WHAT I GOT WRONG IN MY FIRST YEAR IN MEXICO
Calle Madero at rush hour. Nine million people in this city, and for the first six months I did not know any of them.
I turned up at the Mexican Consulate in London a day late for my own appointment.
I had misread the date. I stood there while they told me, politely, that there was nothing available. Come back another time. I had done the whole process myself, on the reasonable assumption that a man who had already moved country twice could manage a form and a calendar.
It gets worse. I was applying for the wrong thing. I had booked myself in for temporary residency when, through my son, I was entitled to permanent residency outright. Nobody had told me, because I had not asked anybody. I had read enough online to feel informed, which is a different condition from being informed.
I arrived in Mexico and hired a law firm. They had my permanent residency sorted within about six weeks. It is the same firm we use for clients today, which tells you something about how that first encounter went.
That is the honest start to my first year here: I got the paperwork wrong before I had even left the country.
The part nobody warns you about
The bureaucracy I expected. What caught me out was how long it took to build a life.
I had my wife's family and her friends from the start, which is a head start most people arriving here do not get. Even with that, the first year was hard in a way I had not planned for. You arrive with no one to call on a Tuesday for no particular reason. That takes longer to fix than any visa.
What worked, eventually, was three things, and none of them happened quickly.
Expat meetups got me out of the house. They are not for everyone and I did not stay in that world, but early on they serve a purpose. If you want the map of where that community actually is, we have covered it separately.
Then my son started at one of the international schools, and the parent network turned out to be the real thing. Barbecues, the dads in his year, the ordinary business of standing around at pick-up. Some of those people are now among my closest friends here. We recently asked a couple from that group to be godparents to our daughter, which is not a decision you make lightly.
And I had played golf in the UK, so when I was invited to join a club here I said yes. That produced an entirely separate circle.
It took about six months before I had a group I could genuinely call friends rather than people I knew. If you are three months in and wondering whether it is ever going to click, that is the number I would want someone to have told me.
The pattern, looking back, is that none of it came from trying to make friends. It came from doing things I would have done anyway, in a place where I happened to be new.
The gringo tax is real, and you will pay it
Prices go up when I walk in. Not always, not everywhere, but often enough that I changed how I do things.
For the first couple of years my wife handled anything involving a negotiation. Viewing rentals. Buying a car. Getting quotes for work on the apartment. The moment I was visible, the number moved by twenty to thirty percent.
I still get caught. A few weeks ago I stopped in a rush to buy my son a World Cup ball and paid 800 pesos for it. Every Mexican friend I mentioned it to had paid 300 for the same ball. I had been here four years at that point.
The fix is not cleverness, it is patience. Build a set of contractors and contacts you trust, use them repeatedly, and do not negotiate in a hurry. Until you have that list, get someone who knows the local price to handle it.
Ahorita
It means "right now", in the sense that "in a minute" means sixty seconds.
It is the valet. It is the person at the tax office. It is your friends confirming a time. Ahorita covers everything from five minutes to three hours to a quiet never, and there is no reliable way to tell which one you are getting.
You do not fix this. You adjust to it, or you spend years being irritated by a country that is not going to change for you.
What I actually got wrong about safety
I came from London by way of seven years in Spain, and I assumed my instincts would transfer.
They mostly do. There are areas in London I would not wander into and there are areas here I would not either. The headlines are worse than the day-to-day by a considerable distance, and everyone back home was far more frightened for me than the reality justified.
But I was slower than I should have been to accept that the margin for carelessness is thinner here. You stay alert. You avoid the areas known for it. You take Ubers rather than street taxis. You do not wear an expensive watch in a neighbourhood you do not know. None of that is dramatic, and none of it stopped me living a completely normal life, but I learned it by adjusting rather than by arriving with it.
When it turned
A few months in, without any particular event marking it.
I was eating better, because the produce here is better. I started walking. I did more sport than I had in years. I lost fifteen kilos without setting out to, which I put down to being in a better frame of mind rather than any discipline on my part.
The culture, the people, the food, the weather. It is the best country I have lived in, and I have lived in a few. I am proud to have embraced it and proud that my children are Mexican.
What I would tell someone arriving next month
Get help with the paperwork. I am aware of how that reads coming from me, so take it as a description of my own decision rather than a pitch: I did it myself, got it wrong before I left the country, and paid professionals the moment I landed.
Do not negotiate alone in your first year.
Say yes to the thing you would have done at home anyway, whether that is a club, a sport or a school committee. That is where the friendships come from, not from trying to make friends.
And give it a few months before you decide how you feel. Mine turned around at about month four, and nothing in particular happened. I just stopped comparing it to somewhere else.
