You might imagine this would lead to a well-informed population, although the programs appear designed primarily to make sure you get to work twice as neurotic as you would have done had it just been the heavy traffic, and not also the frantic flicking back and forth through the radio stations as you navigate your way around an inordinate number of advertising breaks.

Amid this on-air array of news, phone-ins, trash music, noise, and seemingly endless and fruitless discussion on “topics of the day” fit to cure insomnia, lies an oasis of frequency modulation.

Radio Universal, on 88.1 FM* in Mexico City, and also available online, has two hours a day of Beatles music and trivia —Mon-Fri 6-7 a.m. and 9-10 p.m. / Saturday 7-8 a.m.— a harking back to the 1970s when “Beatles hours” were as frequent and as competitive as today’s news.

Back then, when English was less widely spoken, The Beatles were referred to as Los Beatles and shamelessly pronounced Los Beetlays. Now that the cuarteto Liverpool is making a bit of a comeback among the savvy Internet generation, the group is pronounced more like Beadles—probably the U.S. influence.

This doesn’t mean a return of Beatlemania, but rather that any iPhone worth its salt is expected to have at least a smattering of retro bands and in that sense, a member of the earphone set will happily concede that the Beatles had “buenas rolas“—and perhaps in the same breath ask: “John Lennon was one of the Beatles? Oh. I thought so.”

* For decades, Radio Universal broadcast on 92.1 FM until 2016 when the frequency changed.  The exact reason why is unclear, although it appears related to the term of the contractual frequency concession, which ended in June 2016.  Frequent listeners and fans won’t mind the frequency change, and in these days of digital airwaves, where people listen online and in-car radios automatically scan the networks and display key information like the station name, it probably won’t make much difference anyway.

But on one particular kind of Friday in Mexico —viernes quincena— when pay day coincides with the last day of the week, the congestion is even greater.  Not just the traffic thickens. As the working people have money to spend, this day you can find yourself in long lines for restaurant tables, cinema tickets, or at the supermarket checkout.

People mill around at malls, and finding a parking spot can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. (Navigating the narrow underground parking lots is a particularly useful skill to develop in busy cities.)

The advent of direct deposit for wages did away with much of the lining-up at banks to cash checks, which in years past was about as daunting a prospect as can be imagined. But people in Mexico still often prefer to use cash so lines at ATMs have replaced many of the lines at bank branches.

What the British call a fortnight the Mexicans call the quincena—a 15-day period between pay days. And as most wages are paid bi-weekly, the pay day is also referred to as la quincena.

The noticeable buzz of commercial activity illustrates the fact that much of the working and middle classes, here as elsewhere, live from one paycheck to the next. Sales numbers from the retailers association Antad, and from its biggest member Walmart reflect this. Months that have an extra Saturday —a typical shopping day— tend to see bigger increases in sales, and the effect is even greater when the weekends coincide with payment of la quincena.

Officially, pay days are on the 15th and 30th of each month, or the nearest prior working day. So if the 15th or 30th falls on a weekend, wages should be paid on the Friday before. Pay days that fall on the Monday can be devastating for weekend plans.

And as there are 24 pay day quincenas per year (52 weeks), inevitably there are a number of quincenas largas, or long quincenas. These are usually following months with 31 days, and they can become even longer if the preceding pay was deposited ahead of a weekend.

Social media provides many examples of the anxiety surrounding the timing of deposits and the efficiency of HR and payroll departments. The X account @MundoGodinez addresses with considerable humor the daily life of the typical Mexican office worker, and la quincena looms large as a subject at the front of most minds.

See also: El Aguinaldo

One of the best known works of Spanish literature is such a one – Lazarillo de Tormes.  The delightful 16th century satirical novel is standard fare in schools and is frequently used as an introduction to Spanish literature for both students of Spanish and native speakers.

The novel is considered to be a pioneering work of the genre known as picaresca, to which the later, even better-known Don Quixote de la Mancha belongs.  It’s also plugged as a fine example of Spain’s golden century, and serves to introduce the subject of censorship by the Spanish Inquisition, since it was one of the works that made the Index of Forbidden Books, a sort of a sixteenth century hall of fame.

The book is an autobiographical account of the fictional life of Lázaro, an orphaned boy who describes his adventures with a series of masters, each one a typical character of the society of the time.

