In addition to liking the Mexican custom of saying Provecho I also like the common custom of greeting people by kissing them on the cheek.

In Mexico the custom is to greet a person by kissing their right cheek just once. Let me clarify and say that men here don’t kiss each other on the cheek, they usually do a pat on the back kind of hug that is sometimes preceded by a handshake. But men will greet women with a cheek kiss. And women greet both women and men with a cheek kiss.

Not everyone gets a cheek kiss, only certain people in your circle are going to expect one. Neither my husband nor myself greets our housekeeper with a cheek kiss, it just doesn’t feel right. And usually I won’t greet someone I am meeting for the first time with a cheek kiss, but sometimes if they are young, or if we are being introduced by a close friend I will give a kiss to a new acquaintance. And we normally don’t greet neighbors with a cheek kiss because they are too familiar, we see them too often for it to be practical.

But when the person you are greeting is a friend or acquaintance usually a cheek kiss is in order. There are all kinds of cheek kisses and they mean all kinds of things. Some of the more memorable types of cheek kisses are:

~ The “I actually don’t like you but I’m kissing you to be polite” kiss. This one is usually given by and to women. It’s often given as just a “mwah” sound in your right ear, there’s not any touching of cheeks and usually there’s no pretense made to pretend to hug.

~ Then there’s the “I’ve got loads of make-up on (and/or a hat on) so don’t mess me up by touching me” kiss. This one also normally involves just a kiss sound in your ear with no cheek touching. But if there’s an accidental touch, and the person really does like you, they will apologize for the lipstick they just put on your cheek.

~ There’s also the “I don’t want your spouse/partner to realize I like you so I’m going to kiss you just a little wrong and maybe he/she won’t notice” kiss. This kiss is a little too emphatic, sometimes it’s too wet and sometimes it lands too close to the edge of your mouth and doesn’t make it quite onto your cheek proper.

~ But the very best kind of cheek kiss is the “It’s really good to see you” kiss. This is the only kiss that should take place imho. This is the one where you really mean it and they do too and both parties feel totally at ease.

I first learned the “It’s really good to see you” cheek kiss from my husband’s family and Mexican friends back when we were living in the U.S. So by the time I came to Mexico I was used to the cheek kissing custom.

Now, after 8 years of being around lots of cheek kissing Mexicans, I’ve found that greeting people with a cheek kiss is very simply normal. And when I travel back to the U.S. I gleefully inflict cheek kissing on my friends there, whether they are expecting it or not. And if they aren’t quite expecting it I cover my totally intentional cheek kiss by saying “I’m Mexican now, so I can’t help it.” Ha!

I think that the thing I really like about cheek kissing is that it softens the social edge between people, and it does so right at the beginning of the conversation. If you start off with a cheek kiss then you are starting with trust and mutual appreciation.

I just got a whiff of sewer gas, it came in the windows. Normally I don’t smell sewer from my home. But for some reason a few minutes ago I smelled sewer. Thankfully that’s over now. I hope it doesn’t come back. But the stink inspired me to finally write a post I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

Mexico often smells like shit. In Cancun I sometimes smell shit when I’m in the hotel zone, near the posh houses and big hotels. And sometimes you smell it when you are in the nice parts of downtown. And it goes without saying that you smell it when you go to the poorest neighborhoods.

It makes sense that in a 3rd world country there will be problems with the public sewer system. They don’t have the money here to keep the roads properly repaired and they don’t have the money to pick up the garbage that’s strewn around the city, so why should the sewer system work perfectly? It shouldn’t. But actually that’s not why I’m writing this post.

I’m writing because in Mexico it’s common for the inside of people’s houses to smell like shit. This is because it’s very common here for drains to be put in without water traps. A water trap is a device that works by keeping an amount of water between the room and the sewer, so the sewer gas can’t escape. A water trap for a floor drain or a sink costs less than $50 MXP (under $5 USD). There is no reason on earth not to put one in every drain in the house.

And yet I have wealthy friends in Cancun whose answer to having a stinky sewer gas filled bathroom is to keep the door shut. Instead of solving the shit smell problem with a $5 USD part they opt to keep the door shut? Does this make sense? Not to me it doesn’t. I don’t know how people can justify not fixing this, unless they secretly LIKE the smell. Ick!

