Observations on life in Mexico

Those of you who live in Mexico, or have lived here, may find this section uninteresting. I think most people new to Mexican day-to-day life notice these same things.
Life here in many ways is like living anywhere. You have to cook, clean the house, go shopping, etc. But there are some things which are really strikingly different.
Life on our street – we live across the street from a small store (called a tienda here) and another small store that looks like it sells beer but we never see people in there. The tienda gets many deliveries a day. Tortillas come in a cooler in the back of a pick-up truck, the milk company delivers, the soft drink truck comes, and so on. Our street is very narrow, so this all causes a traffic jam of sorts. Each truck comes with a driver and a helper. Sometimes we have to wait to leave the parking spot while a delivery is made.
People walk through the neighborhood selling many things. We have a pan man (pan is bread) who calls out “El Pan!, El Pan!” as he walks by with his basket balanced on his head. We have had flower vendors, a tamale lady, a Popsicle guy and others. Then there are the gas trucks. There are 3 different gas companies that come by. Each has their own distinctive little song or bell. We also have a water truck that just rings a bell as it goes by. A fruit and vegetable truck comes by once in a while. We have also had several vendors that we had no idea what they were selling.
There are 2 schools within a block of our house. In the mornings, many mothers walk their kids to school and after school the kids are very glad to be out. They play outside until well after dark.
For about a week or so, there have been 2 trampolines set up on the next block. Each night, they take in the bouncing portion and leave the frames there. Whose they are, why they are there, we don’t know. The neighbor kids love them!
Several of our neighbors wash their cars every day. Harold gets out and does ours pretty often, too. He also picks up trash from the street and puts it in a plastic bag. To keep dogs out of it, he puts the bag up in our tree. We have trash pickup 7 days a week. Everyone in PV does. We are supposed to put our trash out no earlier than 9 p.m. each night. Our neighborhood stacks the trash on the corner across from the taco stand. Some neighborhoods neatly stack all the trash in the middle of the intersection.
We walk our dogs several times a day. We are the only people we see with dogs on leashes. There are plenty of dogs in our neighborhood, though. So far we haven’t had any bad experiences with them. We also have chickens in the streets at times. No horses or donkeys.
Grocery shopping here takes adjusting to. You have to remember which stores get new stuff which days, and which days the sales change. If you hit the store the day before the new produce comes, it almost looks like they are going out of business!
Well I am going to post this and then we are heading to a festival in Bucerias. Thanks for reading our blog! Stay tuned, more to follow soon.