CULTURE / Missing Gringo Comforts

Missing Gringo Comforts

 

Missing Gringo Comforts

13 November 2005 LIVING, CULTURE, COMMUNITY 37

Today is a quiet, lazy day... a perfect Sunday. There's been tropical and cool rain for the last hour (after we watered the garden this morning, of course). Right before it started to rain, we had returned from a typical gringo morning: breakfast at Segafreddo's Italian coffee shop and shopping at Costco. We saw no fewer than seven people we knew there. All those price comparisons for big flat screen TV's has exhausted us, so one of us is taking a siesta. The other one is using the laptop computer over the new wireless DSL that we got installed at home TWO days after ordering it! That must be some kind of Telmex service record... and it would be hard for Pacific Bell or some other US telephone company to beat, too.

On the way home from Costco, we were remarking how many things we used to think of as "missing" from Merida when we first moved here. It seemed like there were so many things from the U.S. that we couldn't get here. But now, it just doesn't seem that way anymore. It does seem like the things we really need (DSL service, car repair, insurance, etc.) are as good or better here. And the things that aren't here maybe aren't that important anymore. (Is sourdough bread really that important?)

(don't answer that...)

...well, there just aren't that many of those things anymore. We can even get organic milk and Pop Tarts here.

Update (3/08/2006): we recently found sourdough bread at Mega...
Update (3/04/2007): there is now sourdough at Mega and Costco (neither are that good though) but PopTarts have mysteriously disappeared from the Peninsula. Organic milk, on the other hand, is everywhere. So it goes...

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