3 Things I Positively Hate About Living in Mexico

After nearly six years in Mexico, these are the things that still drive me mad.

There is no perfect place in this world, and if I were to only tell you the good things about living in Mexico, I’d be doing you a massive disservice.

Moving to a foreign country is difficult in and of itself, and it’s usually accompanied by a healthy amount of culture shock. Hell, I even experienced culture shock when I moved from the Edmonton area to Williams Lake, and that’s in the same country!

I recently wrote about the seven things I positively love about living in Mexico. This is the other side of that story.

To be honest, the culture shock did not fully set in for me until my second year of living here. That first year was more like an extended vacation for me. I had gone through a difficult time at work, having been the only operational member for a very large geographical area. If you’re familiar with interior BC, then you will understand what a massive area both the Cariboo and the Chilcotin really is. Some of my scenes were five hours in one direction. On top of that, I had attended some pretty brutal scenes and autopsies in the months prior to my departure that had left a mark.

So when Covid and the associated mandate nonsense began, it formed the perfect storm for me to leave. All of the small irritations I barely noticed during my first few months here turned into quite large sources of frustration in time. If I am being really honest with you, I still struggle with some of them today.

This will obviously vary from person to person, and depends a lot on your personality and tolerance levels. But I will say that PTSD-related symptoms tend to exacerbate these frustrations to a large extent. So, your mileage may vary—a lot.

At the risk of sounding like a complainer, here are three things that drove me absolutely nuts when I finally settled in and realized that Mexico was now my new home.

1. Chaos and Noise

This is such a huge topic that I don’t even know where to begin. Noise is everywhere, and depending on your neighbourhood, it could be nearly constant.

When we first moved here, I hadn’t settled all of my income issues quite yet, so for a while we lived in a very average Mexican colonia. It wasn’t all bad, but this is a more negative article, so I’ll have to dive into the bad of it.

Our house was fairly small, with only two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Our backyard was practically non-existent, with only enough room for a washer and a clothesline. We did have a small front yard with some grass and one palm tree, but the spaces on the sides of the house consisted of only very narrow corridors. That meant that the neighbours were only about 2-3 metres away on either side.

The neighbourhood was also quite dense with many families living in close proximity to one another. So every time someone was having an argument, listening to music, watching a football game, or having a bluetooth phone conversation in their car, we could hear it all. Suddenly, everyone’s business was our business, and our business was everyone’s business.

Having lived on a small acreage outside of a small town in BC, this was a lot more than I could handle. My immediate next-door neighbour once decided to renovate his house, which resulted in six long months of ongoing construction noise. I was a total basket case!

And that wasn’t all. There was what felt like a near-constant stream of street vendors coming down our street, with each one having a distinct sound announcing their arrival. One guy was selling cheese, so he had a speaker on his car that sounded like a cow. Another was selling esquites, which is a type of corn snack. He would ride his bicycle and bellow out with a booming voice every few metres. Another was selling tamales. Another was going around sharpening knives. Another drove around selling propane gas. Another was selling sweet bread. All at the maximum possible volume. You’re starting to get the picture, aren’t you?

Add to all of that man’s best friend. The dog. Nearly every Mexican family has a dog or two, or five. Now just imagine the cacophony of noise and chaos accompanying every event in your street.

If you’re the kind of man or woman who needs your peace, that kind of living won’t do it for you. You either need to make peace with the fact that life will be noisy, or you will have to pay more to rent or buy a place in a privada or gated community where peace is far more likely.

If you’re someone who isn’t bothered by noise and even finds this sort of thing colourful, well then you’ll have the best time of your life.

2. Garbage Burning

I already covered this in another article. It is something that really took me a long time to get a handle on. I mostly solved it by moving to a better area, although even in some of Mérida’s better neighbourhoods, you can still have the smell of burning garbage waft over.

Some of the city’s less fortunate residents choose to burn their garbage, plastic and all, instead of paying for garbage collection. The price is actually very affordable. At the time, we only paid around 30 pesos per month for collection. But for some of the poorest people, those 30 pesos are better spent on basic necessities. I understand that, and I have sympathy for those folks, but I don’t like it.

