Author Archives: Dianne Hofner Saphiere

NBA Exhibition Game in Mazatlán/Baloncesto NBA

The NBA exhibition game held on October 6, 2011 at the Lobodome – University of Durango was a great experience. The three of us went along with Danny’s good friend, Raúl.

The all-day investment to get tickets paid off as we ended up with floor level seats three rows back and just about under the basket.

If you look closely at this picture, I have circled our seats – left side of the far side basket, at the top of the picture.

Najera, an NBA player who we believe is from Chihuahua, seemed to have a joy-filled evening welcoming his buddies to his home country. He shot both the first and the last baskets of the evening. I tried to talk to him, but I think he looked right over my head – damn I’m short compared to these guys.

The players were really nice to the kids in the crowd. Here is a video of a slam dunk!

Video of a dunk:

Tip Off!


This drum troop was standing outside getting people excited as we entered the school. I don’t think they were official.

In the central courtyard of University of Durango they had a big-screen set up, so that those without tickets could still watch the game.

The event was MUCH better organized (at least upon entry) than the last LoboDome event we attended.

Third row, courtside, under the basket = happy jovenes.

Small venue, clear view, happy night.

The guys tried out the floor for themselves prior to the game. It met with their approval. 🙂

Balls are ready to go for warm up.

And the first player out for warm up is Najera.


“Sure, kid, nice to meet you. Your English is really good!” If we brought a ball or a shirt or something, the players were signing everything.

Come on, come on! 🙂

Playing with a boy from the audience. This kid had game.

The crowd in the upper deck.

Governor Malova greeting the crowd.

Video of the pre-game excitement, leading up to the players coming in:

Players enter the gym:

Free-throw sequence:

Sequence of four: Look

Shoot

Block

Score

We were definitely right in the midst of the action

“Astros,” a local school dance and cheer team, performed at half time.

Sequence of 4: Get the ball

Float in the air with the ball

Decide to slam it

And score

The boys got all the freebies. Now what do they do with them?

The bench. Marion was definitely Dianne’s personal fave.

The Lobo mascot, and some clam?

The Coppel stork? A CULTURA mascot? I thought the stork was from Mega – who knows!

Oh yeah!

Danny’s friend Iván told him they are working on some public camping areas! Awesome news! He also said the state wants to do this event again next year with better players – bring it on!

“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

“I told you I had it!!!”

With less than one minute to go, there is suddenly a very dramatic push and fall. Which of course resulted in a tied score and overtime. How coincidentally lucky for all of us. 😀 Good showmanship.


And, the final shots of the game:

Final score – think about it – four 10 minute periods and one three minute overtime. You got it. No defense – it was a terrific offensive exhibition – these guys got real talent and it was a lot of fun to watch 334 points get scored in 43 minutes (almost 8 per minute).
Confetti!!!
The exit from an event at the LoboDome is never easy… Huge crowd for such a narrow exit, don’t you think?

Other stuff: A video of the warm-up

And a video of the cheerleaders lifting El Lobo.

Playing around and having fun!
Dianne was really excited to see the big boys play
Good friends going on four years – nice to see two nice young men.
For a video news report of this event, click here.
This is the second part of a two part blog entry – for the first part, click here.

Changes in Latitudes, Shifts in Geographies

 

Travel to Tucson, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and tell me this: does it feel like you are in the USA? Or, does it feel like México? Spanish language signage and Spanish spoken everywhere, taco stands, Latino cinema and art, mecánicos, banda music…

Now tell me this: travel to Baja, to Rocky Point, Los Cabos, San Carlos. Does it feel like you are in México? Or does it feel like the USA? English language signage and English spoken everywhere, hamburgers, private gated communities with big homes and big yards (yes, yards!).

There is a MAJOR population shift and geographic exchange of cultures going on in North America, people! Stand up and take notice! NAFTA may not have worked in many of the ways originally dreamed about, but PEOPLE are blurring the borders of today’s nation states, helping create our blended world.

 

Dar Plaza/"Gifting" Your Job Upon Retirement

As most of you know, I endeavor to be respectful of other cultures. There are certain things, however, that for me are wrong regardless of how acceptable they may be in a given culture: genital mutilation, slavery, and corruption, to name a few.

Which leads me to an interesting cross-cultural situation I’ve been living recently. Two of my Mazatlecan girlfriends, while both still in their forties, are retiring very soon. I am sooo happy for them! They have both worked 20+ years in their careers and are fully vested in their pensions. They are both slated to receive a monthly stipend as well as ongoing, lifelong medical care. Hooray for their good fortune. And, interesting to me, both of them have “plazas” (“places,” “seats,” “positions,” or “jobs”) to give.

