Mexico Revisited

When you go back to a place where you used to live, do you get a nice, warm feeling of familiarity and real connection when you are there? Ginger Gerald has just been back to México on holiday and, in his inimitably chatty and anecdotal style, he talks us through how it made him feel and why. What was different, what was the same - and how was the whole experience of Rediscovering México? 

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Transcript

I´ve been away on my jollies for the last couple of weeks but now I´m back, totally refreshed and full of energy – not to mention tacos and tequila and of course a couple of additional kilos! Yes, you guessed it – we went back to México.

Since I mentioned that I was going on my hols I´ve been called a Lucky Barstard by so many people it´s untrue! One of my colleagues even sent me an email which just said “You are a lucky barstard!” Not another word. Haha – excellent!

As loyal GGYLB followers you´ll already know that I first lived in Cancún, México, for one year back in 1995 and then spent almost 9 years there, married and with family this time around between 2006 and 2014. At that point we then upped sticks again and moved to Mallorca, the place we currently call “home” – so that´s already just over 8 years ago.

Why do I explain all of this and why am I trying to confuse you with dates and numbers? Because today´s episode “México Revisited” is all about our perception of México, at least the part of it we visited, it´s a very large country, now versus then. Today we´re going to go on a sensory trip – what looks, smells, tastes and feels different from our recent 2 week holiday versus our memories and experiences from when we lived there.  

Before we get into all of that, I just want to check with you all that I am not too much of an eccentric, odd ball – and I need your help. So consider this question and be honest now – nobody will ever know if you don´t want them to! 

When you go back to, say, the town you were born in, or the place you went to school or college, do you sneakily do little detours to make sure you actually see your old house or your old school? And d´you stop outside them and have a sneaky look in and a quick reminisce – bringing back memories of former times? Well, I have to be upfront here, I definitely do that; in fact I never miss an opportunity to do it. Maybe it´s partly because I´ve been overseas so long that I fairly rarely go back to these significant places from my past – so when I do, I have to take advantage of them and soak up all the memories and feelings. When T´s with me and we go back to Stoke, she takes the mickey and says things like “we need to go the shop – I guess we´ll be driving past your old house on the way there?”.  The good thing is that she doesn´t know the area where I was brought up at all so it´s quite easy for me to just drive around pretending that I´m going the direct route from A to B but in fact I´m going via a very specific personal landmark – such as my infant school or the house I got left behind in once when my family headed off on holiday (it´s true – I was the original Home Alone!)   

Anyway, I really do hope that I´m not alone and that at least some of you out there do the same as me!. And in my case, it makes me feel good – I get quite a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. But these feelings and memories aren´t just limited to places from my childhood, they extend to other places where I´ve lived or spent some time. 

Just a few months ago, I was going to Paris on business and I took the bus service from Orly Airport in the South to the City Centre. There I was asleep on the bus and no doubt dribbling and snoring away in a mostly embarrassing way. Anyway, I suddenly came-to with a bit of a start, I looked outside my window and realized that the bus was directly outside the entrance gate to a place called “Cite Universitaire” – exactly where I´d lived for a year as a student some 35 years previously. It was weird, like I was still asleep and dreaming it. So I stared as we went past and, by just being there, I was able to bring back memories that I don´t think I could´ve otherwise recalled (like the extremely cheap but crap food in the canteen for example). And I have an even stranger example, there I was watching the hockey from the Commonwealth Games last Summer on TV when I got a glimpse in the background of a Big Clock Tower and I got this real funny feeling of familiarity but for a little while I couldn´t work out why or where it was coming from  – it turned out that the hockey was being played on Birmingham University Campus, the Uni I graduated from in 1988 (although if it´d been the campus pub in the background I might have had even stronger feelings of familiarity!) 

So, for all those of you who have lived overseas in a specific place for quite a while, or maybe been brought up in a place and then you move – how does it make you feel when you go back? Which brings me back very nicely to my lovely trip to México – taking in Cancún, Riviera Maya , Isla Mujeres, Valladolid and Bacalar. 

The first thing that hits you, and the most obvious, is what you see. It doesn´t usually look the same as you remembered it because the “old” places and buildings are either still there but older or they´ve been altered, extended or maybe they´ve disappeared completely. In the case of Hotels, restaurants shops all that sort of stuff – they may now have a different brand on them. And of course, there are a bunch of new buildings – usually bigger, shinier and somewhat out of kilter with the image you had in mind.

