Cancun has a hidden treasure, a secret little cache of culture tucked away in the hotel zone. The Museo de Arte Popular Mexicano (Mexican Folk Art Museum) is overflowing with excellent examples of Mexican folk art and crafts. Not to be missed.

If You Go
Museo de Arte Popular Mexicano (Mexican Folk Art Museum)
Location: El Embarcadero Marina – 2nd Floor (near the Pirate Ships)
Blvd. Kukulcan, Km 4.5, Zona Hotelera, Cancun
By Bus: Blue Line Stop #80, Green Line Stop #81
Tels: 998.849.4332 & 998.849.5583
Cost: Around $5 USD
Open: Weekdays 9am – 7pm & Weekends 11am – 7pm
Web Site: Museo de Arte Popular Mexicano

In my last post I mentioned the lack of respect for wisdom and experience that I feel here in Cancun. There’s a deeper level to this than just problems with retailers.

I sometimes feel that living here I myself can’t get wiser, can’t gain wisdom. I feel that I spend so much of my energy here just trying to live a “normal” life that there isn’t extra time for study or reflection and there isn’t cultural support for growth. I feel that the problems I have because I live here are often so big, so un-fixable and so ultimately hopeless that the only way I could prove to myself that I was taking a positive step forward, that I was using my wisdom, would be to pack up and leave.

The shortsightedness in the way Cancun businesses are run is just the beginning, just the tip of the iceberg. The bigger issue is the way that society operates here. Life is hard enough here that you have to become selfish and shielded in order to survive here. And so most people think only about themselves, they don’t concern themselves with the betterment of society, they don’t concern themselves with other people’s well-being and they don’t value (or even notice) the wisdom of those around them.

Of course I’m generalizing. Of course I can name 10 people right now who do care about others and to whom wisdom does adhere. But I can name 100 who are so self-involved, so stuck in the rut of just surviving here that they are not learning, are not getting ahead, not helping make this a better place. It makes me really sad. And it makes me question my own judgment for staying here this long.

[Before you bitch at me that I should pack up and leave let me say that you are right, and we plan to, but we need to finish some projects, sell the house and plan the move. And it will probably take us a year to get out of here. So in the meantime, I’m here, like it or not.]

As I was thinking about this lack of wisdom issue the lyrics to Pearl Jam’s song “Immortality” kept running through my head. So I thought I would share the song with you (especially with Susan and Joyce). The video is here and the lyrics are below. This song is rumored to be about the suicide of Kurt Cobain. The video a little rough, but Eddie is masterful as always and Mike’s guitar solo will make you remember that there is a God. Enjoy.

Immortality by Pearl Jam

vacate is the word…vengeance has no place on me or her
cannot find the comfort in this world
artificial tear…vessel stabbed…next up, volunteers
vulnerable, wisdom can’t adhere…
a truant finds home…and a wish to hold on…
but there’s a trapdoor in the sun…immortality…
as privileged as a whore…victims in demand for public show
swept out through the cracks beneath the door
holier than thou, how?
surrendered…executed anyhow
scrawl dissolved, cigar box on the floor…
a truant finds home…and a wish to hold on too…
he saw the trapdoor in the sun…
immortality…
i cannot stop the thought…i’m running in the dark…
coming up a which way sign…all good truants must decide…
oh, stripped and sold, mom…auctioned forearm…
and whiskers in the sink…
truants move on…cannot stay long
some die just to live…

One of the things that’s most striking to me about the culture here in Cancun is the lack of respect for wisdom and experience. You see this especially in the retail, services and banking sectors here. But it’s present in many forms here.

When you look for a job here you are confronted by Help Wanted Ads asking for light-skinned, tall, skinny people who are under 35 (short, old, heavy, dark people need not apply). It is common for these ads to outline what you should look like. But often these ads make no mention of experience. Knowing what you are doing, being experienced in your field, is often less important than having the look the company wants.

You feel this lack of wisdom and lack of respect for experience when you have a problem with a local business. All too often problems are met with blank stares and statements that your problem can only be solved by a) someone who is not there are present and won’t be back today or by b) sending a request to the main office in Mexico City which will take weeks. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve found that the person that I have in front of me, the person who is witness to my trouble, is not capable of solving my problem and furthermore doesn’t care!

The result is that we consumers suffer poor and inefficient service. And we find ourselves losing respect for the impotent employees in the businesses that we have problems with.

I imagine that employees of these business must feel powerless. The home office, the boss, doesn’t trust them to solve problems so the employee sees lots of frustrated clients but can’t help them. It can’t be very satisfying to work in an environment like that. And that’s probably why these employees have to not care, because they can’t do anything anyway.

My own experience, as both an employee and as an employer, is that good employees are the ones that jump in to solve problems as soon as they recognize them. As a boss you want to cultivate a culture where your employees feel rewarded for and are expected to solve the client’s problems as quickly and as well as possible. But this concept seems to be foreign here in Cancun. Here in Cancun the customer is almost never right.

According to my National Geographic Society “Bird Migration Map for the Western Hemisphere” the Yucatan Peninsula is a stopping point for birds that migrate from as far away as Baffin Island in Northeastern Canada and Uruguay in South America. I’m not sure how many of these birds actually bother to come through Cancun, but some certainly do get spotted here.

