The REAL Housewives of Mexico

I have rented apartments in Mexico that did not come with toilet seats, nor a fridge, stove and forget about finding one with a washer or dryer, this is considered a luxury here.  Most people only use washers as they dry their clothing in the sun.  This was very disconcerting for me when I first arrived as I was a bit of a princess coming from Canada and I wasn't willing to iron wrinkled clothes in my spare time!  The laundromats would not allow you to wash your own, so we would drop it off and for a small fee of about 6 pesos per kilo they would wash, dry and fold your laundry and pack it neat in a bag for you.  I thought this was a great luxury, until my first bunch of whites came back grey!  So I started washing things by hand or taking them to my mother-in-law's, but even she had one of those old-fashioned washing machines that only washed but did not spin the clothes!  Oh Cielos, it was like going back in time!

My first apt. did not have any cupboards or counters in the kitchen, just a sink with tiny taps and hardly any water pressure, and no counter around the sink in the bathroom and if we leaned too hard on it, it started falling from the wall!  The family loaned us a couch and a bed and we bought a small fridge for our daily essentials, an electric hot plate and made a toaster out of a coat hanger - I felt like I was camping most days, although I lived right downtown!  Thank goodness we lived right across the street from El Pipirin, "Cocina Economica" - a little kitchen that sold home-cooked Mexican food to go - every day I would line up with all the rest of the lazy housewives on the block at 12 noon and we would fight over the beans, rice, meat, salsa, tortillas and the special of the day like enchiladas or chile rellenos, they would put everything in a little sealed bag instead of a plastic container.  A meal here for two would only cost us about 60 pesos so it was cheap and delicious.  Many Mexican families run businesses out of their homes, so at night we would go to our favorite little house that sold tamales and "atole" - a hot drink made with corn flour and chocolate, or our favorite "tacos de pastor" at Los Pingüinos and Los Catrines, where they would put the hottest red salsa on your taco called "Resueño", which meant you would remember it because you would get diarrhea the next day!  

In those days, it was 1999 and it was very hard to find rentals, we found a house in a nice area out of town but were competing with other families for this house, it was the only one for rent!  So we ended up living downtown in a house that was made into 3 apartments, ours was at the top so there was hardly any water pressure.  And sometimes an odd green oily substance would come out of the shower, if we even had water at all, sometimes the wells in the street would be dry for 2-3 days.  And we would have to pack buckets of water up the stairs to flush the toilet.  I don't think we even had hot water, we just waited for the sun to heat the tank on the roof, I remember many times bathing with a bucket over my head because the water would just trickle out.  And I would have to go yell out the window at the neighbors downstairs to turn on the pump.  It was cold at night in the winter months with no heaters and tiled floors, and our apt. was infested with earwigs, flying cockroaches (I didn't know they could fly!), and other unrecognizable flying insects.  Street vendors would ring our doorbell at 7am to sell oranges, bread, etc.

Rent was very cheap, I think we paid around 3,000 pesos a month for that little apt.  But you are on your own to pay for any repairs, plumbing, etc. that may go wrong with your apt.  Mexican landlords will not pay these expenses for you, I have tried to explain that in Canada, this type of thing is included in our rent, they just give me blank stares.

Cell phones in those days were huge and expensive, so daily we would go to the internet cafe and write emails to our families.  My fiance's cousins lived nearby so we just did the pop-in whenever we wanted to get together, they didn't have cell phones, I think it was still pagers in those days!  We were not able to get a telephone in our house - Telmex had simply "ran out of lines" in our area, as hard as that was to believe.  My friends who had kids only had 2 or 3 toys, they did not have an excess of stuff for their kids like we do in Canada.

The highlight of my day would be going to the movie theatre because they miraculously had movies in English with Spanish subtitles so it was my little escape to feel somewhat "at home".  And movies were so cheap,  at 35 pesos it was becoming a daily habit.

I learned from the beginning of my journey, that you can live on very little, and I became very frugal because resources were simply just not there and I had to learn to live without my English magazines, TV, stove, telephone, washer and dryer and peanut butter!  I stopped knowing what was going on in the "real world" of celebrities, news, etc. and started living in a bubble.  My life got simpler and simpler as the days went on...