I feel safer this past year (?) than I have… maybe ever. Or as long as I can remember.
I also don’t remember if it’s been this way all year.
Safer from what I don’t know. I can think of all kinds of things from which I might feel safer, but I don’t know which one(s) matter most, or at all. Maybe I just feel safer from mid-Atlantic February and March weather. Or safer from home remodeling tasks. Or safer from the future uncertainties of what life in Mexico would be like… since most of those uncertainties have been resolved.
Safer from the ambient mental health situation in the USA.
Safer from crime. I don’t know if I am safer from crime, but it feels that way. I might only feel this way because I’ve been mugged multiple times in the USA and haven’t been mugged here. There is an ambient sense of civility here, and ambient sense of shame. I feel like people here would be deeply ashamed to commit a crime against another person, but that may be a projection… must be partly a projection.
The pedestrian safety situation is dramatically better here than in U.S. cities. Traffic in residential areas is lighter and people drive much less aggressively. In U.S. cities there are always some random people who drive extremely aggressively. And also in many Latin American cities. But not in this town. People drive much more slowly in residential areas particularly, and I think this is partly a courtesy due to the dust kicked up by cars, especially on unpaved roads. If you drive fast on one of the unpaved roads, you are leaving every house you pass in a cloud of dust. So people don’t do it.
Also, importantly, the roads have many large potholes, especially on residential streets, so driving fast is often not an option. There are also speed bumps in some of the residential streets, and even some improvised speed bumps in a few places, in the form of very thick ropes strung across the road. Traffic tends to concentrate on the main arteries… there is no such thing as cutting through a neighborhood, as that would be too slow.
It’s possible I feel safer here because it’s sunny. That could be 90% of it. Or 20%.
It might be because I now have two countries where I’m legally allowed to live, instead of one.
A lot of it is probably the sun, not being dependent on a single country, and not being immersed in… America’s ambient mental health situation… the ambient aggression and sense of grievance, maybe.
The pharmacy situation here is dramatically better. My experiences with my pharmacy in the U.S. were utterly punishing, by comparison. I may have had a particularly bad pharmacy. There were certain ways the U.S. had of intermittently punishing me for being alive, and one of them was my pharmacy. One of them was my grocery store. One of them was extremely aggressive drivers. One of them was car ownership itself, and everything involved in that. One of them was fireworks, which were completely out of hand in DC, on holidays and often for a day or two before holidays. One of them was emergency vehicles and their sirens. One of them was people on electric scooters.
Here, not much punishes me. The dogs punish you a bit if you walk too close to their fence. The dogs train you to walk in the street, which is fine, as the sidewalks are usually in worse shape than the streets. The sidewalks are mostly not for walking on… they’re mostly just a transition for someone entering their home from the street. The diesel fumes here train you to not walk near the major arteries too often.