Expats Like Us
A podcast series exploring life as a U.S. Expat in Mexico. Topics include preparing to move to a new country, navigating your new home and finding your passion as a retiree.
Expats Like Us
Que Padre, Que Malo: What We Love, and What We Are Adapting to in Mexico
Ever wondered what it's like to trade the familiar comforts of home for a life rich with new culture and simpler pleasures? That's exactly what we, Bob and Sherrie Bosse, alongside Chris and Erica Kovalsky, unpack in a heart-to-heart about our expat adventures in Mexico. From the joy of navigating online shopping to the reality of property taxes, we've got an array of personal stories. Our game of "Que Padre, Que Malo" will have you chuckling and nodding along as we categorize our experiences—some surprisingly delightful and others a tad challenging—as we tried on our new Mexican lifestyles for size.
You will hear about our take on the available technology in Mexico and the unexpected simplicity of staying connected in our adopted homeland. We'll share the quirky triumphs of language learning, the affordability of cell phone plans, and the unbeatable warmth of the local and expat communities that have welcomed us with open arms. Our friends Chris and Erica chip in with firsthand insights into healthcare and road etiquette—because who doesn't love a good story about navigating the "retornos"? So, grab your favorite beverage and join us for a candid conversation that's as much about embracing change as it is about celebrating the rich tapestry of expat life in Mexico.
We are incredibly thankful for engagement and stories from our listeners, who have found their own sense of 'home' across the globe. Stay tuned as we continue to share the wisdom and wanderlust of those who've charted their unique international courses. We'd love to hear your comments and questions. Email them to expatslikeus@gmail.com
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It's amazing to me. You know, you said you get to talk to the orthopedist and you get to talk to the doctor. In the States you get like 15 minutes. They come in, they look at you you don't see them again here. They give you their WhatsApp number yes, they do, and you text them back and forth and they will text you back day or night. They won't. I mean, that's to me, that's amazing. That's something that you would never, ever, ever see in the United States.
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 1:Welcome to ExPATs Like Us, a co-production with me, vita Margarita, exploring the world of US expat life in Mexico. In each episode, we'll meet new people and hear their stories. We'll also learn more about expat life and get a few tips on everything from making your move to settling in, to living your dreams and, most of all, having fun. Let's dive in. Today's episode of ExPATs Like Us actually has four hosts, please welcome Chris Kowalski, erika Kowalski, sherry Bussey and, of course, I'm Bob Bussey. We're all friends in ExPATs who, in the summer of 2021, sold our possessions, retired from our jobs and made the move to Mexico. Today we're talking about some of our personal experiences of becoming expats. We've all noticed that when living in an expat community, we tend to have a lot of conversations about how things are different than they were where we came from. Today, we're playing a game called K-Padre K-Malo. As you might remember from episode 4, padre means father in Spanish, but it also means cool. When we pair it with K, k-padre means how cool. On the flip side, k-malo means how awful. It turns out that lots of changes we've experienced in our ExPAT lives we think are great K-Padre, while some experiences take us a while to get used to K-Malo. Don't worry, you'll catch on. Let's start with a topic from Sherry.
Speaker 5:Okay, Well, my K-Padre would be online shopping. I didn't do hardly any online shopping in the States, but I found out that in Mexico there's things I couldn't find Between Mercado Libre and Amazon Mexico. They have been lifesavers, so anything from getting medication to household cleaning products like Tide Pods, which I cannot live without. But I can't find in the stores here I can find online and it's at my doorstep between probably three and seven days from when I order, so that's definitely a K-Padre for me. Maybe the K-Malo would be some of the stores that were face-to-face stores or in-person stores for me back home are not here, so I really miss Target.
Speaker 3:Nobody knows this, I miss Target.
Speaker 5:I miss the Michaels craft store and although I can get some of the things delivered to my doorstep, sometimes there's a price difference. So maybe a little two ounce paint that I would buy for crafting back in the States $1.29 at the most. If you look online it's an import cost, so it's about $12 for that two ounce paint. So I bring my paint back from the States.
