Trip Report: Mexico City, Day Three

The first thing we did Monday morning was head to the supermarket to buy sunscreen. There was one a short walk from our hotel in lovely Condesa.

In the circle of streets around Parque Mexico, the medians are all forested with a central sidewalk.

As in most cities, a lot of the tourist sites are closed on Mondays, so we decided to go to the privately owned Antique Toy Museum. It was pretty close to our hotel, but in the middle of Doctores and as we now knew what that meant, we took an Uber. Uber was our preferred way to get around in Mexico City, super easy and safer than dealing with the crowds on public transportation right now. We never waited more than 5 minutes or so and the trips were extremely cheap. I sometimes had to double check the currency conversion math because I couldn't believe how cheap - usually around $3 for a 15 minute trip.

The Antique Toy Museum is the collection of a Japanese-Mexican man who just likes weird toys. It was five floors packed full of all sorts of strange things.

Most of the toys were from the 80s or earlier, although there were a handful of newer items sprinkled in here and there.

There were only two other groups of people in the place while we were there. In some rooms the lights were off and we had to go looking for the light switch. (There were signs that said it was OK to turn on the lights if they weren't already on.)

Here is Ben being like, "what IS this place?"

I had Aerobica Barbie!

As you go higher in the building, it gets weirder. This guy was two stories tall, in the middle of a large central courtyard.

The top floor and roof was all street art and graffiti. It was all very well done.

If there was any information about why this art is there, we never found it. 

The top floor also seemed to have been some kind of institution at some point. There were a bunch of small bathroom stalls complete with showers, each decorated in a different way.

This place is awesome. You should go. 

It was lunchtime so we got another Uber and went back to Condesa to the row of restaurants our hotel had mentioned. We chose a sushi spot and ordered four rolls for $6 each and they were ENORMOUS. 

I tried to ask in Spanish if we could take the leftovers home ("Lo podemos tomar?") but the guy said to me in English, "what are you trying to say?" and I said, "can we take it?" and he said, "yes." I TRIED.

We relaxed in the hotel for a while during the afternoon rain and then decided to walk to dinner at Maximo Bistrot in the Roma neighborhood, another popular middle-class area with lots of shops and restaurants. It was about a 25 minute walk.

All over Mexico City we were seeing these green squares painted on the sidewalk. It turns out they're markers for a safe space to gather in case of a major earthquake - supposedly, if you stand there, no buildings will fall on you. Good to know. 

Maximo Bistrot was our first pre-planned fancy dinner spot, and it did not disappoint. Ben got a whole roasted fish with mole.

I got steak with potatoes two ways.

And we split this amazing tarte tatin for dessert, with vanilla ice cream topped with deep green olive oil. 

 Delicioso!

Trip Report: Mexico City, Day Two

As it turns out, it takes too long to update the blog when you're actually on vacation. Spoiler: We made it home!

The second day, we decided to walk from our hotel in Condesa to the Centro Historico, the heart of old Mexico City. Google Maps said it would be about three miles. Condesa is beautiful. The streets are lined with colorful houses and big trees and cute shops and restaurants like this. 

I'd googled a little bit to make sure it was safe to walk all that way, and the consensus was "sure!" And, I mean, we're still here today and nothing bad happened (it was Sunday morning), but in general I would not recommend walking from Condesa to Centro Historico through Doctores, which we later learned is considered one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in the city, for some reason home mainly to car thieves. A guy at our hotel told us "If your car is missing, you go to Doctores to find it." We were not that surprised to hear this, because during the walk we saw many people working on cars in what were obviously, in retrospect, chop shops. Vacation!

Because Mexico City is so old, the streets are all tangled up, at angles to each other with lots of roundabouts. This meant we constantly got off-track when we thought we knew where we were going, and it made for some quite dicey accidental diversions in Doctores. At one point we walked through a small homeless encampment. What really freaked me out, though, was coming across a long block filled with people milling about, mostly on the sidewalk but also in the streets. The vibe was strange, like they were waiting for something - what were they all doing? Everyone was masked, of course. Standing around, chatting, looking at each other. Then I noticed the big building on our right said HOSPITAL. Ah, wonderful: we were wandering through crowds outside an inner city hospital in the developing world during a global pandemic. I pointed the sign out to Ben and we veered instantly into the middle of the street rather than threading our way through the crowd outside the gates. A couple of blocks later, all the businesses lining the streets were funeral homes. 

