Lopeztel's Blog

OK, I am guilty of scrolling through Facebook even though I am on the Fediverse... I simply keep it because everyone else I care about does, anyway, on to the important stuff:

Every once in a while I see something worthwhile there, this time I saw two very interesting posts close to each other (in my timeline at least), these were shared by two different people, both Mexican like me.

The first one came from a someone living in Germany and the other one came from someone living in Mexico.

The first post was about how Mexico is one of the easiest countries in the world to make friends with the locals. It may be biased because the cited article was written from the United States expat perspective, overall I agree with the content. We are friendly, perhaps a little too friendly.

Reference material came from internations.org

The second post was about how according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Mexico is one of the worst countries in to live in and raise a family.

Reference material came from OECD – Mexico and the OECD – country ranking which provides a nice chart.

All this was of particular interest to me because two things are clear:

1. We Mexicans have sub – optimal life conditions (some of the criteria are: safety, work – life balance, housing, income, jobs, education), yet we maintain a positive (naive?) attitude and stay friendly to each other

2. Expats see a whole different country

It's not like expats would frequent bad neighborhoods or have a life similar to the locals, probably enjoying that everything is cheaper given the fact that they earn(ed) money in US dollars but spend in Mexican pesos so they get to see only the nicest the country has to offer, and that's ok

I just found the contrast interesting