Eduardo Niño, deputy head of mission at Mexican Embassy to Romania: 'We make life, this is the only choice'

Every morning, for the last two and a half years, Counselor Eduardo Niño, Deputy Head of Mission at the Mexican Embassy in Bucharest, makes the symbolic Romania-Mexico trip: by international law, the embassy is considered the legal territory of the country it represents. As for the mornings spent in cities like Paris, Washington DC, Riyadh, Jakarta, Taipei, Athens, and Bucharest, they may have differed in the intensity of light, the noises entering the room, or even in the presence of singing birds, but they were bounded by one factor: the waking-up ritual. In the early 60s, in a house from Tampico, North-East Mexico, Eduardo Niño and his five brothers learned the waking-up ritual, with no alarm clock involved. The father put them all in the car, in their pajamas, very early in the morning, at about 5.30, drove to the beach, and threw them all into the water. “Swimming for about half an hour, then come back for breakfast and then the day begins. This is how we learned to swim and this is how we learned to wake up in the morning as children. It was not cruel, it was special,” Eduardo Niño remembers. Now living in the Cotroceni area of Bucharest, he still wakes up early, at a quarter to six and even before drinking his coffee, or having breakfast, he goes to the pool. Swimming is for him waking up and coming back. “I begin to swim and the brain wakes up. It’s a great time to find solutions. This is when I really plan my day.” For Eduardo, the two-hour stretch between 6 and 8 in the morning are his freedom. “In my job, we never know how the day is going to unfold, so maybe the reason why I wake up so early is a selfish one, because from 6 to 8 in the morning it is really my own time. After that, I may have to go to business breakfasts, day meetings, business dinners. I never know when the day ends.” A time of letters and Paris in the 60s Eduardo Niño lived in Tampico until the age of five and then moved to Paris, to pursue his primary and secondary studies and to live with his favorite aunt and his cousin, Guillermo. When asked about Paris in the late 60s and then in the 70s, the political turmoil, the cinema, the nightlife, Eduardo, now seated at his office on Doctor Louis Pasteur street, laughs. “People always ask me, how did you adjust to Paris, how was the city. Well, I was a child. I knew the museums, I knew the school, I knew my class-mates.” Paris meant for Eduardo a very nice house, a Jesuit private school, his aunt, his cousin, holidays in Cologne, and being a boy scout. Eduardo’s distinctive feature now is a very serene and friendly smile, which could probably be traced back to a happy childhood, diplomatic politeness or to his Mexican origins. “We are optimistic people. I am not speaking of politics, or in terms of the Government. I am speaking about humanity. There is something Mexican that is very contagious and this is what I was talking about, a humanistic attitude towards life. We are happy, and if we can’t be happy, we are ironic.” Even while being a teenager in Paris, Eduardo always felt Mexican. “We were going back to Mexico two times a year, a short time during the summer and then during the winter holidays, for Christmas. I was never disconnected. We were writing letters, it was a time of letters, as telephone was too expensive.”