One of the pizza places at the marina is Marina Mia. Being the social butterfly that I am (now) one day I stopped and talked to the owner. Fernando lived and worked in the states for about 8 years. He started out as a dishwasher and moved up to a manager at a restaurant chain. He met his wife (also from Mexico) while in Michigan and now has two young daughters so he came back to Mexico to be with family. Since he is a very personable guy with a great smile (which I'm a sucker for) and also speaks English well I asked him if he would teach me Spanish between customers. He said 'of course'. I asked him 'cuánto cuesta?' to which his reply was 'nada'. Business is slow and I thought he would jump on the chance to make a little bit of money between customers but instead he refused and said that he was there anyway so to just come by when I wanted and he'd help me. I had my first lesson today, sitting at a table outside while the sun was starting to set. We went over the sounds of the vowel and consonants, he asked me dozens of basic questions in Spanish of which I could answer maybe two, and I learned more about Fernando. Kevin joined me after a bit and we ordered pizza to pay for my lesson!

Some observations about life in Mexico (at least in Mazatlan).

-Old school is the name of the game--just in the last two days we've seen workers using machetes, not chainsaws to trim trees of fairly good size branches, men using 5 gallon buckets to carry cement up a flight of stairs to add brick to the façade of a house rather than a cement pump and we watched blacktop being moved in wheelbarrows so it could be pressed into a parking lot using shovels. All of the workers were male. I've noticed there aren't many Mexican men who are overweight.

-Not everyone working are actually employees--kids bag groceries at the checkout counter but their wage is dependent on the customer tipping them. It was a good thing I read that in a publication or I would have had no idea they were not getting paid by the store. Unfortunately for a quite a few kids I didn't read that until about a week ago.

-There are three to five times as many employees in businesses than there are at home--I read that there are strict employment rules that require an employer to provide three months termination pay which means it is often less expensive to keep someone on rather than lay them off. That may be why there are were about 50 employees working on the floor at the local Home Depot, and may have actually have outnumbered the number of customers, that and maybe the minimum wage of $53 pesos a day (about $4 USD PER DAY!) might have something to do with it.

-Bus drivers are not so happy--at least not the ones on the buses we've been taking. This is so different than our other experiences so maybe it's because their seats look like they have absolutely no cushion to them and a few we've noticed look like they are just wire frames with great big rubber bands to lean against. I'd be grumpy too if that was what I had to sit on all day!

-Most people we have had exchanges with have been very helpful, some going way out of their way to either thank us for being here (a taxi driver) or calling another business to help find sanitation hose...a whole other story that I'll spare you the details.

Photo is of a worker riding on top of a moving truck watering the trees in the meridian. I don't think they have workman's comp here.