The other day a woman stopped into my vet’s office and asked if the vet would take in 3 starving kittens that had eye infections. My vet said “no” but offered to treat their infections. The woman complained that none of the pet shops she’d been to would take the kittens either (obviously because they were sick).

Well, the woman walked outside the vet’s office and dumped the kittens in the bushes in front of the building and then she left. A little while later my husband, who was there helping the vet with some building maintenance, heard the mewing. The vet has been taking care of these kitties since then, she’s treated their eye infections, has successfully fattened them up and has neutered each of them. But now it’s time for them to find homes.

The two black ones are female and the orange tabby is male. If you know of anyone who might need a kitty (or 2 or 3) in their life please contact me asap.

This female was a skinny little thing when I first saw her, now she sports a belly.

This guy needs a bath but will be gorgeous when he’s cleaned up.

This girl is my favorite, she’s got a really sweet personality.

Here are the 3 of them together.

Please help save these kitties. My vet can’t keep them, she’s already got 6 six dogs that she adopted off the street (after nursing them back to health from various injuries).

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.

Right now my book club is reading Christopher Hitchens’ Portable Atheist. And I have also just finished Hitchens’ God is Not Great. So at the moment I am well-steeped in religious philosophies, and especially in the shortcomings, of the world’s major organized religions.

I won’t get into the big stuff right now (like whether God exists), maybe later (just you wait). But I do want to address a couple of things that always seem to get said to me in times of need (and as such seem to fit into the religious space).

One of them is:

Everything happens for a reason.

This is said with absolute conviction. To me this is like saying “your keys are always in the last place you look.” Of course they are in the last place you look because you are not so stupid as to keep looking for your keys once you’ve found them, are you? If you look for a reason, you find a reason. Did it happen for a reason? Or were there consequences of that event that didn’t suck? It’s not very likely that every consequence of an event will be bad. You can always find a silver lining and attach a big pile of meaning to it. So it all happens for a reason, a reason that we recognize after the fact, almost as a justification for an event that we are unhappy enough about to bother to say “everything happens for a reason.”

If you followed me through that then I’ll keep with it…

The next thing people always seem to say, or maybe it’s just Mom (who has a Ph.D in Religious Studies) who says it, is:

We are always where we need to be, learning what we need to learn.

This is patent bullshit. I don’t need to be raped and murdered to learn whatever special lesson that holds. We humans are capable of great subtly and, dare I say it, inference. We can watch someone else go through hell and realize that perhaps we don’t need to go there ourselves. (Well, sometimes, some of us, with some kinds of hell.)

There are some lessons I don’t need. I don’t need my attorney to be shot in the face 2 blocks from my home (yes this happened), it’s not a lesson that’s important to me. I don’t need my husband to be afraid of being kidnapped when we are eating shitty tacos from a street vendor (he is). I don’t need to see yet another street dog that has been killed by a car at high speed and lays, pathetically, in the middle of the highway getting slowly ground to an unrecognizable pulp by the repeated cars that hit it (this happens daily here). I don’t need to walk down the beach and find large quantities of drugs washed up on the shore (I know nothing).

If you think these are lessons worth learning then be my guest, fucking learn them! I think this statement is something that is said by people who don’t have enough lessons under their belts and feel compelled to latch onto whatever lesson passes by (sorry Mom). And maybe, just maybe, there are more lessons to learn when you live in a 3rd world country, where suffering is a common everyday experience.

Thank you, good night and God bless…or whatever.

I’m feeling honored. A close friend of mine, a single woman who is 20 years my elder, asked today if I would be one of her emergency contacts in case she gets sick. Perhaps this sounds morbid, but I am deeply honored to be seen as stable and trustworthy enough to be on the short list of people she would let herself need if all hell broke loose.