Speaker 1:You know one of the things I think with online shopping. The other thing I've noticed here we get deliveries at like nine o'clock on a Sunday night. We never had that where we lived in the States. It's deliveries are seven days a week and well into the evening, anytime of the day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that's pretty sure this is very familiar with shopping online. The Amazon man knows him.
Speaker 2:I'm friends with him. We see him almost weekly.
Speaker 5:You invited him for Thanksgiving.
Speaker 3:He says weekly, almost daily, almost, and then he'll forget what he ordered. He gets excited because it changes on Amazon every day. Every day things will change. Sometimes you can't get something crystal research and he'll look to see what he wants. And then he looks again, you know, in a couple of days and now it's able for delivery here without the import fee, and so he'll place the orders and then sometimes he'll forget that he ordered it.
Speaker 2:One thing I didn't realize when I moved down here. There's amazoncommx, which is Mexico. I didn't know they had that, but you can still order things off of Amazoncom and get a large majority, it seems like, of those items delivered as well. You can't get everything from either one, but sometimes you can get things on one.
Speaker 1:You can't get from the other Right and I noticed some of the things you pay a little bit of an import tax on it, but that's included in the price, so you don't notice it. But the bottom line is yeah, you can find pretty much anything on Amazon. Mexico yeah.
Speaker 5:And if you have Amazon Prime, it's almost always free delivery. So I feel like we're saving money.
Speaker 1:It's almost like throwing away money not to order a bunch of stuff on Amazon.
Speaker 3:And if you can't find it on Amazon, you go out and explore the Pueblos or Playa del Carmen and find substitutes that are just as good. Yeah, right.
Speaker 5:Yeah, we especially see that with you know, maybe food items. Yes. If you can't find it well, maybe you could make it or substitute something else that's nearly as good or maybe even better.
Speaker 3:Yes exactly.
Speaker 1:That's true, right? So let's go to Erica. What's a K Padre and a K Mavo for you?
Speaker 3:My K Padre is friends. I thought I would miss more, like I missed my friends back in the States, but I thought here it was going to be lonely, but it's completely opposite. The K Padre is everybody's, friendly. You get to know people and there's really everybody just likes each other. So I love that part of it the friends. The K Malo part is that meeting friends were literally here all the time. So if you are on a walk, what are you doing for dinner tonight? I don't know. Let's go out to dinner and then you find yourself with no downtime. And it gets busier than we actually realized, where we don't have a lot of downtime, we have to schedule downtime. We actually have a shared calendar now, so when we do something or I commit to something, he sees it, because before it's like I scheduled this, why I said that we were going to do this where it got kind of chaotic and so we actually have to schedule our downtime.
Speaker 1:Right and eventually it's like, oh my God, it's February already. I thought it was November.
Speaker 3:Or we're coming up on our three year mark in the summer, both of us. So where did the three years go? Right, that's true, it was quick. Yeah, when you're having fun, it does.
Speaker 1:But yeah, with friends it's easy to make friends. Part of the reason I think that is is because we all have this shared experience of getting rid of all of our stuff. And you know, like I said in the intro, we all talk about. We have a lot of the same conversations, you know, stuff we like and stuff we don't like, but that is bonding with people just doing that, you know yes.
Speaker 3:Or meeting people too. Like if you go to the pool, there's people that visit and they we didn't realize before. They're here year like every year. They come for a couple of weeks and then when they visit, you know they want to hang out with you, they want to talk to you, they want to see you. So it's like you meet new friends every time. You have your main group of friends, but then you have those friends that visit little secret pockets of friends that are temporary, yeah.
Speaker 5:And luckily we don't have jobs, because there's no way we can fit it all in with the job.
Speaker 3:I don't even know how we work. There's no time for work.
