calmita

Before I moved here, I heard plenty of warnings about how things move at a slower pace. When people say “mañana,” they mean some fuzzy point in the distance, not tomorrow, necessarily. Things that you’d think would take five minutes — fixing the voicemail box on my Mexican cell phone, for instance — end up taking a week.

I’d like to be open-minded and live how the Romans do. (You say tomorrow? Great, I’ll be ready in three days… or four.) But it’s been a little hard to rejigger my American attitude about time, because it’s seeped into the tiniest of decisions.

Yesterday the man who made my business cards told me to meet him at his shop at 1 p.m. I showed up at 1:15 and he wasn’t there. (And his phone number was out of service.) I went and got a carrot/orange juice at a juice bar, and came back at 2, and there he was.

“Traffic was horrible,” he apologized.

Yesterday night, a friend was hosting a birthday barbecue. His invitation said 2 p.m. In the U.S., I would have showed up shortly afterward. But this is Mexico — parties run all night, right? (My one piece of evidence to support this is a Super Bowl party we attended here, which supposedly started at 1 p.m., but at which no one really arrived until 11 or so.)

So, I showed up at 11. The party had already ended.

“Comidas are different,” my friend, an American woman who has lived here for four years, explained. Comida is the word for a barbecue that starts in the mid-afternoon. “By 11 p.m. everyone’s already passed out from drinking all day.”

Now I know. Interestingly, there do seem to be a lot more house parties here than anywhere else I’ve lived. Last night, after the barbecue didn’t work out, we ended up at someone’s house in Escandón, a neighborhood that borders Condesa. At 2 a.m. — when we left — the party was still rolling. I think parties here end as late as 6 a.m. That is something I won’t be joining the Romans in.