When we first bought our house the yard had no mature trees. Now, 5 years later, we have a monster of a ficus tree, 5 huge bugambilias, a chico zapote that’s almost 2 stories tall and a naranja (orange) tree which is full of (green) oranges at the moment. Needless to say we have lots of attractive branches for birds to land on.

And land they do. Each morning we are awakened by birds who sit in the ficus, just outside our bedroom window. Once they start their squawking the cats inevitably jump onto the windowsills and watch the bird show for a few hours. Some cats get more into this than others and a couple of the cats get a little carried away making imitative “bird” noises and periodically launching themselves up onto the window screen in a futile attempt to chase a bird.

The other day we were awakened by bird squawks. But this time they were not coming from the ficus tree, they were coming from the other side of the house, from the backyard. And this time it wasn’t the usual 10 or 20 birds having their normal pre-coffee discussion about how to torment our 8 cats. No. This time it was roughly 90 to 100 birds. And this time they were squawking like no one’s business. These birds were LOUD, they had a purpose, they were raising an alarm!

When we looked we saw birds perched along every edge of every roof and wall around our backyard. And ALL of them were squawking INTO our backyard!

We raced into the yard and found the problem. Several guilty-looking cats had a bird cornered in our backyard. They were close enough to the bird that it couldn’t take flight. We chased the cats into the house and then fended off the dog who had come to “help”. Once free of cat interference the bird flew halfway up the wall and landed on a vine in the corner. Then it was able to fly to the top of the wall. I couldn’t tell if it’s short flights were due to it being injured or whether they were due to space limitations coupled with being in shock. But the bird got away under its own power.

As soon as the bird topped the wall it’s squawking brethren quit their alarming and went about their business. But I have to say I was really, really impressed with how all those birds tried to help their fallen friend. If they had not woken us up that bird would have been cat food.

I’ve always thought I would like to feed birds and become a birdwatcher. But it may have to wait until another life, a life in which I don’t pull every starving cat I find off the street and bring it home.

One of the things that I really like about Mexican culture is the custom of saying provecho to other diners as you leave a restaurant. Provecho means bon appétit or “enjoy your meal”.

Usually as you get up to leave your table you say provecho to the people at the table nearest yours, but sometimes you hear people saying it as they pass more than one table.

When I’m in a restaurant I have a tendency to forget that I’m in a room full of people. My table and my companions and my food become my temporary little world. And I think that many Americans are just like me. There’s a sense in the U.S. that people want to be left alone when they are eating in a restaurant. So the last thing you are going to do when you are dining out there is to talk to the people at the next table.

But in Mexico that spell of isolation is broken. You ARE in a room full of people. And it’s acknowledged in a polite and particularly kind way. I like that.

I know I shouldn’t tempt the fates, but how many more things can go wrong? I’m killing myself trying to please all my web clients but all they want is more and they want it yesterday. I’m now going on 3 weeks without a day off. And my coming weekend already has a client appointment marring it.

I’ve had two real estate deals in a row fall apart, the most recent one due to unethical behavior and a list of stupidities committed on both sides. It’s like a comedy of errors. I spent dozens of hours on this last deal and now it’s all for nothing. Imagine all the great things I could have wasted those hours on?

All this crap raining down is actually amusing and, for once, I’m not finding this depressing. But I am sick of feeling like with my abilities, experience and talents I can’t do better than this? What the fuck? I keep on learning the lessons, so when does all this learning pay off?

When I was in college I learned to be a perfectionist. I learned that the rewards were there for hard work. But since coming to live in Mexico I’ve been getting the message that greed rules and that the quality of the work is not important. All people seem to care about is making money and they will stab you in the back to get it. I’m tired of it. I want to go back to having people notice that I’m actually good at what I do and want to pay me well for it, is that too much to ask?

I feel like a zombie. My internal clock is completely whacked and I can’t figure out if a nap would help or just make things worse.

Last night we attended a small, really nice party. But seeing as we both needed to work today (yes, it’s Sunday, and no, I have not taken that day off yet) we decided to cut out of the party on the early side. We got home before 9 pm, walked the dog and went to bed early.

But the next thing I knew husbandito was waking me up with incessant moaning and groaning. He was, apparently, dying; and it was my duty as his wife to somehow save him. Poor guy was a big mess. Turns out it was a bit of food poisoning. At yesterday’s party he’d eaten a hamburger and had been generous in his use of mayo (using mayo at an outdoor party here is not on my list of wise moves).

He spent several hours writhing in pain, swearing, telling me “estoy muriendo” (I’m dying) and making frequent trips to the bathroom. Finally, around 2:30 am, he was able to sleep. But by that time I was wide awake.

And so, in my sleepless state, I watched the second half of the Star Trek Generations movie. This one features Captain Kirk coming back from the dead (well back from the Nexus) to save the day. There’s little in life that I find more comforting than watching William Shatner overact. And by the end I was finally sleepy.