Cancún was very like that – the growth of the city itself (that´s not the Tourist strip specifically) has been huge in a very short period of time. The last house we lived in when we were there was considered to be a bit in the sticks – there was one small corner shop and a gas station and that was that. But now, it is suddenly part of the city centre. You can walk to a Starbucks, any number of shops and restaurants and it´s surrounded by of other residential areas – even our friends´ dentist surgery is right there in our old neighbourhood! That was all a bit of a shocker.

And speaking of shockers - the traffic! Now a may sound like an old fart here but I always thought that the traffic was a bit of a nightmare in and around Cancún. Busy roads and very dodgy driving – and dodgy drivers too sometimes! If you´ve not listened to the episode “You Drive me Cwazy” then have a listen after this and you´ll get a bit more of a flavour into driving in México! But now it really is something else. It takes hours just to get anywhere and often you have to set off in the completely wrong direction to try to find a slightly quicker route. To be fair, most places´ infrastructure tends to get upgraded after a place has already grown hugely – well Cancún´s a great example of that. And, again like many other places, when they begin work in one place – they seem to begin work absolutely everywhere at the same time! However, the beauty of this is that driving becomes even more creative. You can just create your own lanes…..a road that has two lanes will suddenly have 4, plus a few mopeds taking their lives into their hands by weaving their own ways through.

So from a looks point of view it was a real weird mix for us – parts of the City were totally unrecognizable to us, shiny new, modern and big, but other bits – like the famous and grim Immigration Offices – looked like they had not even been touched with a duster let alone a paint brush since we last visited them. Perhaps the saddest thing for us was that our fabulous sports club, which holds so many great memories and was very much the fulcrum of our community, social and sporting life, was rotting away, closed and abandoned!  

But looks are only one thing – and they´ll always change – it would be wrong and sad if they didn´t. One of the very many things I love about México are the sounds – and I don´t think they´ve changed too much. You wake up in the morning and you hear the “chachalacas”! They´re birds, by the way, quite big, not particularly pretty, and they make an absolute racket. They´re named after the sound they make. I´ll pop a video of a chachalaca up on social media so you know what they look like and sound like if I can find one. But the point is, their noise is just so familiar and homely to me but I didn´t even realize I was missing it! 

Now, who doesn´t like a Mariachi band? The suits, the sombreros, the instruments but mostly the passion in the voices as they blast out a “Guadalajara” or a “Canta no Llores” or any of your other favourites – absolutely fabulous. And not just mariachi but music in general just blasts out from everywhere – salsa, ranchero, regaetton a whole bunch of stuff which everyone seems to know every word of! 

Then we come onto the tastes and smells….well this is one thing which I don´t think the passing of time is really ever going to change in México – or at least I hope not. Walking past or even better queueing up at a taco stand with its cochinita pibil and carnitas is just a delight. Classic almost. It stops time. And it doesn´t matter where it is – some of the very best tacos, and taco smells of course, are from stands in the dodgiest parts of town. Oh, and don´t forget freshly made corn tortillas……I´m getting hungry again folks just thinking about that lot and I´ve only just come back!

But not all Mexican smells are food smells. I was in a shopping mall and there was someone mopping the floor - and I got this sudden whiff of floor cleaner that was oddly, really familiar. I guess it was the same floor cleaner we used to buy but if you´d asked me to name it or describe it I wouldn´t have had a clue. Shove me in a dark room with just that smell and it´d take my immediately back to México! Another one, maybe a bit more specific to Cancún and in particular to the lagoon between the city and the hotel strip, is the smell of the mangroves. Not particularly pleasant it has to be said – a sulphurous sort of a smell and sometimes really strong and always distinct – but not one that ever crosses your mind until you actually smell it and then you get this familiarity feeling going on. It hit me last week as we were on a boat heading over to the beautiful Isla Mujeres – my nose suddenly got attacked with mangrove smell – yep, I know exactly where we are I thought!

But whatever it looks or smells or sounds like when you go back to a place that means so much to you, the most important things is how it makes you feel deep down inside. And that´s not based on buildings or food or music – it´s based on the people in that place and your interaction with them. When I lived in the UK and particularly as a kid, I went to a lot of Stoke games – yep for better or worse Stoke City are my team. Over the last 25 years or so I´ve only been to a handful of games but it´s the only place in the World where a complete stranger, in the public loos might come up to you and say “Ayup duck”. And I love it. I even say “Ayup duck” back which is something that, in any other place or with any other person, I wouldn´t dream of saying. And it makes me feel good – friendly. And the people of Stoke are friendly.

