Waiting on a bed

Satori, notes — Stephen on 15 January 2008 @ 10:12 AM — 0 comments

Today I am waiting for a bed to be delivered.  I have been looking into all the mundane things that one looks into when one moves to a new place, except that in a different culture, these things don’t seem mundane at all to me.  Yesterday I took a walk around the neighborhood, got a haircut, bought a SIM chip for my phone, checked out a local gym and had a meal with my roommate.  Here are a few of the things I have noticed:

- Mexican mobile phone rates are ridiculous. In fact, they are the highest I have seen anywhere in the world. This seems mostly due to the fact of a near monopoly by Carlos Slim. There is also a highly confusing system of dialing between mobiles and land lines, and for dialing in and out of the country. It is also the case that sometimes the receiving party on a mobile will pay part of the cost of the call. Whew.

- I was noticing that there is a ton of beautification work going on in my neighborhood with respect to parks and walkways. When I asked Julio about it, he told me that the current mayor of Mexico City lives in this neighborhood. Aha.

- My ability to express myself in Spanish and to understand others fluctuates a lot during the course of any one day. Some people are a lot easier to understand than others. Pues, poco a poco.