AGU Acapulco

Before I went to México D.F. there was the AGU joint assembly in Acapulco. The AGU is the American Geophysical Union that - in contrast to the German system - also includes atmospheric and ocean sciences and geology stuff.
Once a year there is an enormous convention in San Francisco and there are the smaller joint assemblies which have a more local focus so a lot of the atmospheric science contributions were about air pollution in Mexico City.
Well, I listened to loads of talks on volcanoes, seismology, atmospheric sciences and climatology. One quick lesson was to try to avoid talks from Mexico since they usually were not that convincing. Apart from that there were quite some interesting presentations and a lot of terrible color and background choices (although there is pink, you still don't have to use it and a cool picture in the background might make your text pretty unreadable).
My personal winner is Fred Prata, who showed some pretty cool stuff on satellite and thermal camera detection of ash and SO2 Plumes.

Acapulco itself is not convincing. The beach line is full of big tourist hotels (some of which are really nice) and you don't really get the impression of being in Mexico. Everywhere you see Federal Police driving around in groups of 10 with G3 assault rifles, because there is some massive drug fighting going on in the area.
For the first night we stayed in a little hotel on the other end of the city. Here we did some experiments on the ceiling fan (we didn't have AC) and saw that it accelerated a little peace of soap to a quite impressive speed with which it slammed into the wall. So we went to sleep below it and hoped it would not fall on us...
After this night we decided to go for a different hotel and found a hotel that was about half way to the conference area and the hotels where everybody else stayed. It still took us an hour to get there walking. Well, let's say I've seen more convincing places and after listening to some other guests talking about their times in US jails for cocaine abuse related crimes John and Gemma, who had been sleeping outside their room to escape the heat a little bit, decided to leave for a more expensive hotel with AC and hopefully less criminal guests.

John presenting one of our fresh towels

On one of our walks along the coastline we saw this dead blowfish, later in the museum of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City I found a matching skeleton.

Dead blowfish on the Acapulco beach

Dead blowfish in the México City museum