Martin Gumucio

Terrifying but not very surprising…

U.S. Military Spied on Hundreds of Antiwar Demos – Yahoo! News

I am spending the week in New York, here are some pics I took on my first day:

http://picasaweb.google.com/martin.gumucio/NewYork147

Also amazingly I managed to hook up with my Dubai friends Don and Susan, they happened to be passing NY at this exact time, pretty cool!

http://picasaweb.google.com/martin.gumucio/DonAndSusan/photo#5020654435452480482

No time to write a lot, but more info is to come.

For you to understand how much this post means to me I need to provide you with some background. In the mid-nighties the Lucasarts computer game company was incredibly good. They released an games that really where fun to play and that told great stories. And they brought Sam & Max into my life with the “Sam & Max hit the road”. The characters are so good that they appeared in just about every game Lucasarts every did after that in some way.

And then for a long time nothing happened, Lucasarts decided that they only wanted to do Star Wars games and S&M were left in the cold. Until now! Yep 15 years after the first game its finally time for another one! If you like adventure games you need to check this out. After a loong wait related to Lucasarts holding the rights to the characters finally the upstart game company Telltale can bring us some new adventures. They are the same team that were behind the first game, and the quality is just as good as it ever was. So in short:

Click the link below, buy it and sit back and enjoy the soul-hollowing ride.. Buy it, dont pirate it! They are a small company and they need your money.
Telltale Games – Sam & Max

Both me and Lina have jobs that demand our full attention so it was very welcome that we could end the year with a week to just relax. Imagine.. I didnt bring my laptop, i did not even bring (or miss) my cellphone. Those who know me can tell that this means I was in serious need of a vacation.

Playa del Carmen, Mexico turned out to be a very nice little tourist getaway, with one street “La Quinta” being able to cater for all the tourists needs in the form of shopping, restaurants, danceclubs etc. To see some more genuine Mexican culture and eat for about half the price, there were other restaurants closer to the actual city center, but we never went there. The beaches are absolutely top-class, simply one of the best i have been to. And this was also once one of the top snorkeling spots on the globe. Sadly the hurricane Wilma changed that last year, and most of coral-reef is destroyed, it is still beautiful but you have to dive now to see it. The damage from Wilma was also clearly visible in the town itself, the house next to our hotel was deserted and had no roof. Also it still had the christmas decorations up, but it was hanging there from last year.. Sad.

Since Apollo, our travel arranger screwed up a bit they put us in a slightly worse hotel than the one we had booked. As a compensation they treated us to a free daytrip and we chose to go to Chichen Itza, the majority of the photos you see below are from that trip. The temple areas were simply amazing but sadly our guide (again from Apollo) was almost completely useless. Between open ignorance and free speculation  there was little to be learned, but the theory could wait for another day. As you can see the area is worth the price of the ticket to Mexico just by itself. You will see from the pictures that Chichen Itza is in a very open area, but there are many (smaller) temples around the peninsula that are still covered in vegetation and many that still have not been closely examined.

If you clap your hands in front of the steps of El Castillo, the main temple, the echo comes louder than you would expect and it sounds very much like an eagle, pretty cool. They said there was an accident last year, so now they dont let tourists climb it anymore, considering how steep the steps are it is too easy to imagine what  happened, but i would still have liked to climb it.

The rest of the week we did nothing, absolutely nothing. It was just us and the beach.

Here are the pics:
http://picasaweb.google.com/martin.gumucio/Mexico20062007