And while Don Quixote is better known than Lazarillo, it’s probably not better read, on account of the length of it.  One of the advantages of Lazarillo is that it’s very short, so short that anyone can finish it without the excuses and other dubious claims made by those (of us) who made it some distance past the other’s introduction to an “idle reader” and intend to finish it one day.

Lazarillo should probably grace any bookshelf that includes Spanish works, but the text is also available online at a number of sites, both in Spanish and English.

Of course you can put on some music to enjoy, although even the most avid music buffs might need a break from their usual fare, or want to listen to someone speaking “live,” especially first thing in the morning.

Car-pooling is still very much a thing for the well-organized, and a quick glance at the traffic in a big Mexican city suggests that the average occupancy per car is one-point-something. But even for those vehicles that might qualify for a car-pool lane, if there were such a thing, one-on-one conversation isn’t that attractive an option when leaving home before it gets light, as traffic levels in the capital suggest many do here.

Enter the radio.

Here in Mexico you could say that you are spoiled for choice. There are endless news shows, music shows of all kinds, talk shows, and call-in shows, but not that many documentaries or decent game shows.

As in other places, the popularity of a radio show has a lot to do with the personality behind the microphone. And ratings are their principal guide. Among the most competitive spaces, but not necessarily with the highest ratings, are the morning news programs.

Some run from 5:30 until 9 or 10 o’clock. The FM frequencies are the most coveted, and some shows will be on for an hour on FM, and then continue on an AM frequency as FM makes space for the next ‘ratings king’.

Four hours or more may sound like too much for one day’s news, and most of the morning programs are filled with the previous day’s news (since nothing much has really happened since then). This isn’t that much of a problem.

Commercial breaks are frequent and long, and are apt to cause listeners to flick through the stations to avoid them, usually with limited success.

Interviews are often dragged out affairs for this same reason. Then there are the “on this day in history” fillers, the traffic updates, and frequent updates on the outside temperature—or the time.

One particular show gives the time only in minutes, but not the hour. “Ten minutes to the hour,” “fifteen minutes past the hour.” The host will occasionally explain the reason for it, namely that Mexico has four different time zones and therefore it would be presumptuous to give a particular hour. It’s hard to know if this is simple pedantry, knowing that there are four time zones, or bragging about nationwide coverage of some kind. In any event, it serves to fill in some more space.

Most of the show hosts are also quite expert in spinning out news items with long introductions, to the news itself or someone who is about to be interviewed. These can be interspersed with comments and opinions, even about the least controversial of subjects. And in these days of Social Media listener-interaction, no host worth his salts will fail to read out a few Tweets or Facebook comments.

The main radio broadcasters in Mexico are Radio Centro, Radio Formula, W Radio, MVS, and Imagen—and their program listings and frequencies can be found on their web sites, which also include live streaming, and links to previously recorded shows.

The birds living in the capital —of which there are a considerably large number for such a vast expanse of concrete and bitumen— find their dawn-welcoming choruses competing for ears with the continuous rush of tires on tar, the roar of diesel combustion, and piercing shrieks from the whistles of policemen trying to keep it all moving along.

Perhaps not surprisingly, noise is something of a status symbol for the chilangos as they struggle to be noticed among 20 million others.

The owners and operators of the ubiquitous micros —shuttle buses— may well skimp when it comes to seating arrangements, faulty light bulbs, or sticky doors, but spare no expense when rigging up sound systems for the apparent entertainment of the driver alone. From the intricate set-up of tweeters and woofers, no one is spared the blast of música tropical, corridas, or rock en español.

In case this isn’t enough, some replace the standard horn with a series of trumpets pumping out Yankee Doodle or La Cucaracha, both proclaiming “make way for the raucous.”

The penchant for forcibly sharing dissonant tastes extends to the owners of cars, many of whom roll down their windows to let fellow motorists and pedestrians appreciate the finer points of disco, rap, or hip-hop—at full volume.  Pathos comes to mind as the driver tries to shout “look at me” through the speakers, but actually insists, “listen to this awful din.” None of the loudies seem to like Simon & Garfunkel.

And, as elsewhere, even in the best of homes decibels rather than premises, inference, and deduction are the main currency for settling differences in points of view.  Here, the more the merrier combines with the louder the better to produce some ear-splitting enforcement of opinion, making the expression, el que calla otorga, (whoever says nothing, consents) somewhat redundant.

Mexico is seeing a renewal in excitement about railways as the government tries to make passenger service a thing—again.

A brief backdrop

First a bit of history. The thing for which president Porfirio Díaz was most famous —before he became infamous for clinging to power for 30 years— was the development of a network of railways, much of which was done by foreign companies.

