Market Rehab Underway

Last week all the vendors in the tents in the middle area of the Corozal Market were moved out and over to the vacant lot beside the post office and behind the police station. This was, we were informed so that new bodegas could be built for them.

My thought was, "Yeah, right. Any excuse to move them out and open up the area for more parking and more access to the vendors along the perimeters.

Well, lo and behold, we came traipsing along this morning and what do we see? They have kicked the automobiles out and have been getting ready to pour some concrete. This is amazing progress so far. Our suspicions that this was a ploy to get rid of some vendors was groundless. Which is nice to see. This whole project might go a long way to cleaning up the Corozal market, making it a more attractive and fun shopping experience.

Corozal Market Construction

I know the quality of the photo isn't up to par. I've got a boatload of excuses.

1. My Nikon Coolpix is on the fritz (I think... May be related to battery problem below)
2. I'm having a hard time right now finding US made Duracell AA batteries. I can find a ton of Chinese counterfeit Duracell's that last about *** that long.
3. I forgot to bring my specs along this morning.
4. I took the picture with my cell phone camera - I need the specs to read the screen.

It was a good thing Doug was with me this morning, to read the menu on the damn phone. Maybe I should have had him take the photo too! Well, anyway, it isn't supposed to be art - it's news, or something similar.

The quality reminds me of when I was in the Navy. A good friend of mine then was a photographer's mate named Willy Dyer. I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with him in the ship's (USS Iwo Jima LPH-2) photo lab (You could flip the darkroom warning light on, which showed out in the passageway. No one would dare enter the lab with that light on, thus ensuring some hour's of quiet and escape.).

Anyway, we had occasion (Apollo 13 Recovery) to have a photographer from AP or UPI on board. He just freaked us out with his photo development techniques. He'd over-expose his film, then run into the lab, flash develop a roll in the chemicals for no more than 30 seconds at each stop, dump the negatives, still wet, into the enlarger tray, expose a print, run the paper through it's process, slap it into the print dryer (set just about on fry), peel the print off the drum, and stuff it into a fax machine (one of the old 11-minutes a page models - hot stuff at the time) that had been installed for the press' use and his image would be on its way to New York or wherever in an instant. It was amazing to watch him at work. His stuff was always so grainy and just really terrible looking on print stock, but would show up in the news looking good (We had to take his word for that - we never saw any of his stuff in published form since we were out at sea for that whole time).

So, there you have it. News as it happens, right here in Corozal. Almost as fast as it did in 1970!