7 Things I Positively Love About Living in Mexico

The freedom, culture and small daily pleasures that have kept me here for nearly six years.

Most of what I write about in this section is practical: the things a person ought to understand before uprooting his life and planting a flag in another country.

But life is about more than practical stuff. If you hate living somewhere, it doesn’t matter how well it works on paper because you’re not going to stay there very long.

So with that in mind, I thought it might be fun to publish what I actually like about living here. Here are seven things I love about living in Mexico:

1. You Are Given More Room to Live Your Own Life

I absolutely love the amount of personal freedom you have in this country. While bureaucracy is certainly a factor, it is more confined to specific needs rather than everyday life. In Mexico, we don’t have a rule for every minor inconvenience. And even if there is a rule, most of the population has probably never heard of it and the police are unlikely to enforce it unless absolutely necessary.

In general, if you treat your neighbour with respect, you will be treated in kind. Give someone a compliment, and they will go out of their way to help you or point you in the right direction.

That daily government intrusion that you are so sick of in Canada just does not exist here. Or maybe I just haven’t noticed it, which is fine by me. For the most part, the government just does not care about you. Pay your taxes, be a decent human being, and all is well. Here, you can still be yourself and most everyone will accept you the way you are. Isn’t that what being inclusive is supposed to mean?

A great example was former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s refusal to give into the COVID fear campaign. He made sure the vaccine was available to everyone who wanted it, but he did not mandate it. Some rules were implemented, especially at the state and municipal levels, but they never seriously restricted my freedom of movement. I could generally go anywhere I wanted to without having to “show my papers.” AMLO famously said that the most important thing was to maintain freedom. Lefty or not, I can abide by that.

Yes, I’m aware that Mexico now has a new president and that the political climate has changed since then. But this was my main reason for moving here at the time, and almost six years later, life on the ground has not changed very much at all. In practice, Mexico is still a very free place.

By and large, Mexican police go about their daily business, which seems to consist mostly of messing up the flow of traffic at busy intersections. I’ve never seen such inept traffic direction before. Apart from that, every interaction I have had with them has been respectful and professional. Mind you, I don’t keep myself occupied with criminal activity, so that is really no surprise.

I am free to say what I want, both in public and online, without expecting the gestapo to come and knock on my door for calling someone an insulting name or criticizing some government figure or weird policy. You are more liable to get your ass kicked for dissing someone in public, than for the local police to show up with a warning and a finger wagging. And that is just the way life was meant to be, at least in my books.

2. Everyday Life Is Still More Affordable

The daily cost of living is definitely much lower than in Canada. That does deserve a little asterisk, though, as prices have steadily increased over the last few years and things are not as cheap as they were five years ago.

Source: Expatistan’s crowdsourced Calgary–Mérida comparison, retrieved August 15, 2026.

Overall, you can still just “say yes” when you get the urge to go out for dinner instead of first performing a household budget review. Fresh food is very affordable, especially when you buy it at a mercado rather than a supermarket.

If you are happy living a more local lifestyle, buying locally sourced produce and groceries rather than filling your cart with imported products at Costco or Chedraui, you can still live very affordably here. Restaurants, local food and many everyday services are noticeably cheaper than they are in Canada.

Not everything is a bargain, however. Gasoline costs about as much as, or sometimes even more than it does in Canada, while imported clothing, electronics and certain groceries can also cost just as much or more. Electricity can be inexpensive if your consumption is subsidized, but running the A/C all day in places like Mérida can quickly change that equation.

Real estate is also less expensive than in Canada, although Mérida is no longer the bargain it was five years ago. Houses may be affordable according to Canadian standards, but I don’t see the same value for the money when I first arrived.

I’ll be covering this topic in greater detail in the Living in Mérida series, so stay tuned for that.

3. Functional Healthcare

Private healthcare is a major plus in Mexico. It’s affordable, access is almost immediate, and in my experience, the care has been highly competent and professional.

That’s what I love about the healthcare here. It may not be “universal and free,” but it’s definitely available and functional. When I need to see a specialist, I can usually get an appointment the next day or sometimes even the same day. Even visiting the ER is surprisingly painless, with short waiting times and doctors who possess a bedside manner worth 5 stars. I’ll take that over the communist experiment up north any day of the week.

For a deeper dive into Mexican healthcare, check out this article I wrote recently:

4. The Food Is Fresh, Local, and Unpretentious

Mexican cuisine is famous for its rich history and vibrant flavours. Traditional Mexican cuisine is recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and is widely considered as one of the world’s greatest cuisines.

What I especially love is that good food here does not need fancy branding or an expensive restaurant to justify itself. Some of the best food can be found at a mercado, a family restaurant or a little stand on the side of the road. It’s fresh, local and generally served with a smile.

I find it hard to pick just one favourite food because everything tastes so good here. But if I had to choose one, it would probably be chilaquiles for breakfast.

If you’re unfamiliar with them, chilaquiles are basically fried corn tortilla pieces covered in a red or green sauce and topped with cheese, cream and onion. They are usually served with a fried egg, shredded chicken or whatever specialty the restaurant offers.

