Living in Cancun

This is The Real Deal

 

I’m celebrating, pour the champagne, it’s been two years since I moved to Cancun! I’m feelink happy, so I’d like to share a few things I’ve experienced here since then. I am sure that when you come on holidays it is very likely that you will stay at the Hotel Zone all the time, probably leaving it only for a tour, natural park or a cenote, meaning you won’t get to see Cancún as a city, but only as a touristic spot. So if you want to see the big picture, here are five things you didn’t know about living in Cancún:

1. It rains a lot.
Well duh, I should have known since all this area used to be pure jungle… I used to think there was a rainy season only, but nope, it basically rains the whole fucking year. So let’s say you wake up to a perfect sunny day, you have breakfast and get ready to hit the beach, well by the time you’re ready some clouds will be ruining your mood. But oh, thirty minutes later there’s the sun again! Confusing right? And of course that comes with humidity, which is like 100000%, forget about perfect furniture or a nice hairstyle.

2. There’s no fresh milk.
Well, in México we have to kinds of milk, the delicious fresh one which you can store like for two or three days, and the regular one which can be stored for months. So here I am the first day I went to walmart in Cancun and I was looking for fresh milk. Where’s the fresh milk? I asked to a guy who worked there. – Fresh milk? We don’t have fresh milk in Cancun, he said… ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME?

3. It’s multicultural.
Cancun, as Las Vegas, was created for tourism. The city has only 44 years old, so almost no one has been born here. This means everyone is from other states in México or from other countries. Plus, we have a floating population of thousands. So this is just very cool.

Cancun

4. Making friends is not easy.
You may asume that since the city has that many people from around the world, specially single people who come here to work, it would be very easy to make new friends. Well, not exactly… Businesses, specially hotels, run 24/7 which means lots of people have night or more than 8 hours shifts, and also many work on weekends. Therefore there isn’t that much time to be social. If you don’t know anyone in Cancun, it won’t be that easy to start a new friend circle.

5. Downtown vs. Hotel Zone.
You may see Cancun as a very glamorous and nice looking city, but not every corner of it is like that. Actually, Hotel Zone is quite different than the downtown area (basically everywhere that’s not the Hotel Zone is known as downtown) and even in downtown there are some nice neighbourhoods and others which are really poor and bad looking. Also, some people think it is a small city or even a village, wrong! Cancun is pretty big and is getting bigger by the hour.

All in all Cancun is a great place to live in, a paradise I’ve been enjoying since the day I got here. It’s always nice to smell fresh air and feel like I’m on vacation every weekend.