Winter weather in the Jalisco highlands traditionally arrives after harvesting is finished in mid-October, a bit later if the rainy season is bountiful.  And frequently there are some cabañuelas in January – brief soakings that are popularly believed to forecast the next temporada de las aguas.

Lakeside doesn’t actually have a dress code but it wouldn’t hurt visitors and foreigners living here to be more sensitive to what’s acceptable to the local Mexican community.

Here’s a real mixed bag for you: a hiking trail that starts only three kilometers from the controversial Villa Panamericana (Pan Am Games Athletes Village)  just outside Guadalajara and shows you both the best and the worst sides of the Primavera Forest.

When internationally recognized Jalisco ceramicist Jorge Wilmot Mason talked of the halcyon stretch he and others in Mexico shared — the 1950-1960 era of surging creativity — he termed those days “another world.” It was an era when Octavio Paz stunned Mexican society and attracted international acclaim with his analysis of Mexican character, “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” when Carlos Fuentes did the same with his novel “The Death of Artemio Cruz.” Mexican culture in all its forms seemed to catch the world’s eye.