Speaker 1:For sure. So do you have a K-Molo?
Speaker 3:The K-Molo is no downtime. Oh no, no downtime, Right no downtime that's.
Speaker 1:That is kind of Molo.
Speaker 3:It's fun time, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can't get in the way of. We have to get our car registered, but we don't have time to go get our car registered because we make things like happen with friends. So now we just push it and push it. Or, taking care of the outside, we push that. It's like, oh, we don't, we can do that tomorrow.
Speaker 5:It's good, we'll go hang out with friends and there are some people that I know their spouse has a set role, like no more than three social events or even maybe one or two social events, that they're not a very social person per week, so they have to really pick and choose what they want to do. Their spouse to go to, and then they just do the other stuff with their girlfriend.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, I've seen that. I guess I've seen that as well.
Speaker 2:Their spouse is going to get angry about that.
Speaker 1:All right, chris, do you have a K Padre K Molo?
Speaker 2:I guess it'd be two different things. One of the K Padres would be the Caribbean Sea here Beautiful. It's warm all year long. It's amazing. There are so many things you can do snorkeling, scuba, windsurfing, boating trips, fishing, paddleboarding, etc. It's you know. I mean you could spend every day at the beach here. The K Molo would probably be the retornals, that is, the roads here. It's a straight shot and they don't have a lane to get over.
Speaker 1:They don't have like an overpass like we would have in the States.
Speaker 2:So about every mile or mile and a half, it seems, there's a return Right and you have to do that. And with gas right now I figured out it's about $5.64 a gallon. That's a lot of extra gas every time you want to go north. You got to go south for a while and then turn around.
Speaker 1:It's the distance and also sometimes you got to sit at that return and wait for traffic to clear for and it feels like forever.
Speaker 2:And then you get these big buses and you can't see anything.
Speaker 5:They're kind of dangerous.
Speaker 3:Two taxi drivers that'll just line up next to each other and it's like one at a time. But they don't have patience, so they think they're going to get there sooner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we could do an entire episode just on how people drive. We've learned a lot. We were down with it, we manage it just fine.
Speaker 2:But definitely got to be defensive driver.
Speaker 3:Yes, I don't think I've ever heard him honk the horn as much as he has in Cancun. Cancun is crazier, crazy driving more in Cancun than it is here. And they will merge right in front of you and they don't care. Two or three inches away.
Speaker 1:Right, yes, we all know that feeling. Sherry gets a little nervous.
Speaker 5:just in the passenger seat alone. I can't look Well, and then you see the number of cars. If you park anywhere you can like, next to whoever you get out and like, well, they have a little fender bender. I mean, there's a scrape on the side of almost every car.
Speaker 2:Just have that fatal accident here. Six people passed, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5:Well, and the next day there was one farther up the road and I think two or three people died.
Speaker 1:Yeah, going the opposite direction, and that's not uncommon here and it's a straight road. So you always wonder how can that right? You know part of the thing, I guess. One of my things well, I'll just do my K Padre is our property taxes are really low. Yeah, they're great. It's a small, tiny fraction of what we paid in the States for property tax. The K-Malo that goes along with that is our roads are not that great. We don't have the overpasses, we don't have the infrastructure that we can pay for in the States with our property tax. Yeah, that's true, you know. So it makes it affordable. Yeah, so that's my K Padre and K-Malo, and we'll be back, welcome back. Today we have all the producers of expats like us and we're talking K Padre, k-malo, about what we love, about expat life in Mexico and those things we just maybe don't like so much. Erica, what's your next topic?
Speaker 3:Mine is the medical part. I have severe asthma and in the States my co-payments would typically consist of about $30 and my albuterol inhalers were $60. We carried medical insurance for the family and that was $500, $600 a month for that. Moving here, I can get my inhalers for 40 pesos each, which is about maybe closer to $3. With no prescription, no co-payment. I can go into the pharmacies, show them the albuterol and they'll sell me as many as I want.
