From the ridiculous to the absurd

Travel in any foreign country and you are likely to encounter rules, systems and processes that differ to those in your home country and which, frankly, appear strange and ridiculous.

No matter how Americanised Mexico is becoming, it is still rife with quirks and oddities, presumably stemming from its strangely blended colonial and indigenous past. Even my history teacher says that Mexicans have identity issues - and historians don't agree on whether the country was conquered by the Spaniards or whether the invaders simply learned indigenous languages, introduced catholocism and sort of blended into existing society.

Some things in Mexico just don't make sense. Like the fact that everyone, including men, are good dancers, if you peel back the veneer of everyday life, absurdities and oddities bombard you at every turn.

Take the boarding house-type place where we are staying. It is like living in an escher drawing - the one with all of the staircases in three dimensions that don't really lead anywhere. The house is such a maze of rooms and stairs and terraces that it is easy to get lost. When we first moved here I went to find the laundry room - it took five flights of stairs - three up and two down - to reach it. The house has three separate kitchens and even has two street entrances that lie perpendicular to each other.

The Mexican postal service is an other oddity. We tried to send a package containing a present to a friend for a birthday. We put it in a box and taped a sturdy plastic shopping bag over it.

This would not do, instructed the stern-faced woman at the post office, after keeping us waiting a few minutes while she was shuffling papers. For a start, we had to open the package up so she could inspect the contents. Then, it had to be re-wrapped in yellow or manilla- coloured paper which they did not sell so we had to go to the stationery shop and come back.

The stationary shop only had manilla envelopes which were too small to fit the box, so we emptied its contents and placed them inside. This would not do either, informed the postal wench when we returned, as the envelope might break so we were ordered to cut the envelope open and wrap the box in it. Of course, it didn't completely cover the box so I was sent to buy another envelope and tape them together. And throughout this whole drama she didn't once check to see what was in the box!

Our innocent attempt to use the university swimming pool also found us mired in a tangled web of rules, procedure and frustration. We had already obtained the required request form for a medical exam from our faculty, paid the fee at administration, visited the medical centre to obtain an appointment and attended said appointment where they asked a range of bizarre medical questions that had nothing to do with swimming.

The final stage was to visit the swimming centre and obtain a "credential card". It took us about an hour to enter in our details to the computer to generate a code to then enter our details again to get a printed form which would then be used to generate a photo ID card. We couldn't get the ID card because apparently there were problems with the system, so we were told to return the next day. We did, and the system was still down. The following day we found the office shut with a sign to go to the sports department, 2km away in another part of campus.

After hiking there we were informed that it was not possible to obtain an ID card in the month of January, and no credentials would be issued until February. After nearly three weeks and hours wasted trying to navigate the bureaucratic maze, we weren't going to be allowed to use the pool in the first place!

I suppose any time you deal with a government entity there is some level of box-ticking and procedural confusion. It's no worse than dealing with the RTA, only here the computer systems are more antiquated and many offices are still stocked with typewriters. I can only imagine how things work in Cuba!