No matter what country you travel to, if it is not the United States, it is different. The culture is different, the language will be different, and most likely the weather is going to be different. I recently took a trip to Mexico and it was quite the experience to say the least. Different language, different currency, and a very different culture. Most of us have heard a little bit about Mexico whether it be through a class we once took or through social media. I have heard so many different stories about the place that I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about going to this foreign country. Change isn’t something that I cope well with. However, this trip turned out to be an amazing one not only for the memories, but also for the learning experience.
One of the first things that I learned in Mexico, is that we people in the United States take filtered clean water for granted. It is just something that we don’t typically worry about because most places in the U.S. have clean water. That’s not how it is in Mexico. We all had to be very aware of what we were drinking and where we were drinking it. For the most part we drank bottled water, that way we didn’t have to worry about our water not being filtered. While I am home in the U.S. I rarely drink bottled water. Most of the time I drink ice water from our sink or fill up a water bottle with that same water and take it with me on the go. So now every time I go to get a drink of water from my house, I am grateful that I don’t have to worry about getting sick from that drink.
Another thing that I didn’t really think about before the trip was the currency in Mexico. U.S. dollars versus pesos. Figuring out the conversions for buying things was not too hard, it was the fact that an 18-dollar purchase turns out to be 338 pesos. So when you see a bill come up as 338 you kind of start to panic when in reality, it is not as expensive as you think it is. The scariest bill was our dinners each night because usually it was about 10 dollars per person so when you would see the total in pesos it was a much larger than what we are used to in the U.S. But that is just another thing to consider when traveling to a different country.
The scariest part of Mexico was the roads. There was one point where our driver was not in a lane at all, and it was because there were no lanes for anyone! One thing that just blew my mind was that for you to “merge” onto the interstate, you had to come to aa complete stop in order to go on your way. It was either that or you had to wait for traffic to pass for you to enter and people who were already on the road would not get over to let you merge. Keep in mind, the speed limit was 65. So to be in the back of a van with a driver who is driving a stick shift was quite a struggle. Not to mention the fact that I get carsick. If I was smart, I would’ve brought Dramamine, but that was a lesson that I learned the hard way.
The main thing that really spoke to me was the language. I took Spanish all four years in high school, but that got me to a kindergarten level of speaking. There were multiple times on the trip where I felt restricted or held back by a language barrier. I remember being on a boat and one of the workers was trying to tell me to do something but I had no idea what he was saying, Eventually, he started to point at what he was talking about and I was able to pick up what he was putting down, but I felt bad because I couldn’t try to talk back to him. I brought that knowledge back with me. The knowledge of realizing that being in a foreign country with a different language is not easy no matter where you are. Learning to have patience with people is something that we should all practice because we never really know what others struggle with culture/language barriers.
