- Hello Tangerinies from somewhere in Mexico.
- And welcome to our second ever edition
of 10-minute Tangerine Travels Tuesdays,
where we're releasing a shorter video
than our typical Saturday vlog.
Today we are going to be sharing
the 11 things we hate most about living in Mexico.
Don't get us wrong, there's a ton of things that we love,
but these are the things that are not so great
after three years of being in this country.
- One thing I hate about living in Mexico
is the way trash is dealt with.
In most places, there aren't really dumpsters.
In most cities, you're going to probably put your trash
out on the street, but in the meantime,
all the street dogs are going to tear open the bags.
- Wind blows it around everywhere,
and there's garbage juices that leak out onto the street
and then make stuff smell horrible.
Sometimes the custom is to just leave your bags
in the actual middle of an intersection,
and then the trash men come and pick it up eventually.
But this is kind of a huge culture shock
compared to where we lived in the U.S.
The next thing we don't like about living in Mexico
is how slow and unreliable the internet can be.
This is generally more so the case for smaller cities
and little puebelitos, especially cities and towns
that aren't really on the map per se.
The bigger the city, the less of a problem this is,
but for people like us,
who do all of our work online,
I mean, you're watching this video right now.
We need like a good upload speeds
to get a video like this up.
- It's not to say we can't get it.
Like we were living in Puerto Morelos,
which is a small town,
and we were able to get fiber optic there.
So we had a hundred up a hundred down something like that.
- Yeah, but especially when we're traveling
around the country and going from Airbnb or hotel to hotel,
it's really unpredictable what the internet speeds are,
and when we're going to get decent enough ones
to be able to work.
So, like I said, huge pain point, it's ongoing,
and there's nothing really we can do about it.
The next thing that really sucks about living in Mexico
is the corruption.
To give you one example,
we were going through the process
of renewing our temporary residency,
in order to get that process done quicker with Cancun INM,
they said we can pay $1200 U.S dollars
to go to the top of the pile.
We neither had the money nor wanted to cooperate
with that type of corrupt-
- [Jordan] Bribery.
- The bribery, yeah,
we didn't want to go through with that.
So instead it took almost a year, a full year,
for that temporary residency to be renewed.
We also found out later that our lawyer,
who was also in on all this, by the way,
asked for our bank statements,
even though she didn't need them at all,
just so she knew how much money we had in the bank.
Totally, totally corrupt and immoral and horrible.
I hate that that's a part of Mexican society,
and I know Mexicans hate that as well.
Another sub category of this corruption topic
is the cartels and cartel activity,
which I hope it's going to be obvious
why we're not going to get into the nitty-gritty of that.
- One thing that really tugs at our heartstrings in Mexico
is the mistreatment of animals.
For example, we'll see a lot of really skinny street dogs,
and in many cities, there's a lot of dogs
that are left on the roof for their entire life.
They don't get any socialization, nobody to play with.
And just today,
we saw some evil human try to run a dog over in the street.
He swerved his car towards the dog to try to hit the dog.
- People in Mexico, they just don't see animals,
they don't see dogs especially,
the way that they do in the U.S.
Like people in the U.S.
treat them like they're a member of the family,
and that's totally just not the culture,
or at least for the most part,
it's not the culture here in Mexico.
Another thing on the street dogs thing, though,
we have Laska, that's our Husky.
And so with there being sometimes a lot of street dogs
just running around loose, they can sometimes be aggressive,
which is dangerous for us to be walking around with Laska,
and just kind of scary.
- Honestly though, 99% of the time, they're not aggressive.
- It's just the not knowing.
- You'd never know, that's the thing.
- I hate to see the dogs are mistreated or not fed.
We do understand that when it comes down to it,
if a family doesn't have enough money
or food to feed their family,
they're obviously not going to feed a pet,
but it doesn't make it any less heartbreaking.
- Something we can't stand in Mexico
are these giant glorietas.
A glorieta is a roundabout, and roundabouts are easy
when they're one or two lanes wide.
They're super easy to navigate and traffic flows nicely,
but then you have these big cities,
like there's one in Mexico City
around (speaking in Spanish) that's, I don't know,
six, seven lanes wide.
It's enormous, and it's a total disaster.
I have no idea what to do
when we get into a roundabout like that.
- The next thing that is a real bummer
about living in Mexico
is how ungodly expensive it is
for us to have a foreign plated car here.
And yes, I realize that we could buy a Mexican car,
and that would save us a lot of costs,
but it was my car, we had it.
And that's just how things played out for us.
- It's also one of the reasons
why we get stopped at checkpoints so many times
and pulled over by the police so many times
wanting to see our papers.