The country’s first railway was conceived in 1837, when the president at the time granted a Mexican businessman a concession to build a line from the Gulf coast port of Veracruz to Mexico City. The first train to run between the two cities, under a later concession, left the capital in 1873—not bad as delays and cost overruns go. The network expanded from 9,500 km (5,900 miles) in 1890 to more than 19,000 km (11,800 miles) by 1910. A nicely illustrated history of the railways (in Spanish) can be found here.

The Mexican railways were nationalized in 1937 by then-president Lázaro Cárdenas, a year before the expropriation of the oil industry, and run by the state for the next six decades.

By the time the government decided that private companies would do a better job of maintaining and improving the country’s railways, passenger travel by train from one city to another was virtually unheard of.

The private concessions were only granted for freight service, and the railway companies focused on that with few exceptions such as the journey through the picturesque Copper Canyon and the tourist train connecting Guadalajara with the agave-growing town of Tequila.  Passenger rail travel was removed from Mexico’s consumer price index around the same time that bottled drinking water was added. Signs of changing times.

Service on the handful of routes where passenger travel was still available into the 1980s was somewhat typical of a state monopoly in its last throes—bad. Air travel was still prohibitively expensive at that time for many people, but highway expansion made bus routes more convenient, and significantly faster than the rail services being offered.

Getting back on track

Fast forward to the 21st century. Low-cost airlines fly all over the country, interstate buses come equipped with toilets and movies, and long-distance passenger rail is beginning to make a comeback.

The idea began with the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), who had plans for a bullet-train from Mexico City to Querétaro, including a future extension to Guadalajara, a trans-peninsular passenger train joining the Yucatán state capital city of Mérida with the popular tourist region of Riviera Maya, and a train from Mexico City to the State of Mexico capital Toluca.

From the outset the projects were criticized as being unprofitable, which they evidently would be, but that wasn’t the point: the plan was to reignite the rail industry and recreate a modern high-speed passenger train network capable of reducing travel times along what have become highly congested highways and give passengers more choice in travel.

To cut a long story short, the bullet train project was canceled for political reasons —all was not well with the way it was awarded— and shortly after, the trans-peninsular line was postponed indefinitely for economic reasons. The Mexico City-Toluca line went ahead but was far from complete by the time his term ended.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024) went a step further. The idea of a trans-peninsular train was rekindled and expanded into the Tren Maya, a tourist line running around the entire Yucatán peninsula. The Mayan Train opened almost a year ago, although some parts have yet to be completed.

Initiatives begin to pick-up steam

President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office on Oct. 1, 2024, took up the baton and intends to continue expanding passenger rail service. Her government has resumed plans for a Mexico City-to-Querétaro train —but not a bullet train— and others in different parts of the country.

They include completion of the Tren Maya, the Mexico City-Querétaro project, the Interoceanic line crossing the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, several lines to the new Mexico City airport at Santa Lucía (including a stop on a new Mexico-to-Pachuca route), and others from Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo on the U.S. border, and Querétaro to Irapuato.

Her efforts will be supported by a recent constitutional change restoring government control of the railways. The railway bill was even supported by the opposition—an unusual occurrence in these days of political division. Private operators can make their own plans for offering passenger service, and have expressed interest in several projects, or they can allow third parties access to their lines. Government plans also involve laying new rails where necessary.

Books’ row in Mexico City

In the south of Mexico City, where Miguel Angel de Quevedo avenue crosses Avenida Universidad —about five minutes from the Bohemian hangout of Coyoacán— is a mini paradise for bookworms.

Three major bookstores, Gandhi, El Sotano, and Fondo de Cultura Economica, and a dozen or so smaller ones, line both sides of the street. Outside are wooden trays with books at throw-away prices, and inside you’ll find special offers on those less likely to be thrown away.

Mexico City remains the place where the widest selection of books and bookshops can be found, and some well-known chains have most of their branches in the capital.

Bookshops are still popular in Mexico

But while in many developed countries bookshops have been closing, Mexican chains have been opening new stores. Like bookshops everywhere, they have also added small gifts, toys, games & puzzles, and other paraphernalia to their offerings to make the business work.  This may annoy some purists, but somehow it’s hard to get worked up about a model that means the book business can continue going.