Well, take that same concept to México and you´ll understand why I, and we as a family, absolutely love México so, so much. The people are just fabulous. I love a bit of banter – and you can have banter with anyone, anywhere – they´re all up for a bit of a laugh. And they “get” sarcasm – which, in my opinion, puts them ahead of their northerly neighbours when it comes to having a bit of a chortle. Everyone´ll talk to you, about anything, everyone is smiling and laughing and it makes you feel, well, happy, involved, connected, valued. It´s a great feeling and not one you get everywhere! Sometimes you don´t really appreciate this feeling until you don´t feel it any more. People want to help you and that makes you want to help them – they´re kind and that creates feelings of community and belonging. 

Now if you think I´m just talking a load of sentimental, idealistic nonsense about my feelings towards a country which has an appalling record of violence and Drug Cartel controlled crime and yes, of course, not everyone´s nice, some people are complete and utter twats like they are anywhere else – but, indulge me for a moment, and let me give you a couple of simple illustrations from just last week.

We arrive by ferry to Isla Mujeres from Cancún and take a taxi to the small hotel we´re staying in. It´s about a 20 mins ride. By the time we get there, I know all about the taxi drivers family, where his kids are, what they´re called, what they do and what they like to do. I know what footy team he supports, how he thinks Mexico´ll do in the World Cup, what he thinks about the development on the Island and where he sees himself when he retires…..and I only asked him what his name was!

And then there was the guy who took us out onto the Bacalar lagoon in his little boat to watch the sunset (by the way – fabulous and highly recommended). This chap must have been in his 70´s and he´d been working as a captain and guide on that lake for a long, long time. Anyway he did a fabulous job with us, but it was his job so that´s normal. Next morning our friend realized she must´ve left her hat on the boat. So down we went to the port to see if we could get it back and there he was, our man, it was like he was waiting for us. He saw our friend, big smile on his face and without a word went off to collect the hat he´d found a looked after knowing full well that she´d return. And would he accept a tip as a thank you – bearing in mind many, many staff in this area and working in tourism rely heavily on tips to make ends meet – no he wouldn´t. Not a peso.

And finally, Nelson. Our mate Nelson. We were wondering through the town of Valladolid in the Yucatan peninsula, deciding where to eat. There were quite a few new and quite trendy looking restaurants but we spotted one which was not quite so modern or popular (well, the truth is there was no bugger in it which wasn´t a great sign) but Nelson and his traditional menu of tacos and Yucatecan specialities convinced us that this was the place for us. So in we went. Now it´s true that the food was just what we were looking for, there was loads of it and we loved it – but if in 20 years´ time you were to ask any of the 4 of us to recall one particular thing about that evening, all four of us, without hesitation, would just say “Nelson”. He was like our brother, our best mate, and it wasn´t that he was being over servile or just desperate to please, he was…well, genuine. Just him being him being Mexican – and he was like it with the trickle of other customers that came in too.

Now, can you find chatty taxi drivers, guides and Nelsons wherever you go in the World? Yes of course you can. México doesn´t have an exclusivity on openness, friendliness and humour – but my example is México because that´s what we know and love and that´s what we, rightly or wrongly, often compare things to wherever we are. Your examples and experiences will be different of course – we all have our own benchmarks, but I really hope that when you return to places that you know and loved while you were there, that you still love them when you go back and that you get the very same warm, fuzzy feeling inside that maybe you´d forgotten about – and I bet the main reason for that feeling is the people.   

And speaking of people – we really, really are lucky barstards to have such fabulous Mexican friends and, mainly thanks to T it has to be said, we have maintained those fabulous friendships over the years since we left. (A few of my previous episodes talk about making friends – give´em a listen for a bit more insight on that) They are open, generous with time and energy, they laugh with us all of the time and they take the piss relentlessly. We have a million and one photos from our recent travel and I can honestly say that we are laughing and smiling on every single one. They encapsulate the feelings that we have for México and Mexicans and we are so fortunate to have Mexico and our Mexican friends to hugely enrich our lives.  We have so, so many memories, warm fuzzy feelings and friends, and a huge shout out to P & L, you know who you are, that we are so grateful for. And all of these experiences not just for us but for our family, originate from D Day – the day we decided to move to México.  

What a great place to finish today´s episode. Those of you who have lived, worked or travelled in México will hopefully relate to some or even all of today´s ramblings – and for those of you who have lived in the million other places in the World maybe some of it will ring true but others not so much. We´re all different, all of our experiences are only unique to us and perceptions and truths can marge and adapt over time.