I moved to Monterrey from Mexico City with my husband and daughter. I can't speak much Spanish but I enjoy everyday life with new friends here. Hopefully I can write about lots of cheerful and charming Mexico!
Mexicans in general are a magnanimous, cheerful bunch, so it’s easy to see why they love parties so much. Families and friends get together on weekends for house parties, and there are all kinds of seasonal events, birthdays, and other parties as well.
Around 85% of Mexicans are Catholic, so Easter is an important event here. In Spanish, they call it Pasqua. I hear it’s celebrated differently in the US and other places, but in Mexico, their so-called “Semana Santa” lasts a week, and schools are closed for about two weeks during this time.
This year marks my fourth time spending the New Year holiday in Mexico, and my first spending it in Monterrey. Mexico is a Catholic country, so the New Year isn’t the most important holiday of the year here like it is in Japan. In Mexico, families gather to celebrate Christmas rather than the New Year.
In a few days, Mexican schools will go on Christmas break for about two weeks. Like last year, fewer people are traveling due to the pandemic, but I’d still like to write a post about Cuernavaca, a place that many people who live in Mexico City like to visit on holiday.
On October 31, Halloween, we went to a pumpkin patch. Pumpkin patch events are something that originated in America, not Mexico—but Monterrey is so close to the US that there is a lot of American culture here, and people celebrate Halloween more than they do in other Mexican states.
Mexico is already major tourist destination, but the Mexican board of tourism decided to encourage even more people to visit by coming up with the Pueblos Mágicos program in 2001 to showcase its most magical and enchanting towns.
In this post, I want to tell you about the cafebrerías. Cafebrería is a portmanteau that combines the words for café (cafetería) and book store (librería).
Did you know that there is a street in Mexico City that has one of the highest concentrations of museums in the world? They say there are more than 130 of them—maybe even 170. Some of them are famous of course, but many are so small that you’ll walk right by if you don’t pay close attention.
Mexico City was once Tenochtitlan, a city built by the Aztecs on Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico in the late 13th century. Between 200,000 and 300,000 people are thought to have lived in the Aztec empire at its peak.
Mexico’s historical ruins and ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations are well-known. In this post, I’ll talk about the mysterious Teotihuacán World Heritage Site and its pyramids, home to a civilization that flourished on the Central Mexican Plateau between the second century BCE and sixth century CE.
There are so many beautiful places in Mexico City that I urge you to visit, but this time I’d like to tell you about one of the most beautiful buildings here—the House of Tiles. It’s located in the historical district in the center of Mexico City, an area called the Centro Historico. There are a lot of old buildings in the area, but the Casa de los Azulejos is particularly eye-catching.
It’s been over a year since the coronavirus pandemic began around late March of 2020. It’s now late April of 2021, and Mexico, like many other countries, is still struggling.
Have you ever heard of Carlos Slim? You don’t hear his name mentioned much in Japan, but he’s one of the wealthiest people in the world. He ranked sixteenth this year on Forbes’ Annual World’s Billionaires List, but he clenched the number-one position for four years running between 2010 and 2013.
Hardly anyone can picture spring in Japan without the cherry blossoms. Thinking about the days warming up and everyone making plans for flower-viewing parties as news of peak season starts to spread always makes me a little nostalgic.
Mealtimes in Mexico are different than those in Japan. Breakfast is a light meal that people eat between seven and eight in the morning before they go to work or school, lunch is quite late (between two and four in the afternoon), and dinner is between eight and nine at night.
There are some delicious dishes that I have fallen in love with since coming to Mexico, and you may be surprised at what they are—soups and Caesar salad. Make sure you order them if you ever visit Mexico.
In Japan, people quickly start putting away their Christmas decorations as soon as it’s over to start preparing for the New Year holidays, but in Mexico, it feels like the Christmas season lasts through the New Year.
Sunny Mexico has more varieties of flowers than almost any other country in the world. They’re also an integral part of the Mexican culture. Some are used in cooking, they’re of course used as decorations and gifts, there are flowers for the dead… the list goes on.
Most people think of Mexico as being hot year-round. There are some regions where this is true, but there are also places in the country that get snow. Mexico City is cold between November and January, and though the mornings and evenings in particular can be quite chilly, heating systems are rare.
Tacos always come to mind when people think of Mexican food. They apparently originated 6,000 years ago, and have always consisted of beans or chilis wrapped in a tortilla. Traditional Mexican cuisine, which includes these ancient tacos, were listed as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010.
September 16 is Mexican Independence Day. It’s a national holiday, and celebrations start the night before. The pandemic unfortunately kept everyone from doing what they normally would, but we still did what we could to commemorate this important event.
The state of emergency declared due to the coronavirus has been lifted in Japan and life must be gradually returning to normal. In Mexico, as of June 19, the coronavirus crisis was still severe. The virus had claimed 20,394 lives and infected 170,485 people, with the number of infected people continuing to increase every day.
When people think of Mexico, they often picture jovial people, Mexican food, the bright and cheerful photogenic streets, and its many precious World Heritage sites. You might even think of vast tracts of sun-drenched terrain peppered with cactus.