Being kind and polite in Mexico is key, I believe that sometimes we even exaggerate, for us it is never enough though.
It is well known that we are good hosts, but, why? Well, the reason behind can be as deep or as banal as we want. The deep reason might be related to the Aztec society where being generous was synonym of wellness and hierarchy, that´s why Mexicans always offer the best to their guests. Of course, this is just a hypothesis made by the SOMA staff during the writing of this blog. The banal reason behind might be that we like Fiesta, we know this sounds like a cliché, but we can tell you that we like fiesta indeed; therefore we always try to keep our guests as happy as possible for them to be in the Fiesta as much as they can,
Normally in Mexico we rate a party when we ask to the attendees when the party ended, a boring party normally finishes at 12am, the good ones finishes the next day after breakfast (no kidding).
When we say that we like being a good host, we mean it, we want you to feel at home.
We even have a saying “mi casa es tu casa”. The literal translation of this is “my house is yours”, in other countries this expression might mislead somebody to kick us out of our own home with a couple of lawers, in Mexico means that you are always welcome and you can do the same you do in your own home.
Other examples of Mexican kindness are “Provecho” and “Salud”. We can´t stop wishing people to be healthy and enjoy their meal, even strangers that are sitting next to us in the restaurant or the subway. In Mexico we always say ¨buen provecho¨ or ¨provechito¨ to everybody that is eating around us, why? I have no idea, but we feel rude if we do not do it, even if the person eating is a stranger. The same happens when we hear somebody sneezing, we always say ¨salud¨(bless you)…. Always!
These two behaviors are quite common in other countries, but I have not seen the same devotion anywhere else.
Mexicans prefer to take extra steps when talking (or writing) to avoid any rudeness in the message, we also like using diminutives. We feel diminutives sound nicer than the actual word, mostly when we ask for something. For example, instead of saying “Please send the email today”, we would say ¨could you please be so kind to send the little email (correito, diminutive form) by today please?¨
We could write examples forever, but I guess you got the point, if not, call us and you will see ?