I was in a hurry to share my final thoughts on Friday. I had to pack everything, and I didn't have time to spell check either. I have a few more thoughts to share.
-If you want to use a public bathroom in Mexico, you have to pay between two and five pesos. It's not much, but it underscores the need to always have loose change. The $10 peso, a golden coin, is the most useful.
-At bookstores (liberias), you cannot open most of the books. They're laminated. Browsing is discouraged.
-At many stores, including liberias, and Bodegas, you can't enter with a backpack. You have to check it in at the entrance.
-A tortilla on every stove (estufa), and a gas tank on every roof. That's how it is in Mexico. Tortillas are the staple of every household (see my previous post), and every house and apartment has its own gas tank. I remember entering Guadalajara, and I saw lines of black tanks on tops of the roofs. It's a slight inconvenience. To get a hot shower, you have to light the pilot light (llana piloto), and wait 10 minutes. When you run out of gas, you have to call a gas company. A truck carrying tanks full of gas comes to your house, and pumps your gas line. As your correspondent found out the hard (and cold) way, gas companies aren't always prompt. We asked our gas company every day for two weeks to come to the apartment and fill it all the way (llanelo bien todo!). Even so, that didn't guarantee a hot shower, and I had to put up with a tepid shower. But life can be much worse.
-I recommend traveling to Mexico for certain types of people. If you are interested in anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture, then come. Mexico's thousands of cathedrals and hundreds of museums will not disappoint. If you enjoy wildlife, come. If you enjoy various biomes (the combination of climate, environment, landscape, flora, and fauna), Mexico offers everything, except snow: from the desert that spans the states of Sinoloa, Cholula, Chihuahua, Baja California Norte, Baja California Sur, and Durango, to the beaches of Guerrero (Acapulco, Hitualco), Veracruz, and Quintana Roo (Cancun), to the jungles of Chiapas and Oaxaca, there's plenty of nature.
-On the other hand, Mexico suffers from every environmental problem: air pollution, water pollution, water shortages, garbage, oil spills, and endangered species.
-Not a thought, but a fact: there are 14 fiestas per day in Mexico.
-Every cathedral is stunning. It doesn't matter when it was built, who built it, or which town it was built in, the architecture and detail is magnificent. The amount of physical work, natural resources, and expertise needed to build them is testament to the meaning Catholicism has in Mexico. On the other hand, in a country where 40 million still live in poverty (particularly along the border in appalling cities such as Juarez, Matamoros, and Nuevo Laredo, and in Chiapas, and Oaxaca), and in which most of the people have been poor for the greater extent of its history, the cathedrals are a spectacular display of waste and misuse of resources.
-The exchange rate is 13.40 today.
Your correspondent,
Kevin Burciaga
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