Starting to live in Mexican is not all a piece of cake

I'm in the mood to point out that living in any other country is a challenge. Interesting, yes, worthwhile, yes, but not entirely bliss! Mexican culture grows out of a tremendously different historical past than ours, and there are numerous opportunities for misunderstandings between "us" and "them." This comment isn't based on any particular event I've experienced; it's more a warning to people who are dreaming of how great life would be if they left their home in the US (or Canada or anywhere else) and settled in warm, sunny, cheap Mexico where the people (as I often say) are so friendly.

Often Kelly and I do feel that our lives are great. We sit eating a meal on our verandah, overlooking our swimming pool and tropical gardens, in perfect shirt-sleeve weather with few bugs, and we are very content. We've even been known to gloat!

BUT there are challenges aplenty. The numbers of dead dogs that we saw beside the highway on our recent trip still haunt me. I'm getting more at ease with how Mexicans drive, but it's still very daunting to me at times. Already more fluent than many foreigners, I wonder if I will ever reach a level of proficiency in Spanish where I feel satisfied. The slowness of Mexican bureaucracy is amazing at times. I miss friends at home. And just because I'm living in another country doesn't mean I'm free of concerns for my own country and our planet.

Buying this house in Mexico is an experiment. Will we live here for many years? Off and on, with a home also in our town in Colorado? With this our only home (as it is at present), just visiting in the US? Or will we end up back in the US after an interlude here? There's no way to know yet. For now, it's a matter of doing my best to live each day fully. Now that we have all our essential furniture (and a washing machine we got yesterday, tra la), we can begin to get back to doing some real work, on our websites and otherwise. That will get me a bit more centered, I'm sure. It's been close to a year since I've been able to do as much writing as I want to.

Of course, we still have to figure out how to maintain a swimming pool and give it a good scrubbing or hire someone to do that, change the electric bill to our names, figure out where we can get snail mail, consider whether to buy a car in Mexico or wait till our next trip to the US, and on and on. For now, I'd better try to catch up on my email. The fencing guys are doing some welding and we can't use our computers when they are doing that as the welding crashes our surge protectors. They've gone off to lunch, so I have a while!