Speaker 2:And they're the same quality.
Speaker 3:They're the same Right.
Speaker 2:She's been using them for three years.
Speaker 3:The breathing treatments. I've had to use breathing treatments. I have to have a nebulizer. The nebulizer was about $20 US dollars when in the States the insurance would basically sell you one and it was way more expensive. The treatments in itself are about $6 each one. I had to stay in the hospital. The personal experience was I had to stay in the hospital overnight because I had a severe asthma attack and the medical was still reasonable. It cost us $2,500 US dollars and they would not admit me until we made full payment of $3,000 and then they reimbursed us. So, considering it no insurance, it was pretty inexpensive. It's still a lot. They did give me oxygen, they treated me well, everything was amazing. The Malo part they do tend sometimes the hospitals do tend to kind of question you and they will charge you more if you're not a local.
Speaker 1:Right, or I've heard when they find out you have Mexican insurance. I've had people say if you're going in for something, that's not a big deal, do not tell them that you have insurance, because then you're gonna get the jack-back rate on everything Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then also the get by that it was for Chris. He rolled his ankle playing pickleball and he also had an accident with his finger. We were playing football, and so I base when he got home after his rolled ankle. It's like we're going to the hospital. You need to get x-rays. We'll do a two-for-one. I mean, you're already hurt with your finger, let's get your ankle checked. We walked into the emergency room. It was about 45 minutes. The nurse came in, checked his vitals and then he spoke to both doctors the Emergency room doctor and the orthopedic doctor. We didn't had no middleman and that cost us at that time about $172 and I came with x-rays.
Speaker 2:I came with the Wrap that they put on my foot and my finger and the pain medicine that they gave me.
Speaker 1:It's. It's also. It's amazing to me. You know you said you get to talk to the orthopedist and you get to talk to the doctor. In the States you get like 15 minutes. They come in, they look at you, yeah, you don't see them again here. They give you your, their WhatsApp number. Yes, they do, and you text them back and forth and they will text you back day or night, and they will. That's to me that's amazing. That's something that you would never, ever, ever see in the United States.
Speaker 3:No, and you walk out, like Chris was saying, with your x-rays, your whole medical report that they diagnosed you with. You Walk out the door with everything.
Speaker 2:I think part of the reason Erica's was so expensive is it was Kind of during COVID and that's what their first thought was that she had COVID. They gave her two or three tests and she was negative. But they were. It was an automatic three thousand dollars down Because they thought that's what it was and that's was the cost to treat it.
Speaker 1:I guess and you guys do. You didn't have any problem getting Reimbursed no, we went up to the cashiers.
Speaker 3:You go up and they review everything and they say, okay, this is how much it was, and it was 2,500. And they said this is what we're charging your credit card, because you had to have a credit card on hand. It's not like pay when you leave, you have to have it up front. Okay, so they just charged it and everything was fine, all right very, very cool.
Speaker 5:And we do have Mexican health assurance, but we've never used it. So most things are so Reasonable you just pay out of pocket. So you know, for example a mammogram 40 bucks you know, Just unbelievably cheap compared to what we would have paid up in the States. And Bob had an MRI and it was maybe 300 275 bucks for an MRI.
Speaker 1:I remember getting one on my shoulder in the States and it was over three thousand dollars to my insurance company.
Speaker 3:Well, Tess we had to.
Speaker 2:It was five or five, fifty. Yeah, we're our part after our part, yeah right.
Speaker 3:And then also your medication, your blood pressure medication.
Speaker 2:Well, that's 19 pesos for two months, but a dollar.
Speaker 1:Yes, k-padre, the prescription medication and the I guess the lower level health care in Mexico. Yeah, it's fabulous, chris. What do you got?
