I love public transport and Mexico City has lots of it. You’ve got the Paris-inspired Metro, the Metrobus which is a bit like a tram route supplied by London’s old bendy buses, ‘trolley buses’ whose drivers love a power ballad, and then a vast network of smaller bus routes which can theoretically take you anywhere if you can get your head round them. Here’s what I’ve learned about public transport in Mexico City:

1. It’s way better than it used to be At all times of day whatever you get on is some degree of full unless you live on the start of a line, and at peak times it’s a sweaty scrum. But massive investment has hugely improved the city’s transport- in the last couple of decades they’ve introduced the Metrobus, and keep expanding it, added several new Metro lines, and encouraged less car usage. Extracts from the Mexico City Reader (published 2004) paint a much grimmer picture of total car reliance for all who can afford it and mothers struggling to even get on a Metro to take their kids to school.

2. It’s really cheap A Metro journey costs 5 pesos, which is about 20p in British money, and other modes of transport are roughly the same. There’s an exhibition celebrating 50 years of the Metro now on in Bellas Artes which compares its prices to those in other major cities, and its pretty much the cheapest of the big ones. London is the dearest in the world, roughly 20 times more expensive!

3. Passengers are sometimes incidental When you’re on the tube in London at rush hour and the TFL staff member on the platform warns you the train is ready to leave right now, you know that realistically it probably isn’t. Here, when that warning sound goes, you know you’ve got about 2 seconds. I’ve ruthlessly bundled elderly men onto the Metrobus to give myself a fighting chance. Also the doors are brutal, I saw a man get thrown halfway across the carriage after leaning on an opening door.

4. Women-only sections are a fixture There was a lot of fuss when Labour proposed women-only train carriages a couple of years ago – well these are part of the furniture here. The front half of the Metrobus is all pink seats as are the last third of all Metro trains. They are for children and the elderly too. Seems a bit sad, but when government posters tell you 9 in 10 women have been victims of sexual assault on public transport, also pretty necessary.

5. You won’t go hungry In keeping with the city’s culture of constant food availability (I’m often reminded of the hotdog vendor who follows Homer Simpson to a funeral) some of the major Metro junctions do a range of refreshments to rival the spread at a nostalgia stadium rock tour. At Deportivo 18 de Marzo there is a McDonald’s dedicated dessert outlet next to a pizza place. You never have to see the sun.

6. I’m terrified of taxis and the buses still have me beaten The bright idea of getting a bus to see the Dia de Muertos displays in the Panteon Dolores . We waited for the bus at Tacubaya, 12 others came and went, I got some gummi bears, some more buses left, we gave up and ordered an Uber. Then the Uber got stuck in traffic and didn’t move while we sweated at the pickup point, so we gave up and went home.
(The city taxis look official but don’t have seatbelts and the drivers drive like maniacs, so Uber is often a necessity. In Mexico you can pay for Ubers in cash which causes more disputes, so Uber is soon to trial audio recordings of all journeys here and in Brazil).

An earlier post discussed how Mexico’s rules and regulations have a sometimes overwhelming impact on everyday life. A corporate middle manager, I’ll call him Juan, gave me an interesting new perspective on this. In essence, Juan accepted that Mexico does have a strong culture of bureaucracy but insists that here, ‘rules are made to be broken’.

For example the taco stand. There is one of these on every street corner of the city and officially they all have to pay tax, but the reality is none do. The government knows this and turns a blind eye. (According to Juan, they do however all pay a ‘representative’ a certain sum to look after them, I didn’t get much further in working out what that entailed, it sounded protection-rackety). The official line is either ignored or got round somehow. Similarly if you have the right friend in the government, your luck is in and like the street vendor you too do not have to pay tax.

The Hofstede index, a model for explaining corporate behaviours in different countries, explains bureaucratic practices through the lens of ‘Uncertainty Avoidance’; it contends that countries like Mexico have an ’emotional need’ for rules and deal badly with ambiguity. While on one level a useful initial analysis of how things work here, I wonder if it only gives part of the picture. There may be a real ’emotional need’ for rules that is perhaps based on direct experience of how scary genuine lawlessness could be – but at the same time, Mexicans clearly have a sophisticated understanding of what should be observed, what can be ignored, and when you need to call in a favour. Pay lip service to the regs and then get on with living in messy reality.

The reverse might be true of the British. Hofstede also scores highly on flexibility, our ability to deal with ambiguity on the path to a goal (also known as muddling through) without needing too much of a blueprint. We have rules but they don’t tie us down – just a sense of ‘fair play’. While this superficially makes us more mature, perhaps its actually because deep-down we British believe we’re protected by an underlying natural order. When ‘fair play’ is transgressed we react emotionally – where other cultures just shrug, we stamp our feet and threaten to complain to the authorities. We like to think we don’t need rules but subconsciously believe/ know that those rules do exist, and that they will ultimately look after us.

Reductive perhaps, but it certainly matches the psychological profiles of Prince Andrew and Boris Johnson, much as I’d hate to tar the whole of Britain with that brush.