I’m also honored because Gary over at The Mexile complimented my blog. He writes well and his blog is really about living in Mexico, so it has real value to people interested in Mexico. In fact, Gary’s blog makes me interested in Mexico City which is something that husbandito, who is a chilango (person from Mexico City), cannot manage to do. I think Gary was just being nice; my blog is actually just a long grumpy rant written by someone who types too quickly, does too little and doesn’t really want to live in Mexico. But I appreciate the compliment.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want to blog about. Sometimes I have several distinct blog post ideas in my head. Other times I feel the blog post ideas build up but don’t seem to be able to separate one from another. This stalls my process and usually means I don’t blog at all, which makes the whole thing worse, of course.

This past week was like that, 15 different half-formed blog posts floated through my head, but none of them became defined enough to warrant any actual typing. So I’m posting now just to post something, to clear my brain and get back to intentional blogging.

My illness of last week became a week-long fever (hence my foggy-headed state). I functioned for part of most days, but by Friday I was just a feverish lump. Friday and Saturday I didn’t accomplish shit. I hate days like that, forced days off that are no fun. If I’m going to not work I want to enjoy it, dammit. But I’m finally better now, I feel strong and fully here again. It’s about time.

My daughter’s school is really something. Today the kids flew from Denver, CO to San Diego, CA, then they took a van across the border into Mexico. Her 8th grade class is headed to Tijuana for a week.

They will be volunteering at, and also staying at, an orphanage there. My daughter says that they will, among other things, help build a wall. The concept of a bunch of rich American kids going to Mexico to work illegally as construction workers just cracks me up.

I’m sure the trip will be great, it’s a whole new experience for all of them. I’m glad to see the school pushing the kids this way. And I’m very glad for my daughter to see somewhere in Mexico besides the Yucatan, even though by all reports Tijuana is pretty skanky.

The school told my daughter that she wasn’t allowed to spike her hair with colored gel in case her colors could be mistaken for gang colors. What a thing to worry about.

They also told the kids that this trip was about total immersion, which means they weren’t allowed to bring cell phones. So no contact for a week…I will spend a lot of time this week wondering how things are going.

The last time I had a cold was almost 5 years ago, just after we moved to Cancun from Colorado (USA). And I contracted that cold on a trip back to Colorado, I didn’t catch it here. When we lived in Colorado I got at least one cold a winter, sometimes more. And with all the dust in the air there (it’s high desert there) my sinuses would bother me often, cold or no cold. So I was a tissue-carrying girl back there.

Here in Cancun I don’t get colds. At least I didn’t. I’m coming down with one now. Husbandito came home from work on Saturday suffering the early symptoms of a cold. By Sunday it looked to me like a mild flu, he had fever and chills and sniffles and was generally miserable. He’s better today (Monday), the fever has broken and he’s feeling better. But now I’m getting it. Bah humbug! I don’t want to get sick. One of the best things about living here is that I don’t get sick, and now here I am with a headache and a stuffy nose and that pre-fever feeling. Yuck!

On the other hand I guess I should be happy that catching a cold is news, right?

I was just browsing around in Gary Denness’ Flickr Account (he’s a blogger who lives in Mexico City) and I was struck, once again, by the realization that being surrounded by good architecture is critical to the health of my soul.

This is all my parents’ fault. Of course. When I was little they bought a huge beautiful Victorian house (this followed living in a tent for a year). The house had soaring 15 foot ceilings and 6 bay windows, 2 of them in the living room. It had 8 bedrooms and 2 kitchens. It had 3 floors, a full basement, a barn, several outbuildings and so much more that any real estate agent would get writer’s cramp trying to take it all down.

But most of what that house had was classy architecture. It was beautiful inside and out. Every surface was nice, from the polished wooden floors to the fancy woodwork around the windows to the plush red carpeting on the wide staircases. There was room for everything and the spaces honored the people in them. It was a house that graced its occupants, it made you feel good. And everyone loved being in that house, it was always full of friends and family and neighbors and stray animals and I even remember a duck, once.

That house spoiled me. No house I’ve lived in since has felt so generous or so gracious. No house I’ve lived in since has made me feel honored like that. But when I see really beautiful buildings I get a taste of that back. And someday I’d like to buy another house that I really, really love. But this one can be a little smaller, that way maybe I can afford to, you know, paint it.

P.S. Check out Gary’s blog: The Mexile.