Speaker 2:I would say the people here, almost everyone you meet that's a local. They're friendly, they're accommodating, they're hard-working, just some of the nicest you know. There's the gardeners here, the people you meet out the restaurants, they're great. That would be the, the k-padre. You know that? I looked it up today. It's actually. They usually work about six days a week and the minimum wage as of January 1st 2023 is 207.44 pesos a day, so 12 bucks a day that they're making and they, they're always smiling. Now we see you so happy, so accommodating. On the other side of that, the K-Malo would be any time you deal with somebody in a position of authority, such as Getting your car registered, any of that stuff they make it as difficult.
Speaker 1:It seems as possible, inter interacting with the government can be very frustrating, very frustrating, or even the Home Depot workers. But yes, that's one of the stories that everybody goes through when they first become an expat is you got to buy a car, okay, then you got to get license plates for it, and a lot of people will hire someone to go do that for them because they're intimidated by it. But eventually you're not doing that anymore because you realize you're throwing away money, right, and you go there. But yeah, it's, you need you know five different forms. You need. You need duplicate copies of your stuff. I went in just recently, in the last month, last couple of weeks actually and I wanted to get license plate for our car and for my motorcycle and it was no problem. The car it took like two and a half minutes you know they type, type, type the thing out and gave it to me. The motorcycle I didn't have a copy of my passport. Well, I had a copy of my passport for my car. The lady had a had a copy machine two feet behind her, but she was not going to make me a copy, so I had to come home, get another copy and go back on another day.
Speaker 2:And the next time you go might be fine with only one copy.
Speaker 1:It changes every time the next time you might go. They don't even need a copy Right.
Speaker 3:I dread going to the, to that place.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I just know it's like a day I have to wake up and mentally I prepare myself, because you can have everything. They ask the first time, the second time and they still want something else. Right, I've learned to have extra copies, but sometimes it doesn't work, depending on who's working. Then you can. You can kind of get away with it Right.
Speaker 1:We have a file folder at home that's just full of copies from our marriage certificate, to our passports, to our residency cards.
Speaker 5:Well, almost everything here. Your proof of address is your electric bill. And if your name is not on the electric bill, you might have problems. So if I know I need that, I take a marriage certificate to show that I'm married to the person whose name is on the electric bill, because I don't want to make a second trip, exactly.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it's. People are so nice, they're helpful, they're patient. They're patient with us Gringos that you know. Three out of the four of us don't know that much Spanish, right, and people are extremely patient with that. But yes, dealing with the government's a pain.
Speaker 3:But do you find yourself like with the language barrier? A lot of them speak English or understand it here.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, I do, I do like that yeah.
Speaker 3:And there's some that you'll get, that they understand it, but they won't speak it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:But for the most part, like with you, Sherry, your Spanish is getting amazing, like amazing. I am impressed with it.
Speaker 1:Oh, she came up with k podre and k molo.
Speaker 5:Yeah Well, and it helps. Once in a while I'll use my Spanish and I get complimented like oh, your accent's very good and I'm like whoa, I'm gonna stick with this. So I use it. Even though my maybe the waiter speaks English and I have an English man view, I still like that word in Spanish.
Speaker 3:Just practicing. Practicing, I think, helps a lot too, me too.
Speaker 1:I saw a Facebook meme today and it was a shot of Anthony Bourdain in one of his shows, and the caption was this is what I feel like when I pronounce jalapeno correctly. That was pretty good. So, sherry, what do you got?
Speaker 5:Well, one of my deals the things I like a lot is the cell phone plants here. So when we came down to Mexico and decided we were going to get rid of our US phones and US numbers, we went in and we knew from one of our neighbors here that had a blog that you could prepay for a cell phone plan and get a heck of a deal. And I think our first year that we are, the first two years we prepaid and it averaged out to be about $12 per phone. It went up per month per phone and it went up a little bit this last time, but it's still $20 per phone per month, which is about $180 less than we were spending in the States, and it covers all the the data that we need and it's pretty much our lifeline here.
Speaker 2:So that's through AT&T.