As a Londonhead, to me street food means £12 for a spicy wrap from a chain in Shoreditch but a few weeks in Mexico City has opened my mind. And it’s not just street food that’s different here- food eaten in restaurants, at home, or on the bus, it’s all not quite the same. Based on regular eating, and speaking to people who eat, here’s my lowdown on Mexican cuisine:

BREAKFAST I asked a student what he had for breakfast, he said “Not much- eggs, sausages, chilaquiles, maybe some pastries.” I’m very fond of chilaquiles, which are crunchy tortillas smothered in salsa and covered in eggs, chicken or another protein. Also very important is the daily probiotic. After some concerted involuntary stomach irrigation in the early days, I now take Yakult religiously. Can be replaced with an Activia yoghurt.

LUNCH This is generally the big meal of the day. I was particularly excited by the Comida Corrida, three courses plus dessert and juice, for as little as 70 pesos (about £2.50). The reality is a bit more complex- the first course is soup, pretty much uniformly delicious, especially Sopa Azteca, semi-spicy with soaked tortillas. Course two is the real head-scratcher – either rice or pasta, plain. As I as I live I’ll never get used to plain spaghetti but Mexicans love it. Course three can be all sorts, from enchiladas and beans to meat in sauce. It’s often very nice but the last one I had was a chicken leg soaked in a luminous green sauce, I was coming down with unrelated stomach flu at the time but still, some scars take time to heal.

DINNER Street food stalls operate at all hours. A couple of days a week I have to leave the house before 6 and people are setting up and frying, by the time I’m halfway to work changing Metro at Tacubaya it’s in full swing. So you can eat tacos, quesadillas, gorditas, tamales and so on (corn-based dough products with a variety of fillings), at all times of day. Although they are basically single-vendor stalls, people still tend to eat at them sitting down/ hovering around and then pay at the end. It’s quite a good system to stuff your face during the day on the above, then go to get a taco on the way home from work for a light final meal.

OTHER Pozole is a spicy soup with meat in, which is great. Bread and pastries are variable but when they’re good they’re great. At the supermarket bakery you fill up a silver tray with tongs before your rolls get priced up, which is cool. Cereals and chocolate seem to be quite strongly American influenced, respectively very sugary and more Kraft than Cadbury. Fresh stuff is largely delicious especially avocados and tomatos. Salsa Ingles – ie Lea and Perrins – is widely available.

Finally, lots of things we consider Mexican are in fact Tex-Mex (American) and therefore scorned and reviled here, which in the case of burritos shocked me. We’ve secretly been making our own burritos at home but we buy the ingredients in separate shops to avoid suspicion.

Latin America is well-known as a bureaucratic hotbed and after a few weeks in Mexico City I’ve encountered several examples of this to rival stories from friends elsewhere, including the Kafkaesque nightmare of enrolling in an Italian university and being asked for ID to buy groceries from a Buenos Aires supermarket. My best/ worst Mexican ones so far are:

– To go swimming at a health club I needed to show a medical certificate to prove I don’t have mycosis (foot fungus). To get one I went to a doctor based in a pharmacy, who took my height and weight, asked various questions about my medical history… but didn’t once ask to actually look at my foot. This is enough for the lifeguard to whom I have to show the document every time I enter the pool.
– My employer asks for proof of residence – but assures me it doesn’t need to be proof of my residence, anyone else’s utility bill will do. To actually rent a flat you need somebody who is living in the city to vouch for you, though they have to be currently paying off a mortgage…we’re sticking to Airbnb
– To get on the Metrobus (bit like a bendy bus with its own dedicated lane) you need an Oyster card equivalent, procured from a self-service machine. However for an unknown reason these only dispense one card every 5 minutes- so you have to hover over the machine hoping everyone is just charging their existing card and not buying. People in a rush frequently pay strangers to let them through.

These are of course fairly minor irritations but bureaucracy does have a material effect on Mexican people’s lives. To the extent that in 2009 President Felipe Calderon held a competition to find the government’s most useless process – it received over 20,000 entries! The winning entry was a woman who had to repeatedly queue for stamps to get access to healthcare for her 7-year old son.

Research into this problem from CIDE has anatomised excessive bureaucracy in Mexico, finding that opaque processes, unreasonable officials, failing technology unsurprisingly all cause people a great deal of stress and frustration and often significant time and earnings. Petty corruption is an inevitable result of this kind of culture, whether cause or consequence. Another solution people resort to is to use a ‘coyote’, a backdoor fixer.

This kind of culture is characterised as a ‘low-trust bureaucracy’- the government doesn’t trust its citizens to be honest and follow the rules, who in turn don’t trust the government to provide them with effective public services. It is argued that this is a legacy of Mexico’s authoritarian past, in which such public provision was not a universal democratic right but subject to cronyism and centralism. The state and its functionaries could express their power and prestige. Overbearing red tape can also be a tool for rationing scarce resources (sadly a trick also used in Britain to cut welfare costs).

I found this research fascinating though it didn’t offer any easy answers. Sadly, for various sometimes tragic reasons to be discussed in future blogs, trust in the Mexican authorities is not likely to recover any time soon. On the plus side it has made me slightly less resentful towards HMRC.

My name is Sam Martin from London and I’m spending a year in Mexico, starting in Mexico City. I hope that even if in your whole life Mexico hasn’t once occupied the smallest corner of your thoughts there will be something that interests you here.