Important Local News Coverage in English

After 2 years of Majoring in “Business and International Trade” studies at the Tec. De Monterrey Campus Guadalajara, Armando Elizalde moved from Jalisco to Quintana Roo in 1995, to live in the Mexican Caribbean and work in the tourism industry.

Upon arrival, he started a new career and venture in cave diving; at the beginning, mostly diving to pay his training in Mexican Caribbean dive shops, but later creating scubacenote.com his own cavern diving operation.

Over the years, this eventually brought him to become an important part of the local leadership that created a 60+ strong professional divers’ association, for the purpose of protecting the reefs, cenotes and mangroves in the region. Even though Armando is retired from the cave diving business, he continues the environmental activism and is still running scubacenote.com, but only as cavern diving information website, as opposed to a tour operator source.

Currently, Armando and his girlfriend Cyndi write an on-line magazine, Mexican Caribbean Today, a website publishing important news coverage of the State of Quintana Roo in English. Armando has traveled to around 13 countries and 3 continents, so he has been on both sides of the fence when it comes to tourism, as a service provider and a participant in local services. He also writes restaurant reviews to support the eateries in the area.

Armando also volunteers his time to help the Playa del Carmen gastronomic community, as he did for about 300 hours, functioning as the finances executive of Taste of Playa 2010; all without collecting a dime, while donating the proceedings to the local Rotary Club. He was mostly in charge of the accounting of the event, but also helping as a volunteer in the marketing and the design committee.

Armando is also a versatile artist willing to manufacture your dream into color and depth. By listening to ideas and working with the input of his customers, VeryARTiculated.com (Armando’s art pseudonym) provides the results that business owners need in any sort of illustration or graphic media content with the most current and flexible formats.

Through private lessons in his youth, he learned several different art techniques, such as watercolor, pastels, acrylic, oil painting, and carbon drawing. He also trained in perspective, drawing the human figure and the principles of chromatics.

Many years ago when computers became mainstream, Armando self-trained to bring his art to digital media; and as a result he is skilled in ADOBE Photoshop and Illustrator. He has also taken a course to learn HTML, CSS and CMS (Joomla, Wordpress) which has broadened his horizon by allowing him to publish his art on the internet. All of the art* and cartoons in Mexican Caribbean Today.com is done by VeryARTiculated.com as is the web design.

*Exceptions: Art NOT done by Armando: "Carnaval" posters from article: http://www.mexicancaribbeantoday.com/index.php/food/22-mexican-recipes/59-carnaval-mardi-gras-appetizer-extravaganza