Hmmmm...timeshare? Well I guess I can venture into it and try my skills out...might be actually good with it...you never know. My initial plan is to stay for 6 months to get a taste of Cancun...if everything works out well Im open to stay some more time there... Dear Steve, I wasnt referring to whoring myself out...was just saying that I know how the hospitality business is...where good skills are very essential but it wont hurt if you are nice looking either.
So you are trying to say that it is impossible to find a catering job with which you can support yourself? Were/are you working in that industry while in Cancun?
I think Steve was referring to the fact that being a young, attractive girl will give you an edge when looking for certain jobs. Lots of nightclubs here have dancers (not strippers, more like go-go dancers) and such, plus a bartending/waiting/entertainment staff job might be easier to land if you're better looking.
Hi Viktoria, There are quite a few jobs you could do as others have stated tequila shot girl, club promoter, dancer, timeshare, there's a few call centers selling mini vacs where you usually only work a few hours a day etc. If you have restaurant experience then there's a couple of places in the Hotel Zone that might hire you if you have a bit of Spanish as well. With regards to accommodation, there are lots of rooms to rent if you don't mind sharing your apartment with someone else - this way you don't have to bother with landlords or contracts. You can rent a nice room with bills included for 2 or 3 thousand a month (about 150 quid). So if you save just 900 pounds all your accommodation for 6 months will be taken care of!!! :icon_smile: If you save 2000 or 3000 pounds more then you'll have more than enough to get started and give you some time to find some work. Save 1000 pounds more for emergency/flight home and you're more than covered!! Get extended stay travel insurance in the UK before you leave - it's pretty cheap and well worth it because the hospitals here are expensive (hopefully you won't need it but it's a great investment!) It's really easy and cheap to get around on the buses here and the main part of the city is safe. Good Luck!!! Bring lots of pounds - they go far here!:icon_smile:
Hello guys! So my understanding is from your comments...it would be better to go to Cancun in Nov or Jan while high season is still in effect and I would have better chances in looking for selling timeshare or other types of jobs instead of the hospitality industry. I would still like to ask that what would be the best way of looking for a room in Cancun? Is it better to contact local agencies or is there any newspaper that advertises rooms to rent? Also, which area of Cancun is cheap or more affordable but still relatively safe? And how much would approx. a single, relatively clean and well-kept room cost monthly? Here in London I pay 500/month for a decent room close to the City...I imagine it would be somewhat cheaper in Cancun
By now it's more like the Call Centers/TimeShare ("Vacation Packages") sales jobs will warn you that if you don't already have your papers you will be working illegally and they do Immigration "sweep" this area more regularly than the rest of Mexico because of the high presence of English-speaking tourists working here and you WILL get deported. Since I"m OK with a free trip home I told them that. I came here to teach English, assured that the "papers" would be "taken care of" and when I'd been here (in Tijuana) less than a week I got purse-snatched in the street on a busy Saturday afternoon in broad daylight. The police caught the guys and retrieved all of our purses (they had 3 other womens' purses on them when they got caught) but confiscated mine, phone, passports (IRELAND lest anyone assume that because I'm typing this in English not French I must be "American"; people do that crap online too not just when I start talking.) as "evidence" to prosecute, and little did I know that meant "forever." Anyway it's been dodgy trying to get them replaced because I've been couchsurfing and thus moving around one hell of a lot. You tell people you need 3-8 weeks in one place so your replacement passport can be sent, for some reason everyone has a problem with it. And I've had to move around at intervals of anywhere from 3 days to 3 weeks. That's not long enough for an Irish one. The Irish one finally showed up after 4 weeks in-transit but it's at a house I'm no longer staying at and the "host" there wants me to pay for forwarding somehow and I'm not even sure the mail service in these Third World Countries has any way to DO that. That sort of thing requires having online accounts and credit or debit cards and in these third world countries their payment systems aren't that advanced especially when your plastic money is from other countries....that sort of thing. So I'll probably have to try again and call it "lost in the mail." So for now I work cash-in-hand for the TimeShare industry attending sales presentations, pretending I'm a one-day tourist instead of stranded here and needing the money. Oh yeah, some of my financial accounts have frozen me out just because I was using the account from Mexico and they're taking forever to verify my legal residence and all that rubbish. I started out with a "guy" I met at the entrance to Wal-Mart (the "tour desk") - I must have though he was the Wal-Mart Greeter and asked him which aisle they hid the Pepper Spray in (because I'm so familiar with Wal-Marts worldwide I usually can go right TO what I want...but they don't have a "camping" section at this one) and we got to talking because he was the only one asking me "can I help you find anything" in ENGLISH even though this is CANCUN! And he offered me this "job" paid cash daily for attending promotions. Since then I've fired that particular guy (he introduced me to other people who did the same thing only BETTER) and gotten a better one who gets me more of those and yes, even though I have a law degree (I went to law school because of medical malpractise against my family) it's GRUELING at best. Coming up with ways of saying NO and getting out of there with just the cash and prizes, I mean. And doing those at least 5 times a week to try to have money to survive here and wait for my accounts to get un-frozen or maybe save up to pay for yet another go at the Irish passport replacement using cash instead of doing it online - but they tell me cash-at-the-Embassy will make it take up to 8 weeks sending paper application to Dublin that way...oh I learned to be a "shark" in law school too but only because I wanted to defend my own family and I was PISSED OFF as hell at the medical profession (still am). The only law I've ever seen myself trying to practise may be Environmental Law or water law or maybe patent law or domestic violence defence (again a topic that "hits too close to home" for me) or international human rights law which no longer exists. None of that would keep me in Mexico or any non-English or French speaking country though. My potential immediate "exit strategy" is by land to Belize and if I can't afford the airfare get myself deported from there. There's a UN-based organisation that makes those arrangements without prison time.