Speaker 1:right yeah, so right right, it's a big corporation. If you happen to go back to the States, your phone works just fine. Yes, that's true. It would probably pay off for Americans to fly down here, buy a phone, get to sign up for a two year contract, fly back to the States and use their AT&T.
Speaker 5:Yes, and the phones are separate. So you just pay for the phone that you want and we started out with kind of cheap ones. I think mine was $150 for a phone and it works just fine. I think I might upgrade a little bit and get one with a good camera, yeah, but you know.
Speaker 2:And we had bought ours, outright, our iPhone, back in the States before we came down here, because we had also saw the same blog and thought, hey, that's a good deal, we just have to put a SIM card in and good to go, right.
Speaker 5:And I think you know maybe one of the key mottos with that is that you know, maybe people over a lot rely a bit on technology. So you could also use Google translate with your phone if you wanted to talk to someone face to face and translate what you were saying or what they were saying, or you know reading directions up the back of a package or whatever. I use that quite a bit with cooking, but I think sometimes people get overconfident, like I really don't need to use Spanish, I don't need to learn it, and then they don't, and I think that's kind of sad that people moved to Mexico and they don't even try to learn any of the language. So that's my key part, right.
Speaker 1:I guess I would go with that, as technology in general is is great here. Think of how much we all use social media. Social media is great. It's everything that's available in the States is available here. But what it does. Think of what it would be like to move to Mexico and leave your family and your friends before there was internet or social media. I mean, you would there, because mail is almost non existent here. You would never rely on the mail, yeah, and but now it's like you know, I look at my social media list of friends and it's like I never left the state Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you see what they're doing every day.
Speaker 1:Every day. I mean we're big, we're living virtually through our friends in the states like we never left. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's to me. That's. That's one of the big benefits of just technology in general that we have done For sure. Now the downside of Facebook and stuff is there's a lot of Facebook addiction and stuff that happens, you know. I mean, we all know people that spend the entire day on their phone and they develop, you know, drama in their head. You know things that they see there and oh my God, and the sky is falling all the time and it's, you know, that's so. That's kind of the downside. The other technology is I have expat TV. Okay, it's $30 a month and I get, I don't know there's thousands and thousands of channels, like basically almost every channel on earth, and if there's a channel that's not there, you email them and they put it on there. So, and it's like 30 bucks a month. And when we were in the states we had, you know, dish network and we had local cable and we went through every iteration of television services and we never pay less than like $80 or $90 a month. And that was at the low end package for those things, yeah.
Speaker 5:So yeah, we never had movie channels back in the States, we got them all down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was. I was always too cheap to get a.
Speaker 3:T. You know what, though? That's the same thing with us. It was just money wasted every month.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the only. Thing.
Speaker 3:I think you really splurged on was the internet, because you were a gamer, he liked the fast internet, and so Chris and our son Daniel. Both Daniel Xbox, Chris PlayStation. So he wanted the fast internet. That was the only thing he splurged on, but everything else it was down here and we didn't have time to watch TV.
Speaker 1:Right, right, right and yeah, and we don't have time to watch TV here either, but at least we're not paying an arm or a leg Right. If you do get a rainy day and you want to sit inside, it's available Right, or you want to, you know, see what's going on in the news, or whatever. You can sit down and do it. But yeah, you know, and it is all internet based. So you know, depending on what service you have, it can get. So it's buffers, or what do I want to say? Buffers, you know? Yeah, we have fast internet, but yeah our internet, the internet options here. You would think going to a developing country like this, you'd have problems with that. But you really don't know, you know it's fast, I mean, and so many of the things that you buy are are connected to you know, like our, our oven can be connected to our Alexa, yeah our fridge and our air conditioners. All can be run off the phone and so the technology in Mexico is just as good as it is anywhere in the world?
