Mexico...character and culture.

  So when I was traveling last week, I popped across the Mexican border with Merida to Naco, Sonora to grab breakfast and spend some time relaxing in a park. On the way back to the US, I stopped into a little family-run store to buy some Mezcal to take home. The woman running the store has to call her husband on the phone to get the price because none of the bottles were marked, and the price she recited to me seemed expensive, kind of like I was buying it back in the US, but I still thought it a bargain so I paid it.

I left and headed for the border crossing three blocks away. Just as I got there the owner’s son ran up and asked me to please go back to the store as there was “a problem”. He didn’t know what it was. I checked my wallet and saw that she gave me the correct change. What was this, some new sort of scam? Why did they want me back in their store? I was literally fifteen feet from the border walkway and the turnstile that I could go through but he could not. What should I do? Tell the kid no and just cross? Go back and see what the angle was?

I thought about it for a second. I really didn’t have a bad feeling in that store and didn't get the idea that the senora was trying to pull anything so I went back to see what the problem was. As it turned out. she’d mistakenly charged me double on the bottle that I bought and she wanted to apologize and return the overage.

She could have kept it and I’d never have known.

I was so impressed that I bought a second bottle in lieu of a refund.

There are scams aplenty in Mexico like everywhere else but time and again I get reminders like this that the average Mexican is damned honest. That's why I'm really getting to be fond of these people and their country.