• Cafebrería El Péndulo —coffee shop-bookstore— boasts several branches in Mexico City, including in trendy neighborhoods such as Polanco, Condesa, Roma, and San Ángel.
• Librerías Gandhi has expanded with new stores in Mexico City, and also has branches in 24 of Mexico’s 32 states.
• El Sótano and Casa del Libro have more than a dozen branches.
• Gonvill Librerías is the biggest chain in Guadalajara, Mexico’s third most populated city and which is also host to a major international book fair each year.

These chains tend to stock the best selection of books, often beyond the capacity of the shelves so that many are neatly piled up.  You can find most books in Spanish at these stores.

And while many, especially Gandhi and El Péndulo, have one or two shelves of books in English and French, here it tends to be hit and miss.  You might find occasional books of interest, but you are less likely to find a specific title. (For some you can check availability online.)

Buying eBooks in Mexico

Since eBooks are virtually borderless, there are as many options in Mexico as anywhere else.

Amazon’s Mexico shop sells Kindles, and you can usually find almost any book published in English or Spanish in the local Kindle store.  Apple Books are an option for those who use Apple devices —iPhone or iPad— although they don’t have a dedicated eReader like the Kindle.

There’s no accounting for taste, and online reviews show some people are impressed with the Apple Books app, others not so much. For those using Android, Google Books is an option, and again, it has the disadvantage of not having a dedicated eReader.

In Mexico, the Gandhi and Porrúa book chains have an agreement with Kobo Books and sell Kobo eReaders, which are popular in Canada and parts of Europe like France and Italy. (The Canadian digital bookseller Kobo was acquired by Japan’s Rakuten Group in 2012, so the app says Rakuten Kobo, although people still widely refer to Kobo books).

Both Gandhi and Porrúa sell eBooks on their own websites, which can be downloaded onto the Kobo reader or using the Kobo app installed on devices, and you can also download eBooks directly from the Kobo website.

Depending on how budget conscious the reader is, it can be advantageous to keep open several options, as sometimes a title will be available on one platform and not another, or cheaper on one than another.

The Kindle, Kobo, and Google Books apps are available on Apple and Android, but the Apple Books app isn’t available on Android.

Finding books not published in Spanish

When you are looking for a particular physical copy of a book not published in Spanish —such as a new release— the options are to stock-up on a trip abroad, or order it from a book seller online—most of which will ship books to Mexico with no problems, but not necessarily that quickly. If you want a particular book right now, eBooks are the way to go.

Mexico’s department stores and big box stores have book sections, but these vary widely in selection and quality. There are about 150 Sanborns stores with magazine sections offering international titles published in English, but not much in the way of books published in English beyond current best-sellers.

Fancy browsing

Even the most bourgeois of us like to dig around for books in a bohemian atmosphere, and for that there are plenty of elegant bookshops—although that isn’t where most Mexicans go to buy reading material.

Apart from a veritable army of windshield cleaners and vendors of newspapers, loose cigarettes, phone cards, confectionery, toys, maps, balloons, and so on, also competing for space at the capital’s junctions are jugglers, spinning top whizzes, fire-eaters, acrobats, and clowns.

Many drivers have little time for windshield cleaners, and frantically wave them away as they approach the car armed with a plastic bottle filled with soapy water, a small cloth, and a rubber scraper. Some quickly wind-up the windows and turn on the car’s windshield wipers, and become particularly irate if the cleaner has disguised his intentions and hit the windshield with a jet of water from the bottle while appearing to look in the other direction, shrugging as if to say, “well I’ve started now so I may as well finish.”

Contributions to the cause are voluntary, and as people easily become bored, and necessity is the mother of invention, a fair deal of ingenuity is required for success in some of these thankless occupations.

A fine example came recently on Reforma avenue: a mime with painted face, flower-pot hat, and white gloves went through the motions of cleaning a windshield. First the invisible jet of water, then the circular motion of scrubbing the glass clean, then the scraping off the water, first vertically then horizontally. The gimmick seemed to work, as the driver handed over a coin, so did the driver behind who watched it. After all, what better if people don’t want their windshields cleaned than not to clean them.

In some ways, Mexico can consider itself one of the winners of the 2026 World Cup, which it co-hosted with the US and Canada.

The national team lost in the Round of 16, which was a disappointment as Mexico was hoping to make it to the quarter finals for the first time since 1986 when the country hosted its second World Cup.

On the brighter side, with the added Round-of-32 this time, the team got to play five games of which it won four without conceding a goal, before losing 3-2 to England in a memorable match at the Azteca Stadium.

