Or was it "Next Ten"?!

Sometimes I ask myself why Mexico is considered one of the Next Eleven countries, that is, having a high potential of becoming one of the world's largest economies in the 21st century.

A lot of corruption and permanent strikes... Not the best prerequisites for a rising nation... Right now 1.2 million teachers stay out, resulting in 26 million "school-less" students. Yesterday morning a mother commented in the news that she could be lucky if her son was able to attend school again with the beginning of next year. What?!

How can a country escape the middle income trap without a highly educated society?

And believe me, Mexican bureaucrazcy sucks - oh, boy, does it suck.

When J.'s wallet was stolen during one of her first days here, we went to the police in order to report it. Well, at least we tried to.

At first there's no webpage which would inform about the proper address. Nor do the Mexicans know where to go. Probably this should already have shown us that you just don't go to the police here...

At first we went to a kind of town hall (whose address wasn't available, either, but at least the dorm employees gave us a description for the taxi driver). They said, in principle they would process the report, but actually the theft happened in another quarter of the "city" (note: Cholula has 120,000 inhabitants and the theft happened not even 5km away from the town hall), so we had to take another taxi.

It drove us directly into the corn fields and we were already a bit worried if this was really a safe taxi... But then suddenly a huge complex of buildings appeared in the middle of nowhere. Highly secured and tidied up to the nines. Yes, there is money in Mexico... if now there was also some proper distribution...

Anyway, we walked into an office and after explaining our request he asked us for two copies of her passport. Erm, yeah, here you have her passport. Please make the copies.

Nope.

Hmm, well then - were's the copying machine? We'll do it.

No copier.

What? This building probably houses several hundreds if not thousands of office sitters. How can't there be a copying machine?

Well, nope.

Ok, where's the next one?

Far away.

Of course it was far away as we were in the middle of corn fields.

So with the taxi back to the dorm. Never returned to this place. In the end the taxi rides had cost us more than the theft itself. And the only result was the realization that here you don't want to have anything to do with the police.

So, Mexico one of the Next Eleven countries? Still not sure...