But at 4:22 am I was awakened by a loud BOOM followed quickly by the squealing tires of a car taking off down the street. At the same time our street’s security guard was blowing his whistle and I could hear him running and yelling. Of course we both woke up and then husbandito went out to see what was going on.

It turns out that someone had thrown a concrete block through the windshield of my next-door neighbor’s pick-up truck. At first we thought it might have been random vandalism. But now I think my neighbor was targeted deliberately. There were lots of other cars in the street to throw things at, and the other cars (including ours) were all lower to the ground than the truck. The truck is so tall that hitting its windshield took a very special effort. Why pick the toughest target?

So now I’m thinking that someone over there must have been schtupping someone they should not have been…or something. Anyway it sucks for them.

It turns out that there was a witness who saw the car leave in a big hurry (the guard was at the opposite end of the street when this began so he just saw tail lights). The veterinarian at the end of the street was performing emergency surgery on a dog when all this was going on. And the dog’s owner was hanging around outside right when the windshield smashers were tearing out of the street. So now the neighbor has a broken windshield and a good description of the car. That’s something, I guess.

Husbandito finally crawled back into bed at 5:30 am, that gave him one whole hour to sleep before getting up for work. Poor guy. I tried to get him to call in sick, but he wouldn’t do it. When he left he looked like he’d been beaten up.

I was able to sleep after he left. But I’m so off-schedule now that I feel weird, I’m even a little dizzy. Maybe I will take that nap…

It’s been cold here in Cancun lately. What that means is that there’s been no need for a/c. And I’ve had to put on socks for a few days in a row to keep my feet warm. I normally only have a couple of need-socks days per year here, and they are in January. So this is pretty weird. I’m wearing sweaters at night, after sunset. And we’ve got a blanket on the bed.

On the other hand, we have all the windows in the house open. And I’m still wearing shorts and t-shirts (with socks). So I recognize that cold is a relative term.

When I moved here from Colorado it was July, and I felt like I’d moved into a blast furnace. I got heat stroke often when I first came here, especially when I was dumb enough to go for a run after say 10 am.

Since then I’ve gotten used to the tropical heat. And now I feel cold if the temp drops into the 70s (21°C to 26°C). I can even run outside at noon now without getting heat stroke symptoms.

But when the temp drops, and I’m beginning to suffer from the labor of having to heat my body, I often find myself unconsciously taunting my friends in northern climes. Without realizing I do it I find that I mention how tortuously cold it is to people who are living in Maine or Colorado or Canada or some other cold place. And of course they retort with a universal “shut up, you bitch.” Well, my mother doesn’t call me a bitch, but pretty much everyone else does.

Obviously, they don’t get it. Sun is setting now, time to find a sweater.

The other day someone I know only slightly saw me holding a book. She called me over.

She said “That book is really great.”

I said “Oh, have you read it?”

She said “No, but I saw in an airport bookstore that they had many copies of it, and it says on it that it’s a National Bestseller. So it must be good.”

I stood and stared at her. All I could think was “Please don’t reproduce.”

When I first came to Cancun someone told me that once you had made it through a year in Cancun you were from Cancun, you were a Cancunense, a native. This was a recognition of both the fact that it’s hard to adjust to living here and also of the fact that (because Cancun is so young) no one over the age of 25 is actually from here. Cancun has no elders, it has no older people who have lived here all their lives the way normal towns do. And so the requirement for becoming a native, a Cancunense, is simply to survive here for a year.

And Cancun is difficult to adjust to. At least I have found it to be. I think that when older people move here, with money, to retire here in a lovely home, they probably do not find Cancun so hard to adjust to. But the people who move here as working-age adults do seem to find it hard to adjust to, especially if they face making a living here as a foreigner.

The things I did which most helped me to adjust were to make friends and to find people I could trust. At first it was hard to make friends, but then one day someone invited me to a gathering and I met people who introduced me to more people and my social circle began to expand exponentially.

Eventually, as the circle grew, I found Cancun’s elders, it’s transplanted elders. Especially a group of, primarily American, women who have each lived here 10, 15, 20 or 25 years. These women have seen it all, lived through everything Cancun can throw at you, they’ve fallen in love here, raised kids here, had careers here. They’ve been broke here, they’ve been rich here. They’ve seen loved ones die here, they’ve done it all and they’ve made it through.

And as I met them and got to know them I found that, almost without exception, every one of them reached out to me and gave me a tip or piece of advice that eased my adjustment to living here. This group treated me with a subtle relentless generosity of spirit and of affection that I’ve never found in another community.

When I look back, I remember that Cancun seemed like such an unfriendly place when I arrived. But that sense slowly abated and has been replaced by a sense of community and belonging that I have never felt anywhere outside my own family.

It’s a wonderful feeling, of course, but I miss my kid and long to return to Colorado to live with her. Yet I’m afraid that a return to the social climate there will be a huge let down for me. I truly don’t know if I can be happy there. I lived there for 14 years and while I know hundreds of people there still, I only have a few good friends there. I don’t know if my ability to make friends has gotten stronger since I left there, or if this has something to do with the difference between the cultures of these two places. But I’m afraid that it is the culture and not that I’ve just suddenly become a social butterfly…flap, flap, flap.