Ajijic is one of my favorite places I've ever visited. It's a small city in Mexico. My family went there to visit my grandma and grandpa back in 2006. My grandpa was having some health issues, and the warmer climate in Ajijic was supposed to help fix some of that, due to the combination of the tropical latitude and its elevation.
We left Cincinnati fairly early in the day, and arrived bright and early in the morning, which was unfortunate because the first thing my grandpa wanted to do was climb one of the mountains that surrounds the city. We were exhausted, but since they were basically our guides to the city, our only option was to tag along. Never in my life have I been so glad that I didn't stay at our apartment and sleep. In our hike up the mountain we ran into all sorts of small, abandoned religious buildings and statues, and even had to navigate our way around a bull hanging out in a pasture. On top of that, the view was amazing.
Past that, we spent basically the rest of our two weeks there walking around the city, buying souvenirs, and eating actual authentic Mexican food (American "authentic" Mexican food is very different than Mexican authentic Mexican food.) The only rough part was how careful you had to be with where/what you ate, so as to avoid getting the dreaded Montezuma's Revenge, which we were all lucky enough to avoid, except for my dad.
It's not a wealthy city by any means, but they definitely know how to live life well. One day there was this huge party in the circle outside our apartment with costumes and colors and food and dancing and singing. Each of the apartments in our complex was basically its own building and you could go up the stairs outside and hang out on the roof to watch the festivities or the sunset or just relax. It's crazy how little they focus on what time it is over there. The difference between the time orientation here in the states and over in Mexico was absolutely mind blowing.
Ajijic was my first introduction to the idea of bartering as well. This was probably the biggest culture shock for me. We spent many of our days wandering from tiengas to tiengas. These were basically these large markets where people would just sell food, handmade gifts, and other random junk for however much they could. No set prices. And they weren't all just sitting down on the ground or at tables selling their goods either--they would follow you around like sharks being drawn to blood in the water. Somehow (probably because we looked like tourists) they could tell that we weren't accustomed to this kind of thing, and the moment you walked into the market or got off your bus, you would be swarmed by folks trying to get you to buy their stuff. Even our first day there, we ran into this guy carrying a box of watches and a bunch of his own handmade guitars on his back. "Sorry, we don't have enough money for that," wasn't an appropriate or remotely helpful response. Most of the time, they would just knock the price down a bit. In this guy's instance, he resorted to being a little punk. His English wasn't very good, but he knew how to dabble a bit with the language.
"Oh, okay! You cheapo then? Okay, Cheapo!"
Eventually we got away, but only for about a day or two. I swear, this guy must have put some sort of tracker on us or something because we ran into him almost every day for the rest of our trip. We would get off our bus, and would suddenly hear, "Hey! Cheapo!" Or we would be walking out of a restaurant after lunch and, sure enough, "Cheapo!" Like I said, a shark drawn to blood, and apparently, we were bleeding.
Eventually, my dad's watch broke for some reason or other, and this guy found us again and dad took a look at his watched and bought one of those calculator watches, which I guess is something an engineer like dad would enjoy. After that the guy's interest in us pretty much fizzled out. He saw us a few times past that, but aside from yelling out his nickname for dad, he didn't really make much contact with us.
That was about the height of the culture shock we experienced. Walking through the streets, there were dogs everywhere, even on the roofs of some of the houses, kind of the way squirrels are in Cincinnati. Their plumbing was so bad that you couldn't flush toilet paper, which was pretty gross. The days were longer because it times and schedules weren't important. It reminded me of the glimpse of the life of a hobbit that we get in Tolkien's books, except that the people were taller.
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