Mexico City can be said to be, among the many adjectives one might ascribe to it, a "city of light". As the plane begins its descent--some fifteen minutes before touchdown--one flies over, as the song writer Guadalupe Trigo put it, "a mantel of light and color". It seems to go on forever, this mantel of light. I looked out the window and said, "It looks beautiful", to which a fellow passenger and local citizen replied, "Yeah, from up here."
The young man sitting next to me had a point: like all large cities, Mexico City is best kept "at a distance", both physically and metaphorically.Since it has the best and the worst humanity has to offer, it is best one doesn't get too close.
I arrived on the 4th of December of last year and the city was in a festive mood. People were getting ready for a couple of weeks of festivities that included Christmas, New Year's Day, and the "Fiesta de Reyes" held on the 6th of January which celebrates the arrival of the Three Kings, or Wise Men, or Magic Kings, however you want to call the legendary Kings who came, according to Christian mythology, to offer gifts to baby Jesus.
Mexicans being ever resourceful, everywhere you went in the city, vendors had set up a stand to sell ornaments, Christmas lights, natural and artificial Christmas trees, and so on. Novelties were everywhere: one could put giant antlers and a red nose on one's car for 200 pesos, there was a jumping-jack Santa that popped out of a chimney, and a guy offered to print a newspaper for you with headlines that announced that Santa Claus and the Three Wise Men were coming to your house to deliver gifts and goodies.
I kept my distance from the hustle and bustle of the city by watching all of this from the comfort and safety of my friend's car. As I have mentioned before, we are lucky to have friends in Mexico City that not only live in a quiet, very civilized part of the city, but they also know their way around it so when we go anywhere in their car, I can just sit back and enjoy it all.
Keeping your distance does not mean locking yourself away from anything and everything that goes on in a city. As I've said, there is a lot to enjoy if you know how to go about it. For instance, the best and fastest way to get around is the Metro. But you should avoid rush hours because if you are squeamish about being midst a maelstrom of 6 million people rushing off to work or school early in the morning, you should not get on the Metro from 7 to 9 AM. If you have ever heard the expression, "The crowd poured out of the...", well a pouring of crowds is what happens at peak hours in the Mexico City Metro system. In fact, it can get so hectic that at certain times of the day, certain cars and passageways are designated as "Women and Children Only".
But, if you use the Metro between, say, 10:00 AM and Noon, or between 3:00 PM and 6:00 PM, you will find it a clean, efficient, and FAST system. A string of metro cars comes by our stop every minute or so, with even shorter times between trains at peak hours.
Unfortunately, I had only a few days to enjoy the good company and hospitality of my friends as well as the festive spirit of the city because, to coin a phrase and mix my metaphors, I had a "bigger fish to fry", and said fish was my pension.
I had recently turned "turned the corner", age-wise, and was now walking down that golden road called Avenue Sixty-Five Years Old, and heading for that pie-in-the-sky address we call our Pension Fund.
THAT is why I had come one month ahead of our scheduled January to May stay in Dolores Hidalgo. I wanted to get the paperwork started and maybe even finished.
In Mexico, there are two government-run pension schemes for all Mexicans. One is call the 77 scheme because it was put in place in 1977 and it states that you only have to work and pay your Social Security contribution 500 weeks to be eligible for a pension. Of course, the amount of pension money you get depends on the level of contributions you paid. The more you put in the kitty the more you get in your pension check.
When the government found out that it would quickly run out of pension money if people only contributed during 500 weeks, they upped their hedge and now younger generations have to contribute during 1295 weeks, almost three times the amount of us older folk. PLUS, they asked employees to put aside a bit of money from their pay that would be invested by banks in a scheme called AFORE (Administradora de Fondos para el Retiro, Manager of Retirement Funds) and for employers to contribute as well by matching the employees amount in said Funds.
This complicated form of providing retirement funds to pay for workers' pensions is complicated enough. But, it is no match for the incredible boondoggle that one has to navigate in order to get one's pension approved.
The paperwork, the running around between banks, clinics, government offices, Social Security delegations, state run offices where official papers such as birth certificates are issued, and so on, is as the French say, le parcours du combattant, an obstacle course!
If it were not tragic it would be comical as you two readers of this blog will see when I describe my adventures in Pension Land in my next couple of blogs. It is tragic in the sense that one sees a poor man who has worked all of his life, and who lives is some far away collective farm having to come all the way to the big city to confront the uncaring, cynical, incredible incompetent government workers who run the Social Security System. AND it is funny because, as you will read, I took the thing by its bureaucratic horns and defeated it.