Remember that little house we lived in at first? Well, unbeknownst to us, there was a very poor barrio behind our house, roughly two blocks in size, made up of modest homes and a number of makeshift shacks. We did not fully realize it was there until after we had signed the lease and moved in.

Overall, these folks caused us fewer problems than the neighbours on our street. But they used to gather up everyone’s trash and then have a good old burn party about two or three times a week. The fumes from the burning plastic would waft into our home if we left the windows open.

My Canadian brain just cannot comprehend burning plastic and other garbage. It is bad for everyone’s health, and it’s bad for the environment. This issue was simply unacceptable to me, and even as a foreigner, I had to do something about it.

First, I tried talking to them directly, but that went nowhere in a hurry. Then I thought I would try to get support from the neighbours, who were also obviously irritated by it. Well, they were indeed irritated and even took to complaining to each other about it in the local WhatsApp group. But, as I would find out, the neighbours were very hesitant to make formal complaints out of fear of backlash.

The possibility of a backlash did not bother me, so I spent an evening researching the process on the local government’s website with the help of Google Translate. I lodged a formal complaint, and a few weeks later the burning decreased considerably. Unfortunately, this did not last and the garbage burning returned in earnest a couple of months later. We finally just moved to a better location.

This is another reminder to do your due diligence and rent before buying property. You don’t want to find this out after your money is gone and all the paperwork is done. You should not assume that you’ll be able to sell a house here as quickly as you might in Canada.

3. Driving

This may be more of a me thing and probably won’t matter as much for others. I suppose the cop in me can’t help but notice the poor driving behaviour and want to do something about it. But I no longer have a badge, and nobody here cares what I think.

But I’ll indulge myself so you know what to expect.

Folks just don’t follow the rules here. I seriously doubt many of them even know the rules. On the one hand, I hate it; but on the other hand, I admire it. It’s sort of a refuge from over-regulated Canada, but then again, it’s too much to really enjoy because you do need some semblance of order to be civilized.

Finding that sweet spot between order and chaos can be a balancing act, and neither Canada nor Mexico has fully achieved it. I still prefer chaotic freedom over tyrannical order, though.

When it comes to traffic and driving behaviour, however, I do prefer order. I have seen way too many ugly accidents to be okay with anything less. Following the rules of the road keeps traffic flowing efficiently and reduces accidents. Yup, that’s the cop talking.

With that in mind, here’s a list of driving behaviours that have me fuming on a regular basis:

• Yucatán apparently has rules requiring slower traffic to keep to the right, but you would never know it. Naturally, many drivers prefer to test your patience by cruising slowly in the left lane.

• Indicators are optional here. You have to discover through osmosis which way another driver will turn. Sometimes, they’ll throw you a bone and activate their four-way flashers, but that doesn’t get you any further.

• Distracted driving is a sport here. Watching Instagram reels or even movies while cruising down the highway is great fun, both for that driver and for you.

• Stop signs are for decoration, apparently.

• If you want to turn left at an intersection, there is no need to get into the left lane ahead of time. Just stay in the far-right lane until the last possible second, then cut across every lane of traffic to make your turn. The important thing is not to miss the turn.

• Speaking of driving lanes, it’s good advice to keep one of the white lines between your front wheels. That way, you always have a heading to follow.

• Brake lights may work, or they may not. It keeps driving exciting.

• Cops drive with their emergency lights activated at all times, and they drive far below the speed limit to “patrol.” There’s nothing more exciting than being stuck behind a Christmas tree impeding traffic when you’re in a rush.

If you’re coming to Mexico and weren’t a cop in a previous life, chances are you’re going to be just fine.

Conclusion

Well, there’s my list of things I positively hate about living in Mexico.

When I first began writing this article, I intended to list five things. But the truth is, I could only come up with three that I genuinely hate. There are plenty of other things I dislike or would prefer to be different, but that is not quite the same thing.

I’m curious to know what you think. If you live in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America, am I on the mark here or just another entitled gringo who needs to adjust? What frustrates you most about where you live?

Stay free,
Exiled Mountie