So this is Mexico..

It's been an interesting time adjusting to life in Mexico. It's 100 times easier than I thought it would be & thanks to great friends & a great new host family, there's really been no transition at all. But there are some very notable differences between life and daily rituals in Mexico to those in the U.S. Some are still startling to me even as I'm growing accustomed to everything here. There are different levels of police here, they're not all equal like in the U.S. There is your general municipal police, then the traffic police (which I haven't quite decided what they do yet), and then the scary Pancho Villa-looking police. They have multiple guns on them, one huge assault rifle type, then a couple little ones. Plus rolls & rolls of bullets strapped across their chests and to their belts. They're positioned in random places too, sometimes they're standing outside shops or just on street corners. They still surprise me every time I pass them. The traffic police don't seem to do much of anything. Like any big city, traffic in Xalapa gets crazy. Add in the tiny, curving streets that were built for donkeys, horses, and foot traffic rather than cars and the insanely steep hills everywhere & it gets worse. People swerve in and out of lanes, run lights, everything. I've been told it's a rule that you have to have your seat belt on in the front seat but you can have 10 people in the bed of trucks without any problem. The traffic police show up when there's been an accident but I haven't seem them worry about much else. People here also don't believe in turn signals but they sure do believe in horns. They honk their horns about everything, sometimes laying on them for 30 seconds or more at a time, no matter what hour of the night. Pedestrians also do NOT have the right of way, it's quite the opposite, which makes it very hard & scary to cross the street when cars seem to speed up when there's someone in the road.

Another thing that's hard to get used to is the milk. I'm not sure what is in it but it doesn't need to be refrigerated. It comes in little cardboard cartons & is good for 4 months. There's something about eating cereal with warm milk that I can't quite get used to.

I usually eat cereal for dinner rather than breakfast now. The meal schedule is very different than what I'm used to but it's growing on me. For breakfast my host mom usually makes something like eggs with ham, or some sort of sandwich, and some fruit. Plus coffee. They drink coffee with everything but it's really good here so I've started drinking some with them in the morning. Lunch is usually around 3:00 and it's the big meal of the day. It always starts with some sort of soup, then some big slab of meat that I usually don't recognize and rice and tortillas. I'll never get tired of the rice & tortillas (especially the hand made tortillas) but food here is very centered around meat and all things fried. I could probably count on one hand the number of times vegetables have been served with a meal, which is hard for me because I usually live on vegetables. Then around 10:00 is dinner, something small like cereal or a little sandwich, or a tamal. Everyone drinks bottled water here, so that makes it easy for me to steer clear of the water since even the Mexicans do. They drink a lot of flavored water though, water with pineapple, water with orange, lots of fruit flavored water. People double check they heard me right when I just ask for agua natural, just plain old regular water. My family is finally getting used to the fact that I just don't eat that much. My mom still offers me every piece of food they have in the house at meals but I don't think that's going to change, I think it's just the mother in her.

When to tip and who to tip are confusing things here also, for me anyway. You don't tip taxi drivers and servers and resteraunts you only tip 10%, which is hard for me to get used to. I have a tendency to overtip after working in a resteraunt. You are supposed to tip the bagger at any store though and they're usually much older people. Luckily, my teacher told are class about this before I had to go to the grocery store so I didn't rip off the man who bagged my shampoo.

Mexicans are definitly more of a touchy-feely bunch than those in the United States. Which isn't really saying much since everyone seems to have their own personal bubble at home. Everyone greets each other with a kiss on the cheek, whether you've known each other for years or if you've just met that second. Everyone also says goodbye with a kiss on the cheek as well. Even if you've just said hello the same way a minute before. There's an insane amount of PDA here too. Just walking down the street every other person you pass is either holding hands with someone or has their arm around another person, which isn't really that uncommon but you can find couples kissing everywhere here! Parks , resteraunts, schools, stores, anywhere, you name it you can find people kissing! And not just little pecks here or there either, lots of PG13 PDA. People walk & kiss, I have trouble not running into people when I'm paying attention to where I'm going on the crowded sidewalks, I have no idea how these people do it when they're faces are covered by another persons. It's a skill I definitely don't have, but at the same time, don't ever see a time when I'll need it in the future either.

It's been interesting and that's just the beginning..