Here's a couple of shots after we were back on the main road.

We did finally reach the Centro Historico. This little chapel was the first historic item we saw.

The Zocalo is the big square at the history city center, lined with the cathedral and government buildings and shops. It's hard to overstate how big that flag is. It's SO BIG.

I had almost booked a hotel here, right on the square (the Gran Hotel de Mexico City) but changed my mind at the last second because of travelers mentioning the noise in this part of the city. Like many touristy city centers it's not particularly safe after dark, either. 

It's hard to tell because the scale is so enormous, but there were tons of people around here, and it was noisy, and after experiencing the quiet beauty of our little hotel in Condesa I was glad I'd gone with that choice.

We went inside the cathedral but as it was Sunday morning, they were having services so we couldn't enter the main part of the church.

There's a cute row of shops behind the cathedral.

Right next to the church are the ruins of the ancient Templo Mayor, the center of the Aztec city Tenochtitlan on which Mexico City was built. In true human form, the conquering Spanish used stones from the Aztec structures to build the cathedral. These ruins were only discovered by construction workers in the 1970s.

We were roughly following a walking tour from one of the books in our hotel, and stopped at Cafe Popular, one of their recommended spots. It was a diner-type place a few blocks from the Cathedral. I got a big plate of papaya.

And chicken enchiladas with black bean sauce and chorizo. This is one of their Especiales de la Casa.

Ben's sausage and cactus leaf is not very photogenic but it was excellent. It came with tortillas. This lunch was like $15, including drinks and flan for dessert.

I don't know what this building is but it looks nice.

This is a famous one, the House of Tiles. It used to be a palace for a rich family but is today the headquarters of a big chain of department stores.

The Palacio de Belles Artes is across the street. This is a big theatre and also houses an Architecture Museum and Diego Rivera murals. We didn't go inside this time.

This is an art museum we also didn't go into.

We did go inside the beautiful main post office, which is still in use today.

The Alameda Central park was packed with people on this Sunday afternoon. The weather in Mexico City is absolutely perfect. I don't know why everyone doesn't live there. Every single day you can just go outside whenever you want and you won't be too hot or too cold. Why am I in North Carolina.

We decided to go over to the Museo Franz Meyer. I didn't really know what it was but it was close by on the map and we like a weird small museum. Meyer collected all sorts of stuff - furniture, art, ceramics - throughout his life and donated it all when he died. The best part was the temporary exhibit of American designer Alexander Girard's work. I had never heard of him but I'm glad I have now.

This building was Meyer's home. Mexico City's tremendous weather means that you can have open air courtyards in your fancy house.

He also had an amazing library.

We hung out in the hotel for a couple hours while it rained, then went to find dinner. We decided to check out Temporal, recommended by the hotel, which was only a 4 minute walk away. We could not find this place at all, even with Google maps. Why are all the roads curved around each other?? So confusing. By approximately Day 4 we had finally figured out how everything fit together. 

Anyway, we made it. We sat upstairs next to an open window. Everything about it was great. My starter was the standout, tomato and corn salad with burrata. Ben's octopus tacos are in the background.

For dessert we split the chocolate tart.

We were both sunburned after the day's long walks but it was worth it! A day full of adventure in Mexico City.

Trip Report: Mexico City, Day One

In an exciting twist, I'm blogging our vacation while we're actually on it, mainly because I'm getting old and this way it will be easier to remember details. Also, everyone has to have a negative COVID test to re-enter the United States, so there will be some suspense later this week when we find out whether or not we're going to be stuck here for a while. We're vaccinated, of course (we aren't Republicans, you know), but the Delta variant is spreading rapidly throughout North America over the past several weeks. All things considered, it would have been better to travel the last week of June rather than the last week of July, but we booked this trip when it looked like summer was going to be A-OK all around. Anyway, c'est la vie! Here we are.