Where Mexico was a winner was in its hospitality, as anyone who spends time on social media might have noticed.

South Korean fans who arrived for the start of the tournament could be seen indulging in all kinds of fun with their Mexican counterparts. South Korea had beaten Germany in the 2018 World Cup, thanks to which Mexico made it past the group stage, and Mexicans haven’t forgotten that “favor.”

And the friendly exchanges among fans continued this year even though the two teams were rivals in Group A. Mexico just managed to squeeze out a 1-0 victory in their game.

The exception was in the 2-0 win over Ecuador in the round of 32. There was fighting and insults between Mexican and Ecuadorian fans after their match, and someone tossed a plastic cup of beer at the Ecuadorian press box, hitting one of its journalists in the face. In a separate incident, three people died in a crush at the Angel de la Independencia monument where many thousands of people showed up to celebrate the win.

Then came the match against England. There was a lot of talk about how the Azteca Stadium is one of the hardest to play in, particularly against Mexico. Mexico rarely loses at the stadium. The national team had only lost two official games on its home turf, and never lost a World Cup game there. (Losses to Italy in 1970 and West Germany in 1986 were played in Toluca and Monterrey, respectively.)

Major concerns were the altitude (fair enough if you’re not used to it), the heat (most US venues were much hotter than Mexico City), and a hostile atmosphere. What hostile atmosphere? was the conclusion of English players and fans alike.

The players of course expected the crowd to be against them during the match, as was the case, but spoke well of the Mexican team and the effort the England side made to come away with the win.

But before and after the game, English fans had nothing but praise for Mexico City and the stadium. Fans from both countries were seen celebrating together after the match.

One video shows a Mexican supporter giving a Merlin Duck stuffed toy (Mexico’s unofficial World Cup mascot) to an English boy inside the stadium. The event was so successful that the English Football Association is thinking of inviting Mexico to play a friendly match at Wembley in the future.

The match at the Azteca Stadium was the last of the 13 games that Mexico hosted in the 2026 World Cup, with the remaining games to be played in the US, including the final at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, on Sunday, July 19.

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The stores, however, are rather unique.  They sell books, magazines, cakes, toys, tobacco, gifts of all kinds (watches, pens, backgammon sets, even telescopes…), some clothing, confectionery, music, electronic goods, jewelry, and pharmaceuticals.

Sanborns is owned by Carlos Slim, the telecoms magnate who bought the chain from the US drugstore chain Walgreens in 1985.  But the original business was set up by the American brothers Frank and Walter Sanborn early in the 20th century; first as a drugstore, to which later a soda fountain was added.

The concept became so popular that dictator Porfirio Díaz used to stop-by at one of the Sanborns soda fountains.  Revolutionaries Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa took refreshments at Sanborns when they marched into the capital over a century ago.

Walter Sanborn returned to California, tired of the political turmoil in Mexico at the time, while Frank and his two sons —represented by the three owls on the Sanborns logo— continued to run the business until 1946, when they sold it to Walgreens.

If asked about a bookstore in Mexico, you’d be more likely to think Gandhi, Porrúa, or Casa del Libro.  If a drugstore, Farmacias del Ahorro or even Dr. Simi if you’re into generics.  El Globo springs to mind when cakes are needed, and one of the big three department stores (Liverpool, Palacio de Hierro, Sears) might be where you’d go if shopping for a gift. But if you don’t really know what you want, or just feel like browsing before or after lunch, you might well end up at Sanborns.

Eclectic might be the best way to describe Sanborns, which just about everyone in Mexico has heard of, and most urbanites visit at one time or another.  Most states and virtually all the main cities have at least one —and some several— Sanborns stores.  The list of stores can be found online.

Many of the stores (there are about 170 and several dozen stand-alone Sanborns Café coffee shops) are located in shopping malls or at commercial plazas, although a number of them are situated inside elegant buildings in historic districts of Mexico’s more picturesque cities.  A prime example of this is the Casa de Los Azulejos on Madero Ave. in downtown Mexico City.  The building houses one of the original Sanborns stores and a large restaurant which operates on several floors.

Sanborns is well-known locally for its generously-stocked magazine stands, which carry a wide selection of contemporary titles published in Spanish and English. These stands are also used by some people as a meeting point, helpful in a country where punctuality isn’t exactly a national trait.  The store also stocks a wide range of books, including the 10 top U.S. best-sellers of the moment, and a selection of greetings cards—the sending of which isn’t a particular habit in Mexico.

