Most of the books on the market dealing with the issue of expatriating to Mexico are fluff. I didn’t realize this until my wife and I got firmly settled into a daily routine here in Guanajuato that there was something those expat books on the market weren’t telling us. In fact, whether you read the books on “How to move to Mexico and live like the Queen of Sheba” or the vast amounts of online articles and websites, they all will pretty much be full of cotton candy and lots of sugar coating.
We came to central Mexico expecting Nirvana. We thought we had arrived in Camelot. If this wasn’t a utopia, it surely had to be the closest thing to it compared to the United States. After all, Mexicans, we observed, seemed happy. They walk around laughing and smiling and seem like they enjoy life and are glad you came along to make their existences just a little bit better. We got a reality check. We got it fast and hard.
The first thing we noticed was that Mexicans, and maybe it is something peculiar to central Mexico, do things in public that would in America get them shot, stabbed, or taken outside into an alley for a sound beating. If you were to move here, you would soon see how that at a store counter, whether it is your turn or not, men and women will elbow you out of the way and shout their orders to the employee behind the counter over you. It is like no one has ever explained to them the concept of taking turns in a line. I mean this most sincerely and seeing this happen daily never ceases to disgust me.
The other day, my wife was standing in line for some tamales. My wife had given the order, paid the man, and the man was serving up our food on little paper plates. A woman simply elbowed my wife in the ribs knocking her away from the counter and began shouting her order at the server. This is not an isolated thing. It happens constantly. There you are, it is your turn, and someone, usually another woman, will act like you aren’t even there or are a piece of trash to be kicked out of the way.
I’ve been yanked off buses so some Mexican can cut in front of me. I’ve been pushed, knocked off the sidewalk, not once but twice, and into the path of an oncoming bus that hit me both times. I wasn’t seriously hurt since I am writing this and not pushing up daisies.
In every aspect of life in Guanajuato that requires lining up or queuing, the “good” people of Guanajuato are totally committed to disordered chaos!
You should try walking down or up stairs. They come up in a massive, throbbing blob of humanity and seem not to know that there can be two lines on a stairwell: one descending and one ascending line of people. They honestly don’t seem to understand this. They go up or down the stairs in one gigantic throng with no sense of anyone else around them. And if you are descending the stairs when the Mexican mob is ascending they either all stop and stare at you or simply knock you down, out of the way, or carry you back up the stairs requiring you to start over.
I was once in a drug store at the cashier when a young man grabbed my right arm and shoved me out of the way. Can you imagine the consequence of this event occurring in the United States? Knives and guns would soon come out and that would be all she wrote.
I cannot explain this to you. We are fluent enough in Spanish to ask and have been told that these are “malcriados”