and enjoy the incomparable climate. The city is filled with gardens, tennis courts, spa’s, golf courses, bathing resorts, restaurants and fine hotels offering every commodity. Within a 40 km radius, sports like water-skiing, fishing, hunting, horseback riding and mountain climbing can be practiced.

Photo by Mapev, via Flickr.

From LATimes: Reporting from Guanajuato, mexico — Juan and Remigio and Ignacia and their closest neighbors can tell you a lot about life in this central mexican mining town.

So what if they’re dead?
 
They might be Guanajuato’s most visited residents — a collection of 56 mummified corpses that survived for years in remarkably good shape and now constitute one of the main tourist draws here.

The bodies, on display in Museo de las Momias, the city’s mummies museum, were taken from above-ground crypts in a graveyard next door. Dating from the mid-1800s to the 1970s, they were removed because they were unclaimed or relatives hadn’t paid burial fees. Long a ghoulish curiosity while in storage, the mummies were put on formal display starting about 40 years ago.

Don’t look for Scooby Doo-style creepers trailing bandages — most of these mummies are naked. They are dry as paper and coppery-looking, but often surprisingly complete, with tufts of hair on the face and body and, in some cases, clothing that still has some of its color.

Museum officials say the tightly sealed crypts kept marauding bugs out and the arid conditions allowed the bodies to dry intact even without the preservation efforts used in ancient Egypt.

“This is why these are the best mummies in the world,” said museum coordinator Carlos Barrera Auld. “It’s a natural mystery.”

The bodies are encased — some standing, others in repose — in the museum building near downtown Guanajuato, where you can catch the bus labeled “Mummies.” In several cases, names and bits of biography of the dead are known. They’re miners, mothers, doctors, Mexicans and foreigners. They seemed to fall young.

One man, exhumed in the 1940s, had been stabbed to death, a golf-ball-sized wound visible in the parched husk beneath his rib cage. Another drowned in the 1970s. A woman from the 1920s is thought to have been buried alive after slipping into catalepsy. Her hands are frozen hauntingly above her face, apparently in mid-struggle to escape her grave. Nearby is a neat row of desiccated babies, some adorned with dainty cotton bonnets.

In the United States, this sort of exhibition might be relegated to an old-style freak show. But Mexico doesn’t shy away from death. After all, families gather in cemeteries to share memories and celebrate departed loved ones at graveside on the annual Day of the Dead.

Museum managers say they hope to get away from ghoulishness and instead use the bodies to teach about the history and culture of Guanajuato, whose silver- and gold-mining legacy reaches to the days of the Spanish rulers.

“It’s not just to see the mummies — the ugly faces. We are working to spread the traditions and the way Guanajuato people lived in the past,” said museum director Juan Manuel Guerrero. “These were people, real people.”

For example, Guerrero said, the number of bodies of foreigners that went unclaimed underscores how Guanajuato and its mines drew transplants from all corners: China, France, Greece and the United States.

There is something, too, to be learned about the lives of women, who also worked at the mines. The body of one mine helper is clad in blue skirt and head scarf. Her scrawny build suggests a life of toil and deprivation.

Museum officials plan a section devoted to the mining industry. And they are seeking to learn more about how each of the subjects died.

Findings could fill in details of a city history that already holds calamitous floods, cholera outbreaks and less spectacular endings.

Some mummies have gone on the road. Last fall, 24 were packed up and shipped for display in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey. There’s been talk of a traveling exhibition in Mexico City and, perhaps, the U.S.

From the statesman.com: Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz bravely challenged cultural and religious mores in 17th-century mexico by believing that women had a right to pursue passions for scholarship and writing.

“She basically broke all the rules,” said James Nicolopulos, an associate professor at the University of Texas and an expert on colonial and 19th-century Spanish American literature.

In doing so, de la Cruz, a nun, also became one of the greatest poets and playwrights in Spanish literary history, Nicolopulos said.

In Austin this weekend, “Sor Juana Festival: A Tribute to mexican Women,” will celebrate de la Cruz’s legacy and the modern-day achievements of women of Mexican descent. The two-day event opens Friday at the Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC), 600 River St., with the 2009 Women of Achievement Awards honoring local artist Maria Pilar Castrejon and Ana Yàñez Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. The awards are given to women whose lives reflect the spirit of Sor Juana, as she is known.

The festival continues Saturday at the center with musical and poetry performances, a symposium, and in the evening, the opening of an art exhibit in the cultural center’s main gallery.

Known to some as the first feminist of the Americas, de la Cruz, “took the initiative to educate herself and to educate women at a time when women were not seen as educators or intelligent,” said Herlinda Zamora, the cultural center’s exhibit coordinator.

This is the festival’s second year at the center, which is collaborating with the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. The museum has been holding Sor Juana festivals for 12 years, coordinating events in cities across the country. More recently, it has focused on collaborations with Mexican and Mexican-American museums, Zamora said.

In Texas, festivals are also being held in San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston.

Nicolopulos, who will speak at Saturday’s symposium at 3 p.m., said the festivals and related events are bringing awareness of Sor Juana’s place in literary and Mexican history to audiences in the United States, where she is not widely known. In Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, schoolchildren memorize Sor Juana’s poems, Nicolopulos said.

Both he and Zamora said Sor Juana’s legacy extends far beyond her place as a literary figure.

“It’s really important for women to recognize people of that time and how they set the path for those that are now working in different fields and educating,” Zamora said.