Wearing a mask for every second of the ~10 hours we spent in airports and planes was not very fun. I was overall impressed, though, at how everyone basically did what they were supposed to do without complaint. Naturally there were a few jokers at RDU who were wandering around in their loafers and shorts and golf shirts without a mask, but especially after arriving in Mexico City, protecting oneself and others from a deadly disease does not seem to be a very controversial idea.

We're staying at The Red Tree House, a popular hotel in the Condesa neighborhood well known for its friendliness and hospitality. It's truly lovely, with a gorgeous central courtyard where they serve a delicious breakfast every morning.

This is the jungly view from our balcony.

The first morning we wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood, which is a quiet upper-middle class residential area with lots of good restaurants and shops. We're very close to the Parque Mexico.

Half of the park is for dogs. There were dogs everywhere. We've seen a lot of dogs in every neighborhood, actually.

The Parque Mexico is surrounded by roads circling it in a big ring. This has meant that for the first two days we get very lost any time we try to go anywhere that is only a 5 minute walk away. We're finally starting to get the hang of it.

We walked over to Chapultepec Forest, one of the largest urban parks in the world (according to Wikipedia). We sat by this monument to drink a coffee. It commemorates six teenagers who died as part of the Mexican-American War in 1847, which to be honest neither of us knew anything about at all. 

 Mexico City is the biggest city in the Americas, but also the oldest. Chapultepec Forest was home not only to battles in the 1800s, but also to Montezuma's Aztec people hundreds of years earlier. There are some ruins of an Aztec aquaduct in the park.

There was also this big tree, which Ben made fun of me for photographing, but I figured it had to be important if they left most of it standing! We found a plaque explaining that it had been planted by Montezuma's men in the 1500s and then died of water contamination in the 20th century.

The park is beautiful and enormous. We only explored a small part of it.

Then we walked back to the Roma neighborhood, adjoining our own just to the north. 

We had a lunch reservation at Contramar, a seafood-oriented restaurant I was very excited to try. This was our first interaction with a business after arriving. We quickly learned that everyone running a public-facing business is serious about COVID. They're all doing temperature checks and squirting hand sanitizer when you walk in the door. Many places have you step into a shallow pool of alcohol to sanitize your shoes (surely this doesn't accomplish much?) and one museum actually misted our clothes with it, too. All servers in restaurants are wearing not only masks but face shields. All Uber drivers are masked with the windows wide open. Mexico City is clearly taking the pandemic more seriously than anywhere in America ever has. Some of it may be hygiene theater, but it's also true that I've never felt as safe in public over the past year and a half as I do here. 

Anyway, we sat outside at Contramar and it was a perfect way to start the trip. Their tuna tostadas are one of their most popular items, and rightly so.

We were also brought shrimp tacos by mistake, which we happily ate.

The house ceviche was excellent too.

And we finished with sopes, corn cakes topped with adobo spiced fish. We were going to get dessert but it was impossible.

After lunch we took an Uber back to Chapultepec to go to the National Archaeology Museum. Uber is pretty close to free here, and perfectly safe. A 20 minute ride is about $3 US. 

The Archaeology Museum has a huge collection of artifacts from all the ancient people who lived here before Spain came and conquered the native people in the 16th century. Olmec, Maya, Aztec - it was all very impressive.

The building is very impressive too.

Almost all of these artifacts are from this immediate area. Mexico City was built long before Spain came to the new world. 

Their civilization was vast and sophisticated.

There were a lot of temples outdoors, too, although Ben went into a possibly restricted area to read a sign on one of them that said it was a recreation.

After the museum, we went back to the hotel to relax a while before dinner. Summer is Mexico City's rainy season, which means it's sunny and 75 degrees with low humidity every day, and then it rains and thunders in the late afternoon or early evening. So far this has worked out fairly well with our natural schedule. This first night, we walked a few blocks over to a casual restaurant that claims to have invented tacos al pastor. We got 8 tacos and drinks and it was $15. We did end up getting caught in the rain on the way home, but that's okay. Viva la Mexico!