They've always been pretty innocent stops,
but yeah, it's annoying.
- It's a drag, yeah, of course.
Getting pulled over when we're not speeding,
we didn't go through a stop sign or anything like that.
So it's just one of those things
that as long as we have a foreign plated car,
particularly a tangerine,
bright ass tangerine foreign plated car,
we're going to be dealing with that,
and we're going to be paying double for insurance.
One insurance here in Mexico, one in the U.S.
- Tags in the U.S.
- With the fees to get the permit to have the car here,
I have a feeling we're not
going to have a foreign plated car here much longer.
- No, especially not after those Catemaco roads.
Oof, we really need a four-wheel drive car.
- If you'd like to see more videos like this
about our life and travels through Mexico,
please subscribe to our channel.
One thing I cannot stand in a lot of cities across Mexico,
I'll love almost everything else about the city,
but then their bus fleet, their public transportation
is really old and super polluting.
You're walking down the street
and your lungs are filling with smoke, just awful.
- Yeah, you just choke on the exhaust.
In many of our earlier videos,
we would be recording and then a loud bus would go by.
I'd be like, buses! (laughing)
- That leads us into our next one.
And that is noise pollution.
- Yes, another thing that's very noisy, motorcycles!
- But also the culture in Mexico,
it's a pretty noisy culture.
Often people bringing a big boombox out
with loud music, playing, playing music from their house,
having parties all the time.
- Roosters, the street vendors, we gotta love them,
but sometimes they're so loud and it's inopportune
when they're blaring their speakers,
or like (singing in foreign language),
those types of ones.
- And then everyone has a dog for home security too.
So you have dogs barking all night,
roosters cock-a-doodle-do-ing all night.
- I wish they would cock-a-doodle don't. (laughing)
- Likewise, but all the general noise,
it's something that I've not gotten used to.
A lot of these things that we're talking about today,
don't apply everywhere in Mexico.
But this next one does.
Everywhere in Mexico I despise the topes.
- Topes, that's just what we use to pronounce
the word for speed bumps
when we first started traveling in Mexico.
But yeah, I loathe these speed bumps, which are unregulated.
Often they're unmarked,
and even when you're going over some of them at a crawl,
you will bottom out.
You'll scrape the hell out of the underside of the car.
Keep in mind, yes, we do have a car,
but it has much higher clearance than a lot of cars,
than the average car that's in Mexico.
I remember one time, I believe this was in Zacatecas.
We were going off the freeway, an off ramp from the freeway,
and there was a gigantic unmarked speedbump.
So we were going at highway speeds.
- Smacked that so hard.
- It was like, oh my gosh,
we didn't even know what happened at first.
It was like, what the hell?
- I think this is something I will always hate about Mexico.
- Another thing we really don't like
about living and traveling through Mexico
is the sometimes horrible road conditions,
where there's for instance, unavoidable, giant potholes,
or like recently we were driving through the state of
Tabasco, which is almost completely flooded right now.
And we drove through like, I don't know,
three, four feet of water for like a mile.
- Three or four feet, Maddie?
Did you see water up to the windows?
- Okay, how deep do you think it was?
- I think the deepest part was maybe a little over a foot,
but it did go on for a literal mile.
- Okay we'll compromise at two feet,
and that's my final offer.
(Jordan laughing)
I'm still shuddering to know what type of damage
it did to our poor Prius.
We got to take it to the car doctor to find out soon,
but man, oh man, it can be difficult
to drive in Mexico sometimes.
Before we get to number 11,
we wanted to let you know that at the exact same time
we posted this video, we also released another one,
the exact opposite, 11 reasons why we love living in Mexico.
So after you're done watching this one,
we hope you will click over and watch that one,
but let's get to number 11.
- One thing that has been a constant frustration
throughout our almost three years in Mexico,
finding things that we need to purchase.
- Yeah, whether that's buying them online
or looking for a physical store to get the product,
I'm very used to like Amazon two day shipping
and searching for the thing that I need online,
and then even being able to find where the store is located.
That doesn't seem to be the case in Mexico,
or maybe we're just not doing it right.
But like you said, it's really frustrating
when we're looking for a specific thing,
trying to find what store has that or what vendor,
or just not being able to find it at all,
because maybe it doesn't even exist in Mexico.
- Just a reminder on the end screen here in just a moment,
we are going to link that video,
the 11 things we love about living in Mexico,
so go check that out.
- And please subscribe to our channel
if you want to see more videos we release
about our life in Mexico and travels across the country.
But one more thing, hold on .
(Jordan grunting)
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Gong that bell so you will be notified whenever we release
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