Mexico takes some getting used to. Yes, I know it's a foreign country, even if it is just next door to the US. As Michael asks me when I'm complaining about something not working the way I think it should: "And what country do we live in?"
Take grocery shopping. Our kitchen is smallish so we can't always stock up on items - there's only so much storage available. And we know that shopping in Mexico is like shopping at Costco: If you see something you like, buy it now; it may be gone if you wait until your next shopping trip.
So this week I plan out a week's menus and make a grocery list for the items we need. Many bell peppers are required - mostly the red ones (more expensive than the usual green color). We drive to Mega on a Wednesday - Sale Day for fruits and vegetables. Right inside the door we walk into the produce section only to find that they have lots of bell peppers in three colors: red, orange, and green. And the red peppers are the least expensive. Bingo!
Later we walk through the canned goods aisles looking for the cans of tomatoes that are needed for the recipes. Four of the five recipes called for canned tomatoes in some incarnation: diced, diced with onions & garlic, stewed, whole, et cetera.
The aisle with the canned tomatoes has only tomato sauces and purees. You've never seen so many cans and boxes of sauces and purees. If nothing else, the grocery staff know how to fill empty shelves with what's available so that it looks plentious.
Luckily, we did have a couple of cans of diced tomatoes with garlic/onions at home so we were able to make the lentil soup, but scratch the rest of the week's menus. No curry, no chicken saute, no salsa, no Scandinavian veggie stew, no Cuban beans. Time to freeze all the chicken, I guess.
I guess that's what restaurants are for, eh?
Another thing that took some getting used to was the toilets down here. No, this isn't rural Italy in the 60s, when some hotels still had bathrooms with a hole in the floor and a roll of what passed as tissue. We have 'real' bathrooms with running water and everything. We even installed whole-house purified water so we could brush our teeth in any bathroom without worrying about catching a dreaded disease.
We live in a working class neighborhood (a colonia) but it's not in the historic center of town, so we don't have a small wastebasket next to each toilet to receive the used toilet tissue. Our drains are large enough to flush all that away.
It's the flushing that gets me. For some reason, Mexican toilets only flush when you hold the handle down. Now this seems obvious, but in the states you depress the handle and release it - walk away - the toilet follows through. Here, you depress the handle and must hold it until the toilet does its job. If you release it too soon, it stops flushing.
This took some getting used to, but it eventually became second nature. However, six months later when I was in San Diego for a while, the depress/release took me by surprise each time for the first few days. I suppose it's not the toilet itself, it's the flushing mechanism inside the tank that determines how it works, but that part of the design is missing here. Perhaps we'll buy some replacements for the innards and bring them back with us on our next visit. It will give Pedro something to do around the house.
I'm not even going to consider installing the pressurized tank toilets that our Home Depot carries. Just not sure we have the water pressure to fill them. We use tinacos and gravity for our water pressure here.
Of course, we could buy those toilet tank replacement kits at our nearby Target, if only we had one. One of my most keenly felt losses was Target. In the San Fernando Valley we lived surrounded by at least five Target stores. If one store was out of something you could find it nearby. Sunday mornings' routine involved drinking the morning cup of coffee while perusing the newest Target ad on the computer to see what the latest thing I didn't know I needed was. And while Costco, Sams Club, Sears, Home Depot, WalMart and other stores have made the transition across the border, Target remains firmly NOB. I'm hoping I live to see a Target store within 30 - 40 miles of SMA; then I could die happy.
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