Speaker 3:I think so. Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2:I was going to say also along technology solar, we have solar, you guys have solar. That's one of the best investments we've made here. I know several people you know install around this area. We ended up getting ours for a heck of a deal. Our last bill on our solar bill was 62 pesos. That's like what, four bucks.
Speaker 3:I should say our electric bill on our solar, but yeah, yeah, like three or four bucks.
Speaker 1:For two months. For two months, yeah, we got. We had eight panels put on before we moved here. We had them put on our condo and we figured they paid for themselves, probably about a year ago. Yeah and we've been here not quite three years.
Speaker 2:Our bill a month, or the two months before we got it, was 7400 pesos as opposed to 62 pesos, so big difference.
Speaker 5:But 350 us, even a little bit more on the exchange difference yeah.
Speaker 3:And before he was always watching to make sure that there was one air on and I told him he was cheap because I wanted a little bit more especially in the hot months.
Speaker 1:You want that air.
Speaker 3:But now he's more. He's okay with having two on three on whatever you need? Yeah, because it's paying for itself.
Speaker 2:Especially in these cooler months. You're racking it up, stores it goes right back on the grid here and you don't have to have any right, any batteries or anything.
Speaker 1:It's like buying stuff on Amazon. It's almost throwing away money to use your solar to run your air conditioner.
Speaker 5:So the only, you know, the only drawback is I know people that moved here and you know they see how cheap people have with their solar panels or whatever. I want solar panels and if you're buying in a condo, just make sure that your unit is allowed to have solar panels, because we've had friends that have a garden level or middle level unit and they're limited to maybe two or three solar panels, which doesn't quite do it. So then they have to really limit how much they use so that they don't go into the non subsidized electric rate, which is much higher. And you know I feel bad for him. It's summertime. You'd like to have your at least air conditioner on in the bedroom at night.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 3:I know people that limit themselves because of that, so that's a good question to think about or check out before you, before you buy.
Speaker 2:Yes, One of the reasons we chose this townhome because we have our own rooftop and we knew we could and you guys your whole building has solar for the entire building, so put up solar panels till the cows come home.
Speaker 1:Exactly, you could power the whole neighborhood with this place. Yeah, yes, but yeah, amazing technology that we have down here, and that's just one aspect of it. Well, I think that's it for our podcast today. I think so, thanks to Chris Kowalski and Erica Kowalski and my wife Sherry, and we'll see you next time on Xpats Like Us. Hasta luego. In each episode of Xpats Like Us, we're going to teach you a new Mexican slang word. This is something you may not find in your phrasebook or your online Spanish class or your Spanish app, or wherever you're learning your Spanish. Instead, this is a term used primarily by Mexican Spanish speakers. Today's word is no manches, no manches. I've heard that or I've read that before. How do you spell that?
Speaker 3:No, no manches. M-a-n-c-h-e-s.
Speaker 1:No, manches. What does it mean?
Speaker 3:It literally translates to don't stain, but it usually is used when you're talking to friends like no shit, no way.
Speaker 1:Okay, no way, no manches, no manches. That's a good one. Thank you, Erica Kowalski. From Me, Vita Margarita. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's topic. Just look up Xpats Like Us on Facebook or send us an email at xpatslikeus at gmailcom. You can also see the video version of today's discussion and all of our discussions on our YouTube page. Follow, like, subscribe and leave us a review. Thank you to the producers of Xpats Like Us for getting together and playing a round of K-Padre K-Malo. It's been fun. Thanks, Chris and Erica. From Me, Vita Margarita, and thanks to my wife, Sherry. Most of all, thank you for tuning in to Xpats Like Us and thank you for interacting with us on social media. Next time, we'll bring you more firsthand information about your international mood. Until then, remember our homes are not defined by geography or one particular location, but by memories, events, people and places that span the globe.
Speaker 4:Hey Jose, please pass the Pico. Don Julio, kick chopping that cilantro.
Speaker 6:Add some avocado and little avocado because we're about to pay his discounts. Our next door shout out to you, carnitas.
