Most people don’t move into a house they’ve never seen. If not a tour, then at least some photos, but I had neither. It was my second time trusting a stranger on the internet.
“You’ll share a house with six other teachers.” The academy’s director informed me over a blurry Zoom call.
I had my reservations but trusted her kind smile, and after several Google searches, stalking the academy’s Facebook page, and zooming in on Google Maps in search of any sign of life, it looked as legitimate as possible. After a day’s worth of travel, two flight connections, four sickness tablets, and eight bites of food, I arrived in Merida, Mexico, my home for the next eleven months. I had also acquired a stranger by my side — my new colleague, who happened to be on my final flight. He was wide-eyed, spoke a mile a minute, and kept tugging at his compression socks. He looked like the stereotypical traveller, with his tan skin and tangled, dip-dyed blonde hair.
It wasn’t long before the academy’s CEO pulled up outside the airport, and we were scrambling into his car in search of aircon. The CEO wore a pained expression, making it increasingly obvious that he hadn’t signed up to play Uber driver for the new teachers. The ride wasn’t long, filled with polite conversation and small landmark utterances—until my coworker chimed from the back, “I wonder what the initiation will be like.”
Alarm bells, no, cymbals clashed in my mind, and I could feel my sickness tablets wearing off. An initiation? My mind flickered through a torturous carousel of drinking unknown fluids, being handcuffed to a stranger, and crawling around on my hands and knees. I hadn’t thought about this as an option and wondered if I’d been too naive. I was entering a house full of six twenty-something TEFL teachers — a job that, for most, is code for less teaching, more travel, and getting absolutely shitfaced along the way.
I hadn’t fully registered the house as we pulled into the end of the street, just a single tick of thought: It’s real, and it seems nice enough. The CEO led us to the front door, and I waited, gulping down my nerves, wondering which tall, overly friendly stranger with a permanent pint in hand I would meet first. To my surprise and relief, the door opened and behind it was a much smaller, sleepy girl with a reserved smile. I followed her through the front door while my other colleague was escorted upstairs by another teacher I hadn’t yet been introduced to.
“It’s a house, but we treat it like two flats.” The sleepy girl told me.
The house was split in two: two entrances, one for the upstairs and one for the downstairs, like siblings who refused to share a front door. The logic was that, if possible, the girls lived downstairs, while the boys stayed upstairs. The exterior was made of concrete, decorative wooden panels and white paint that gave it a modern feel, and reflected the gentrified look of the neighbourhood. The dimmed lights did the lacklustre paint job a favour, and the closed doors made the house seem larger than it really was. When you walk into the house, you are immediately amongst the chaos. Pristine is not the first word that comes to mind when describing the teachers’ house.
Inside, the floors were tiled, and the insect nets on the windows were so flimsy you could hear everything going on outside, from the other teachers’ conversations on the terrace to the workers in the papelería next door. The interior contained only the basics: a leather couch, stained and doused in alcohol, which no one ever sat on; A glass coffee table that came apart at the slightest touch, positioned so awkwardly that once a month it would claim a new victim and paint them black and blue, a woven wooden chair; and a dining table that had seen better days, surrounded by mismatched plastic chairs. The space opened up into a kitchen with a fridge, next to it a small table that was used more for sitting than for preparing food, then shelves, and an oven that you had to light manually. Beneath the sink, a set of pots and pans and a tub full of spices long past their expiry dates, and you didn’t want to think about how many mouths had touched the cutlery.
My bedroom was the smallest of the three but fairly spacious. It had a single bed that felt like a hardwood floor, a desk and chair, and a built-in wardrobe. I never did much to the room; I didn’t hang photos or blue-tac quotes on the walls. Only my single suitcase of clothes filled the wardrobe, and I bought my bed sheets at the local Target. My room was connected to the bathroom, which I shared with my other roommate. We learned to knock on doors to signal bathroom runs and to listen for the telltale rush of the toilet before attempting our turn. The other teachers who lived upstairs had a fairly similar layout. You climbed the outdoor stairs and entered a space with a round table and a sofa, then walked down a hallway to the terrace, the shared bathroom, a kitchen, and four bedrooms.
One of those bedrooms belonged to a girl whose room was built when she arrived. There had been a second house, but it was infested with rats and cockroaches, so they decided to construct her room on the terrace. She loved it, though the door often got stuck or slammed open with the wind, and security wasn’t exactly the best. She shared a bathroom with the three other boys, and I found myself counting my blessings that I was allocated downstairs. I didn’t go upstairs much unless I wanted to share a drink on the terrace or find the tennis rackets, and the others only came down to use the washing machine and to collect their bikes from the entryway, which gave new visitors the impression they were entering a garage rather than a home.
It was during my first night when I realised I wasn’t alone in my room. I was constantly accompanied by the water tank, which, like clockwork, would flick on and off, especially when I was trying to fall asleep. And if it wasn’t the trickling of water, it was the next-door neighbour, a vicious early bird who shouted every morning at 6 a.m., as well as the cats who sounded as if they were auditioning for WWE. Add to that my roommates opening the washing machine at 7 a.m., and it was clear—I had the worst room in the house.
The CEO paid for our accommodation, so quirks were constant and fixed slowly, or never. One such quirk was the boiler, which only heated one of the three showers. This meant that showers became a morning-to-noon ritual: the scorching sun coaxed life into the pipes just enough for a brief seven-minute scrub. Evening showers were a luxury we couldn’t afford; the water was a freezing shock, and even the toughest of participants let out a shriek.
Yet even in its flaws, the house felt alive.
