Culture shock Minimal. While Tecate is very Mexican, it's still a border town with credit-card savvy and bilingual service personnel. English is not spoken everywhere, however. There's not a lot for kids to do in Tecate. No beaches, little sightseeing and few events that U.S. kids would care to participate in.
People are friendly, though, and children are universally loved throughout Mexico.
One Tijuana senior government official occasionally drives from his office in hectic, downtown Tijuana to Tecate just to sit in the city's park and read the paper. Tecate, he says, feels like a Mexican town, with its tiny bandstand, laughing children and rustling trees. But Tecate is more than peaceful. Years ago, Yuma Indians revered the boulder-studded mountain that looms over the small city and called it Cuchuma. Indians still make annual pilgrimages to Cuchuma for sacred rituals, and locals have reported UFO sightings and claimed magnetic energy fields radiate from the peak.