Post #642790 by MadDogMike on Wed, Jul 4, 2012 12:27 PM

Thanks friends.

Not to make fun of our southern neighbors, but 4th of July seems a good day to realize how good we have it here in the US. Here are some interesting things I noticed on my recent trip to Mexico.

Driving - There don't seem to be any real enforced driving laws in Mexico - I saw a motorcycle make a left turn on a red light right in front of a police and nothing happened, try THAT in California! There is no minimum driving age, you don't need lights to drive at night, you are allowed to drink & drive. People will pass several cars on a blink curve! On the other hand, the drivers (at least in the rural areas) are rather courteous. If someone passes on a blind curve and a car comes around the corner, everyone just moves over a little and 3 cars fit in 2 lanes - no honking or finger flipping. If you need to block a single lane street while you unload, people just wait patiently until you are done. They do have some creative uses for vehicles; I saw 13 people in a Datsun pick-up and the average family sedan is a moped - it was not uncommon to see 4 people on one. I saw a man carrying 8 foot boards crossways on the floor of his moped, liked like an airplane!

Employment - they don't seem to automate many things and as a result employ more people. Our hotel in Cancun had a whole army of groundskeepers who trimmed, watered, edged, raked the beach, etc by hand. There is no self-serve gas, each island has it's own attendant (at $2.53/gallon). The average gas station we stopped at had 3 people pumping gas, 1 or 2 convenience store cashiers, and a bathroom attendant - 6 employees. Our average 7-11 has one or 2 employees at a time.

Markets - Each block has a tortilla vendor, a bread vendor, a fruit & vegetable vendor, and a small store all selling out of their home. People generally buy just enough food for today. Every town is centered around a church and a plaza with open air markets in the plaza. Meat just hangs out, they cut off what you want.

Each town specializes in one item - guitars, wood carvings, pottery, cast concrete statues, copper ware, etc. Each stall sells the exact same thing - a system that seems to favor the buyer and not the seller. We went into one place that had a dozen booths all selling just carnitas (slow cooked pork).

Housing - We stayed in a beautiful early 1900s colonial home (my sister-in-law's parents), I'm sure it was much nicer than the average home. 5 large bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a living room, and a kitchen all around a large open courtyard. The 15 foot ceilings had hand-hewn and carved 4x6 beams 30 feet long on about 14 inch centers - I counted about 70 of them. The walls were 2 foot thick plastered adobe. Most of the homes butt up against the street with no front yard. Instead, they have the courtyard inside - I saw one man leading his burro through his front door into the courtyard. But building codes were much more lax than in the US, this is a common wiring job - a switch screwed to the wall with no box (exposed terminals) and extension cord painted to the wall for wiring.

The town where we were was decent sized (approx 20,000). They had electricity and sewer, water was a part time affair. Each section of the city got water for a few hours at a scheduled time every day which they used to fill a tank on top of the house. Then they used this water gravity-feed for the rest of the day. There was no piped natural gas, trucks selling tanks of propane came through every morning with loudspeakers blaring :music: (Charge!) :music: "El Gas!" :music: (Charge!) :music:

A lot of things different about Mexico, some maybe better than here and some not. With all our problems, overall I'm glad I live in the US of A.

As long as I'm off the tiki subject, I might as well show a non-tiki project I was working on. Our church kid's summer program theme was "Sky" so I built a 1/4 scale biplane out of Styrofoam - 7 feet long with an 8 foot wingspan and suspended it from the 20 foot ceiling.

The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts,
Because they're obviously, absolutely nuts.
Only Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun!

[ Edited by: MadDogMike 2012-07-04 17:22 ]