The walls and windows were so thin that the smallest sound travelled: music from upstairs, a door slamming, footsteps echoing through the house. Outside, we had around fourteen cats, all strays, or so I thought, until I caught word of the local legend: The Crazy Cat Lady. I’d heard stories that she believed the teachers were killing her beloved pets, so the cats were half stray and half hers. They were all inbred and unpredictable, lethal if you ever dared to touch them, but we adored them anyway. We gave them names like Bean, Kneesocks, Big Tom, Puma, and Noisy.
I say a legend because I never actually saw her, but she would leave her window open, and the cats would slip through the bars like tiny prisoners, disappearing for weeks before returning with a new kitten under their chest. I’d never been much of a cat person, but I found myself warming to them, even after they tore through our rubbish bin and scattered rotting banana peels and beans down the street. It got so bad that the bin men refused to take our rubbish away, and the neighbours often complained. To be fair, the outside of our house was not camera-friendly, and if we were a restaurant, we’d earn a poor hygiene rating.
The house may not have been beautiful, but it was real. It was the place where I learned to stumble through Spanish with the handyman, to collect coins for the bin men, to haul a 20-litre water container down the street, as well as learning the importance of staying in touch with loved ones back home. Yet, stability was fleeting; the house felt like a revolving door, with no one staying longer than a year or two. I said my first goodbye in February, after six months of living there. Then came her replacement, and I realised why I’d been met with a slightly frosty atmosphere in the beginning. You’re always someone’s replacement.
The bookcase in the entryway acted as a sort of shrine to past teachers. Its small collection of books ranged from fiction to Mexican guides and mastering the Spanish language, and below them lay an array of trinkets. I couldn’t help but think about all those who had passed through this place. Did they look back on it with resentment, bitterness, or intrigue? Their remnants remained: the green dye in the dining area from a previous teacher’s Halloween makeup, the papel picado above the kitchen entryway, the nail polish stains, a small but prominent magnet collection that held up our wifi password, several broken doors, and a black bin bag full of unwanted items. The past and present shook hands. I’d wear a past teacher’s summer shirt I’d never met, use someone’s last teaspoon of curry powder, and shrug on a men’s large England shirt for a disappointing England vs Spain final.
The house was home to seven very colourful characters, and we were all close depending on the week and one another’s mood. We were colleagues, housemates, sometimes friends, sometimes irritants, thrown together not because of compatibility but because of circumstance. There was only one real blow-up I remember. The boys loved a drink, and around 2 a.m., after hopping between bars, they’d always end up on the terrace, just meters away from another teacher’s room. Despite her polite warnings, they kept laughing, singing, and talking for hours. It kept me up, so I could only wonder how she was feeling. By 6 a.m., I found out. Loud rap music blasted through the walls, followed by shouting, furniture falling, and the relentless clang of a pan being hit over and over. This went on for around twenty minutes, and I felt like I was trapped in a sitcom. But honestly, I admired her for it. The boys learned their lesson that morning: respect the house and the people in it.
Even in forced proximity, I learned how to truly connect with people rather than just exist alongside them. I may never see some of my housemates again, but living together in the teachers’ house, we functioned as a dysfunctional family. The teachers’ house was our home, our point of call, and a safe space. My time in the house ended after eleven months. I had originally signed on for another year, until my director blindsided me and told me they had hired too many teachers, which was a rather shoddy excuse, and I was effectively fired. Due to this mix-up, I had already booked a return ticket back to Mexico, and so after three weeks of saying hello to my family and friends in England, I was leaving back to Mexico, not to the house, but to an Airbnb.
I suppose not many people visit the home they no longer live in. After my first time going back to visit two of my old colleagues, I understood why. Despite the house stirring up chaotic fresh memories, ultimately, I felt like an unwanted guest. It felt strange to hear the cats called by new names and to hear stories rather than live them. The furniture had moved, arguably for the better, and the walls had been painted a new layer of white. It was still the same lovely mess, but it felt odd to leave for the convenience store without fishing for my key, to leave a party and instead of getting into a car with the others, I’d watch them go.
“I wear your jeans!” One of the new teachers burst out as she caught sight of me. I couldn’t help but giggle. There was my memory— in a pair of jeans. I didn’t visit much after that.
I wondered how similar the new teachers’ lives would be to mine and the others’. They would meet new friends, potentially fall in love, and there would be new cars to pull up outside. I found myself wondering about the new and the old and what was trapped between. Did the past teachers look at the house with the same eyes and fondness as I did? Did the current ones adore it? Was I stuck in a memory?
I remember the smells most vividly: the sharp tang of vinegar when someone scrubbed the mould from the shower tiles, the occasional whiff of damp from the walls after heavy rain, and the cat piss that no scented candle could compete with. I remember the sounds: the knock on the door that became our unspoken language, the clinking of cutlery, the trickling of the water tank, and the distant screams from our horror-movie-obsessed neighbour’s TV. I remember tasting garlic water for a week after our roommate pierced the water cooler with a knife still smeared from chopping a clove, making us all wonder if we suddenly had terrible breath.
Whenever I think of the house, I feel a wave of nostalgia, not because I wish to return, but because I understand how formative that place was. Without it, my first year in Mexico would have been lonelier and much quieter. It’s been a year since I left, and now no one I know lives there. So officially, it’s goodbye. Goodbye to the white wooden house that was made for a family and not a bunch of misfits and wallflowers. Goodbye to the bathroom that taught me patience, and to the cockroaches that tested my blood pressure. Goodbye to the walls that carried whispers of adults trying to feel less like children. It was a house alive in ways most buildings are not, a house that, in some ways, is irreplaceable.