What does that mean, you might ask? Or, you may understand this practice better than me, in which case please help me learn! What I have learned from my girlfriends is that they each are able to give their plaza, or their “job,” to someone else.

My first example seems fairly straightforward. One of my girlfriends is fairly high-ranking in her government office. She is retiring, and she has a son who is about 20 and a bit lost. He’s dropped out of school a couple of times, he’s gotten in with the wrong crowd of friends, he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, though he is generally a good kid. She of course wants to help him in any way she can to make a success of his life. She has a plaza or job to give (sort of passing on her job to someone else when she retires), and she is giving that plaza to her son, who is now studying to receive his Bachelor’s degree (university). He will not literally step into her high-ranking position, but he will take an entry-level position in the office in which my friend worked, with a career path that will be similar to hers. Small business owners may dream of passing on their enterprises to their kids, but it’s nice to be able to gift your job to your child upon your retirement, don’t you think?

My other girlfriend is a public school teacher. None of her children want her plaza; they have other career aspirations. She has a neighbor whose mother died a couple of years ago from cancer. This young woman studied to be a teacher, but did really poorly on the qualifying tests. So, there’s pretty much no way that the young woman is going to be hired to teach, from what my friend tells me. Just as my girlfriend was ready for her last week of work, the young woman’s father approached my friend to ask if she’d please give his daughter her plaza. She agreed.

What this means is that, instead of retiring as planned, my friend is going to work 3-4 more months in order to have time to do all the necessary paperwork, so that she can give this young neighbor her plaza. Technically this is not “legal,” as I am told plazas should go to blood relatives only. But it is apparently very common practice. Many people, I’m told, even sell their plazas to the highest bidder.

I’m sorry. While I think it’s fantastic that my friend’s son can get a secure and well-paying government job, and I’m happy a young woman who’s lost her mother will be able to realize her dream of teaching, this plaza practice seems wrong to me. It seems a holdover from an earlier time. It doesn’t reward those who have studied and perform well. I do hope these two young people will thrive in their new roles and prove me wrong, prove that they were, after all, the best people for the positions.

In the meantime, I try to be as supportive a friend as I can be to my girlfriends. They have done their duty, and deserve to celebrate the completion of their careers. They have been told since early in their careers that gifting a plaza to one of their children would be a benefit of their jobs. They are players in a system that is larger than they are, a system I can hope will change to one more merit-based. We live in a world in which more people are educated and competent than in years past, when the system was perhaps first implemented.

NBA Players in Mazatlán’s LoboDome

The boys are excited! For 350 pesos (the equivalent of about US$30) we have court-side seats to see 20 NBA players up close and personal (intimate venue) this evening in the LoboDome. 


Our state governor, Mario López Valdez, arranged for them to come down to Mazatlán to play an exhibition game while they are off the court in the US due to labor negotiations. The NBA stars signed autographs and were available for photos this morning on the malecón, and are planning to do so again this evening prior to the game. They also were kind enough to provide free clinics for children here yesterday and today.

Players we should get to see tonight are:
  • Eduardo Nájara (Charlotte)
  • Steve Nash (Phoenix)
  • Jason Kidd (Dallas)
  • Paul Pierce (Boston)
  • Shawn Marion (Dallas)
  • Kevin Love (Minnesota)
  • Tyson Chandler (Dallas)
  • Marcus Camby (Portland)
  • Corey Maggette (Milwaukee)
  • Jarrett Jack (New Orleans)
  • Jordan Hamilton (Denver)
  • Jerryd Bayless (Toronto)
  • Earl Watson (Indiana)
  • Dahntay Jones (Indiana)
  • Anthony Randolph (Minnesota)
  • Hyland Jordan (Clippers)
  • Ryan Hollins (Cleveland)
  • Anthony Tolliver (Minnesota)
  • Dominic McGuire (Charlotte)

I’ll give you all an update on how it goes!



Link to Noroeste story “All Star Show“
Link to the story about how fast the tickets sold out 

This is the first part of a two-part story. For the second part click here.




 

Thai Cooking in Mazatlán with New (and Old) Friends

 

For three days recently Mazatlán was blessed with a lot of laughter (normal here) and a whole lot of wonderful Thai cooking (a blessing), with fresh ingredients and a trained chef in a GORGEOUS old ocean-view home with honest-to-God incredibly wonderful women.