Some of my other favourites are:

• Tacos, especially de barbacoa (slow-cooked lamb or mutton) and al pastor (marinated pork cooked on a vertical spit and topped with pineapple, onion and cilantro).

• Carne asada, grilled over charcoal and usually accompanied by spring onions, nopales (cactus) and whatever else happens to be on the grill.

• Tortas, or what I like to call the Mexican sandwich, made with a crusty roll and filled with anything from ham and cheese to milanesa, pork or chicken.

• Chiles rellenos: poblano peppers stuffed with cheese or seasoned meat, then battered and fried.

Meat is an important part of the Mexican diet, with cookouts in the front yard a common sight during family gatherings or while watching the game. I don’t personally know a single Mexican who prefers Beyond Beef over actual beef, and I have yet to meet a Mexican vegan. I doubt such a thing even exists. Or maybe I just need to get out more.

Anyway, I wish the WEF tyrants the best of luck in banning beef in Mexico. It’s never gonna happen.

5. Winter Has Been Cancelled

I won’t pretend that Yucatán has perfect weather. For most of the year, the heat and humidity can make stepping outside feel like going to a sauna with your toque and mittens on.

But I have not shovelled a driveway, scraped a windshield or driven through a blizzard in more than five years. There is no slush, no black ice and no filthy snowbank still sitting in the Canadian Tire parking lot six weeks after Christmas. That alone puts the weather firmly in the positive column for me.

My favourite time of year is from October to about February, when the humidity finally lets up and temperatures can fall into the low 20s. The locals pull out their sweaters to brave this tropical winter while we Canadians finally stop sweating.

For the rest of the year, I do my best to stay close to a pool or air conditioning. You guys keep the furnace running for half the year anyway, so it’s really not that different. I’ve simply traded one climate-controlled place for another, and mine comes with a pool.

6. Mexico Knows What It Is

One of the things I like best about Mexico is that it knows who it is. This is not a “post-national” country that is embarrassed by its own existence. Mexicans fly their flag proudly, celebrate their history and take genuine pride in being Mexican. You won’t hear Mexico’s president announce that the country has no core identity.

Mexico won their independence in 1821, but their cultural roots reach back a lot further. You’ve got three hundred years of Spanish rule with constant mixing of Indigenous bloodlines, the lasting influence of the Catholic Church, and lingering traces of the older Mesoamerican civilizations. All of that is still sitting and marinating in the culture today.

You can see that history almost everywhere you look. It is in the colonial churches, the old haciendas, the Maya ruins, the food and the music, and the religious festivals that pull whole towns into the streets. Just consider the Día de Muertos festivities; is there anything more Mexican than that?

What is even cooler is how the national culture stays dominant even when the individual regions are so different from each other. Yucatán, for example, doesn’t feel anything like Oaxaca, and neither of them feels like Mexico City or Nuevo León. You go from from place to place, and the food changes, the architecture looks different, but somehow it all stays firmly Mexican.

That brings me to another point: immigration. Mexico has not experienced permanent mass immigration on anything close to the scale we’ve seen in Canada and other Western countries. I always say that one of the things I love about Mexico is that it’s full of Mexicans!

Taken together, all of this has helped Mexico retain a culture that remains cohesive, strong and remarkably resistant to social Marxism.

Another thing I really like is how family is still at the centre of life here. Sundays, birthdays and holidays all revolve around large family gatherings that often include several generations. Even people who aren’t especially religious still feel that Catholic connection, and the traditional beliefs about family haven’t turned into something you’re supposed to feel bad about.

That doesn’t mean that gender ideology is completely absent from society. It isn’t. But it has not yet conquered ordinary Mexican culture to the same extent that it has in Western countries. Regular people still push back against it, and the traditional views on men, women and family are still just… normal.

7. People Can Still Disagree Without Becoming Enemies

Something else I really like about Mexicans is their ability to disagree without immediately deciding that the other person is the devil.

Mexico is certainly divided politically; it would be a lie to say that it isn’t. Mexicans get fiery about their politics, but it does not seem to consume every part of their identity.

People can argue about politics over dinner and then continue eating, sometimes finding themselves agreeing on a completely different topic. They can strongly disagree about government or social issues and still part on friendly terms. They might think you are completely wrong, but they generally don’t treat that disagreement as sufficient reason to hate you and delete you from their lives.

That ability has unfortunately been lost in Canada and much of the West. Having the wrong opinion is no longer treated as a simple disagreement; it is taken as proof that you are a bad person. Friendships end, families become divided and people stop speaking to each other simply because someone voted the wrong way, questioned a government policy or refused to repeat the approved opinion.

In my experience, Mexicans are much better at accepting that someone can be ‘wrong’ about politics and still be a perfectly decent person. That is something Canada desperately needs to relearn.

And that sums up the seven things I positively love about living in Mexico. But, no place is perfect, and there are also some things I just can’t stand about living here.

Keep an eye out for the next article: 3 Things I Positively Hate About Living in Mexico.

Stay free,
Exiled Mountie