Table of Contents
Mars’s situation is still rather up in the air, considered more collaborative project of major Earth nations than it is autonomous. Politics in the roughly 200-person project is still fairly consensus-based. Martian citizenship is thus more ‘badge of honour’ than anything that has political meaning – so far, anyway.
Architecture
Personal living spaces have been described as 'tin can'. Kitchens, bathrooms and gym space is all communal to save space. People use their beds as couches (they are jointed and so this is less of a problem than it sounds). Sorcerers tend to have twice the real estate and a personal desktop computer they can use to crunch data - other people make do with laptops, or with shared computers.
Drugs
Caffeine is freely available as tea, coffee, caffeine pills or caffeine chewing gum.
All forms of smoking are banned on Mars because of what it would do to the air filters, but nicotine patches are available for those who need (or want) them.
Mars does not allow alcohol consumption and indeed has none.
On the other end of the scale, they freely allow psychadelic use (greenhouse-sourced psilocybin, but also some LSD).
Livestock
There are chickens on Mars. For very special occasions, one of them might be turned into a dinner, but largely they exist to make eggs for consumption (and the occasional set of eggs to make more chickens).
Pets
Martians don't have many pets, because most pets are a pain to maintain. No pet is furred, because no one wants shed fur in the air filters.
There are something between four and five total pets on the station. Two of them are 'Martian Peterbald' cats, bred specifically to deal with the cramped living environment, be very friendly and relaxed around all humans, and have a fully omnivorous diet. That said, even with their diet adjusted not to need meat, the Martian situation demands that they get supplementary injections of certain proteins that are specific to them and the highly human-optimised food on Mars doesn't provide. (Feeding them chickens somewhat regularly would also work, but no one is willing to do that, it would deplete chickens faster than they could be restocked.)
One of the cats is Adhafera, Mateo Kasun's cat.
Time-keeping
Formally, Mars uses the Darian calendar. In practise, week names are colloquially the same as those on Earth, despite being a poor match for an Earth week, so that Veneris is generally referred to as 'Friday'. (This sometimes causes fun confusion when people send messages to and fro from Earth and forget to adjust their language.)