We have terrific food here, but, having lived for a decade in both Tokyo and San Francisco, we don’t have the international variety I would like. I CRAVE good Moroccan, Ethiopian, Indian, lamb shish-kabob, a good borscht …. Ironically, we do have a terrific local Thai restaurant, Zab Thai, where we eat every once in a while and for which we are very grateful.

Anyway, when six months ago my friend Indra told me she’d taken some Thai cooking classes in a friend’s home, I made sure she gave me all the info! I cook a lot of Asian food at home, but I was sure I’d learn something new, and I was eager to check out the classes.

The classes are taught by Lis Maiz Rochin, a Mexican woman who lived in Southeast Asia for years and runs the Mibong restaurant in the Condesa neighborhood of the DF. Her husband is Mazatleco, so fortunately for us Lis comes here regularly. Though I doubt she will visit us again in the heat of September! That’s her on the right in the photo with me.

I wasn’t able to attend all three classes, since I am a working woman, but I made two of them. Each time we prepared four dishes, and walked out of class stuffed!

What I Loved Most
 

So, what did I love most about these classes? FISH BALLS! They rocked! I was really shocked to realize that I love these little things, order them all the time when traveling, but I’ve never made them at home. And they are so easy! And the dipping sauce we made was exquisite.

I was so so so so very psyched to see fresh (it may have been packaged, I’m not sure, but whole, real not canned) BAMBOO SHOOTS. Oh how I loved these in Japan, eating them as if they were candy! I soooooo miss them. And Lis brought some, and used them with abandon in the foods we prepared. Gotta love it!

Bamboo grows in Mazatlán, and I hadn’t realized how much I missed this until we used it, but if you know where in town I can buy fresh bamboo shoots, please let me know.

Giant fresh GINGER ROOT! Now ginger root I can buy here, and I often do. But these were soooo much fresher than what I normally find here in town, and they were gigantic! I brought some of the class leftovers home, sliced it up, and put it in the freezer so I’d always have some on hand.

I also was sooooo excited to see a bag of sticky rice for the first time in forever! I was lucky to be able to bring home the remainder of this bag, at left, and I plan to do my best to get some shipped from Coyoacán to us here in Mazatlán.

And what did we make with this mochi-gome? Mango sticky rice, of course! Mmmmmhhh!!! Calorie-, sugar-, and fat-free of course (lol).

So, okay Dianne, you loved your nostalgic trip through some of the foods you miss from Japan, finally available in Mazatlán. Anything else?

Yes, Lis had the most beautiful, and practical, Thai wooden mortar and pestle, which she used for making salad dressing. Take a look; that’s the wooden bowl and pestle there at the rear of the photo.

The thing I most loved about this class, though, was that the women attending it were truly awesome. I crave girlfriends who have international interests and passions, who are creative and fun, and boy did I find it with this crew!

Left to right we are Magda, me, Chika (I am sooooo excited to meet a Japanese woman who lives here in Mazatlán!!! FINALLY!!!! Hooray!!!), Erika, Lis our teacher, Manina our hostess, and my friends Nancy and Conchita.

 
What I Learned
 

What did I learn in this class? Well, embarrassingly enough, I learned that when we cut lemongrass, we should only cut the center, white, heart of the stalk. I always wondered why the stalks were so hard to cut! Oops! I know that lemon grass (té de limón) also grows here in town, so if you know a source, would you please let me know? I’d love to grow some on my balcony beside my beloved basil plant.

While I’ve eaten a lot of Southeast Asian desserts in my day, I never realized the terrific combo of pairing light/sweet/slimy lychee or rambutan with crispy/strong/bitter fried shallot. Definitely an inspired pairing!

There were of course many things I learned, such as to always remove the green “sprout” in the center of a clove of garlic, if you find one, as it’s bitter. One last learning that really stands out for me, though, is the cool cutter Lis had. I WANT ONE! Mis primas-hermanas or beloved sister-cousins: when I visit Indiana to see you in October please let’s find and buy a few of these. I promised the ladies here I’d try. Why is it so cool? Well…..

Look what it does! You can julienne mango or carrots or whatever, in the same quick and easy way you peel them! Gotta get me one of these gizmos.

Thanks for reading my post! I welcome your comments and especially your local ingredient and supply sources. You all, of course, know about Toyo Foods, up the right-side-fork of the street above Club Navy, next to the pescadería. They are a godsend.