Yes you will find Cancun much cheaper than London as long as your money remains in POUNDS somehow and you remain able to access it from Mexico. I cannot stress this enough. I've been here in Mexico in several parts of this lousy country and only when I started using the account in Cancun did they freeze me out. I posted this on a Facebook group "Irish in Mexico" and someone said maybe a "skimmed" ATM machine triggered it, or something like that. Because if they're going to freeze you out just for accessing your money in Mexico they should do it right away, right?! Right now the exchange rate is at approximately 26 pesos to the Pound but the only way to work that to your advantage is to be able to live as much like the "locals" as possible without, say for instance, going without running water or food or electricity or the internet! That being said, there are newspapers and online-newspapers like Segunamando and Vivanuncios... I just put an ad on Vivanuncios for private tuition English lessons and got one response via WhatsApp. I have to offer my services for a mere 200pesos per hour because I know that the people who need that service can't afford the going rate for someone with a Master's degree from a trilingual country (Belgium) and a law degree!! I happen to have found myself stuck here during "low" season when the weather sucks but at least accommodation is cheap. For the equivalent of £26 a week I'm in a hostel with "only" 5 other girls in the room, the air-conditioner seems to work (I think the front desk shuts it off at their end during the day) running water within a day after you tell them it's not working; breakfast included; drawers and a closet and even drawers in the bathroom, (right now after all that Couchsurfing, "sharing a closet with 5 other girls" is my idea of "movin' on UP" because what I'm saying is "at least there IS a closet!) and at least the wi-fi works in the room so I don't have to lug my computer outside to the Mall to the nearest Starbucks all day every day - I also do book translations some times, when I can get work, by not telling anyone I'm in Mexico because that would kill all interest! - I started out here in Cancun by doing a work-exchange (that you find on things like WorldPackers and HelpX and WorkAway and the like) at the first thing that would take me and got myself here on the bus because no airport would let me on a plane with just a photocopy of my Irish passport. That being said, for a more normal person in a more normal situation - one reason I came out to Cancun/Playa del Carmen was not just the HelpX but more English-speaking-but-not-American people to get together with, hopefully? - you could do better for maybe in the £200 a month category. More reasonable rates will be offered to those who speak Mexican Spanish fluently (and I don't mean you learned it in school so it's Castillian) if you speak English here that's OK but if they can even tell you're English (or Irish) the prices go up drastically. Think "Walking ATM machine." I've recently used that exact phrase against a couple of people - not the least of whom would be my first TimeShare "agent" when I was sacking him. Of course those prices are for the fact that I'm divorced and traveling alone. Party of One. (And yes, I know that's why I got robbed. And why I feel generally unsafe in Latin America and want to go back to London where at least "our" robbers are more Couth. When my things got ransacked in Walthamstow at least I wasn't carrying them at the time. And dragged halfway up the street by the strap because the asshole wouldn't let go.)
I've noticed. Even in the TimeShare hotels it's getting increasingly Spanish. I've said people mistake me for a Yank when I start talking but they've apparently initially mistaken me for Mexican or some other Latin American because they initially address me in Spanish everywhere I go even though this is CANCUN. "More English than Miami" Cancun. That's why I said earlier my exit strategy involves Belize. At least I should stop getting addressed in bloody Spanish there. That's a former English colony. It's gotten to where if I get addressed in Spanish I say something back in English or French. Because if they do speak English after all, and they've started with me in Spanish, that's racism. In the States, even though I'm Irish and French, I would get a lot of (more and more lately) "do you speak English" sort of crap and that's racist.
Oh sure the Pound goes far here. Be sure that your financial institution has some way of being notified that you will be accessing your account from Mexico, for some reason Cancun specifically triggers "fraud alerts," so they don't freeze you out when you get here, forcing you to have to try to earn Pesos to survive until they get that sorted! Yes, sharing instead of trying to rent in your own name, like some kind of hostel or something with rooms for rent, is the only way to get out of having to have things in your own name like the bills. But with that it will be much, much harder to get established here if you wanted to stay longer or work legally or anything like that. FYI, I did have £4,500 saved. It got wiped out when the joint-account-holder closed out my bank account and took all the money. Excuse given: I was USING it. After all these years. I'd had that account since 1984!!! Suddenly sees that kind of balance in it (from saving up from my last Maths TEACHING job) and doesn't want me to have the account anymore AT. ALL...Asshole!!! Now I'm down to about £700 in a FROZEN account. And 2,000 pesos hidden in my computer-repair kit and earning 1000 pesos per day doing the TimeShare gigs. Oh I know all about everything being expensive in Mexico if you're not Mexican. They charge your eyeballs out the minute they hear the English language. Fortunately for us Irish (or is it? Actually it's quite INSULTING) they assume "Yank" instead of "Brit" because if they figured we were British they'd know the Pound is worth WAY more than the US dollar. Still it's getting bloody insulting being taken for a Yank every time I talk (plus since I'm not white it's racism - Irish and French Polynesian then they call me "Black" Irish or African American!! Screw this continent, I've been getting way too much of that for the last 25 years or so...make that more like 30...) show the photocopy of the Irish passport to get that to shut the bloody hell up and then get asked for an American one!!! Wow let me just say that this continent is far too racist and stupid to be taught English so I no longer want to do it!!
Very interesting post. You sure have a story. Lemme ask how it is you have a "job" attending timeshare presentations? You pose as a timeshare buyer and somebody pays you? How do you fire a guy who offerred you a job? I want to understand all of this