Mexicans tend to have mixed feelings about Sanborns, a store that is an established institution of the Mexican retail terrain and which at the same time market commentators say is struggling to convey a clear identity in today’s rapidly-changing retail landscape.

Most of the existing stores have undergone a re-fit in recent years; the new decor  clearly aims to retain some of the old-world charm while bringing forth a brighter, and more contemporary, feel.  Regardless of individual predilections, Sanborns remains an emblematic brand in Mexico.

Two decades have nearly passed since Mexico enacted a new law to crack down on the use of tobacco, securing smoke-free public spaces and buildings everywhere, and generating widespread awareness among smokers of the rights of non-smokers to be free from the toxic clouds exhaled by the users of the stuff when shopping, eating out, or waiting for a bus.

What it hasn’t achieved is to cut down on the number of smokers in the country, according to some reports.  Whether that’s because not enough has been done to discourage smoking, or because people who smoke don’t really care to quit, is anybody’s guess.

Props to help those who do want to give up —including nicotine patches, nicotine gum, lozenges, etc.— disappeared from drugstores across the country a while ago, although a form of nicotine lozenges have been making a comeback.

Imports of electronic cigarettes (vaping devices) have been outlawed by presidential decree, citing World Health Organization data concerning the practice. Notices have since have been posted in customs halls and some travelers are having vaping products confiscated when their personal items are examined.

The ban on the —highly profitable, by the way— sale of loose cigarettes has been widely ignored.  These are still openly available on thousands of street stalls, at markets, outside Metro stations, at traffic lights.  In some districts where health inspectors have shown up to admonish vendors in breach of the ban, the sale stopped for a while and then resumed surreptitiously among trusted customers. But if the prohibition was aimed at keeping cigarettes out of the hands of minors, it could be said to have worked.  At least you’d be hard pressed to find vendors selling tobacco to the under-aged, and this is true of local shops as well.

You can take many walks by yourself and never actually speak to anybody you don’t know, much as you might do if you travel on the Metro or in buses. If you are in the habit —as many Mexico City residents are— of driving everywhere, your only communication with your fellow denizens may be a shaking of the head, blowing of the horn, or an untoward hand signal that goes unnoticed by its intended recipient

Striking up a conversation becomes more or less necessary, however, when you come face-to-face with someone who, like you, is on the defensive end of a leash being stretched to its limit by a pet whose intentions could be anything from simple acquaintance to a battle to the death.

This is as good a time as any to establish your “dog-expert” credentials.

You could start out with, ¿qué raza es?, which would be OK as long as the other’s dog isn’t a German Shepherd, a Labrador, or some other well-known breed.

Many dog breeds are the same in Spanish as in English or their original language. Examples are Rottweiler, Doberman, Schnauzer, Bulldog, Boxer. Others are literal translations, for example, pastor alemán (German Shepherd), pastor inglés (English Sheepdog), gran danés (Great Dane).

For some breeds, the habit of using an English adjective and turning it into a Spanish noun is applied. So a French Poodle becomes “un french,” a Golden Retriever “un golden,“ and a Cocker Spaniel, “un cocker.”

A mongrel in Mexico is described as corriente, or callejero (street dog), criollo, or euphemistically, cruzado con corriente (cross with mongrel).

Another possible opener, ¿es macho o hembra? would show you know that, ordinarily, there ought to be no problem if they are opposites, although it could do severe damage to your pose as someone who knows all about dogs.

¿Muerde? is probably the most sensible, yet impractical question. Besides, the growling and barking may only be directed at the other dog, and could also be mere frustration at being held back by a chain.

Anyway, once the preliminaries have been dispensed with, and a decision made whether to allow the dogs to associate freely, come what may, the owners can then get introduced and share impressions on the one thing they apparently have in common—a love of dogs.

Where you would expect to hear things like, what do you feed it? does he sleep indoors or outdoors? has she been spayed? what you actually get are things like, she’s normally quite sociable, he only fights if he’s afraid, he thinks he’s bigger than he actually is.

The habit of attributing psychological or sociological characteristics to an irrational quadruped appears to say more about the owner than the dog, but in any case it serves to get people talking to each other who might otherwise not so much as exchange a “good day.”

Sometimes you’ll come away from these meetings shaking your head and saying to yourself, “I can’t believe I said that!” And the dog, now more settled after a romp in the grass or a bit of a scrap, would probably agree if it could.