Topic - Living & Lifestyle

Getting to know Mexico well and becoming intimately involved in the country and its ways is a skill that can only be truly developed with the experience of having lived here for a good while, and taking the necessary care to observe, acknowledge and learn about the local environment you have adopted as your home, [...]

When you are living in Mexico, one of the most important day-to-day skills you’ll need to develop is that of making contacts and networking in your local community.  Contacts fall into two broad categories; social contacts and trade & business contacts. In social terms, Mexico is an easy place to meet and make new friends [...]

Negotiation and barter are woven into the fabric of Mexican culture. In 1520, Hernan Cortes wrote to Emperor Carlos V of Spain describing a city with “many plazas, where there are continuous markets and dealings in buying and selling”. Since at least Aztec times, Mexicans have been devout traders. Five hundred years later, whether you’re [...]

For a variety of reasons, which include bureaucracy, ceremony and cultural habit, some situations which develop in Mexico can appear quite frustrating to unwary foreigners. Sometimes it’s because one is “used to” things, especially supposedly simple things, happening differently (usually more quickly) than they might do here. Sometimes, the lack of something you really need [...]

In this series of articles we will examine five essential skills any budding expat considering Mexico should develop, whether the move is for living, working or retirement, full-time or part-time. In this first article, we examine possibly the most essential skill of all: learning the local language. Even if you plan to live in an [...]

Earthquakes are naturally-occurring phenomena most commonly caused by a sudden release of energy from the planet’s crust, or movement of ‘fault lines’ deep beneath the Earth’s surface which cause seismic waves to occur.  Other events—such as volcano eruptions and major landslides can also cause them.    The Richter Scale (RS), popularly quoted to convey the magnitude [...]

Google has been quietly moving-in to the real estate promotion business by enabling realty agents and property owners to upload listings to its Google Maps service in some countries. In Australia and the UK, for example, people looking for property to buy or to rent can now use Google Maps to find individual properties—listed by [...]

Starting May 1, new immigration procedures are being brought into effect in Mexico. We outlined the key changes that will be introduced in a previous blog published last month, and these have now been integrated to our guides about Mexico Entry Requirements and Mexican Immigration. In summary, procedures for tourists who carry a passport from [...]

In a bid to clamp down on email spam, Telmex and other major internet companies running WiFi spots in Mexico have shut down access to Port 25—the port most commonly used for sending email when you are using an email client like Outlook, Windows Mail, Thunderbird or Entourage. This means that when you attempt to use [...]

By Ronald Buchanan Guest Writer on Mexico Insight Good news for American retirees in Mexico. Good news, too, for Mexico’s struggling economy. According to Andrés Oppenheimer, the well-informed Miami Herald columnist,  President Felipe Calderón wants to persuade the US government to make Medicare benefits payable for treatment in Mexico to US retirees.  Right now Medicare [...]