His Tale
I really like Mexico City. As a capital city it offers you everything you could possibly want: markets, street vendors, Michelin guide restaurants, green spaces, plazas, history, millionaire pads, even bloody expensive gluten-free dedicated restaurants! It has a brilliant and varied transport system that would be a match for any European one.
The Cablebus, as they call it, cost me 28 pence for a 90 minute round trip that covered 10, 555.3 metres and went between Constitution de 1917 Station and Santa Marta Station. I did get some funny looks when I was taking photos as this isn’t a tourist attraction – this is everyone’s journey to and from work. It has 188 cabins that move 3000 people per hour.
I think if you came to Mexico City as part of a holiday and you had that kind of budget, you could have a great time, eat beautiful meals and do some really interesting and fun things like the hot air balloon rides in the desert area or the boats on the floating gardens. It feels friendly and safe and even with limited Spanish, most things are navigable (like getting broken glasses fixed; having a haircut and beard shave!)
Her Tale
I didn’t love Mexico City which is surprising because usually I love all a city gives: its chaos, its green spaces, its grit and its sudden charming insta-worthy spaces. But Mexico City just couldn’t win me over.
It was both overwhelming because it was so vast and the distances between things you wanted to do were 30 mins to an hour in an Uber or on Public Transport; and underwhelming because the parks and so-called ‘bougie’ suburbs were not quite lush enough. It is winter so it is a nice temperature but all the green plants look a bit dusty and dry. The area where they look lively and lush is ironically where all the skyscraper type buildings are and everything glistens.
After a great few hours at the Frida Kahlo Museum, where I felt I learned a new side to her life which was more empowering, and wandering around the lovely Coyoacan neighbourhood, we decided to pack in seeing another two nice neighbourhoods and a museum that day as we felt we had a lot to do. Buoyed up by our easy navigation of the metro system everything looked dandy. I tried to plan a route through the nicer parts towards the museum park, thinking we would appreciate a lot of ‘steps’ so 2 hours walking was fine. But 2 hours walking through grim neighbourhoods, never to find the specific spot you’d call ‘cute’ or a restaurant that looked good, only to arrive at the park when it was closing and having missed the museum times, was not fun. We then had to piece together a metro line that was being renovated and only had certain stops and a replacement bus. Not a good start to our 4 days.
I think my judgement is also marred by feeling ‘off’. I’d been sick on the plane the day before and still felt a bit hollow and we woke up with stuffy sinuses (think this might be a ‘thing’ here as Anna and Esther had felt the same). Our walking tour was a bit rubbish too, which is very unusual, so there was nothing to follow up through her recommendations. In fact her nearby food reccs sent us down another unsuccessful rabbit-hole. It was at this point I realised I needed to retreat and relax in the hostel while Stewart went to do something he’d find fun – the cable car. It looked awesome but my body was not feeling it.
To stop being a Negative Nora, I will admit the museums were brilliant. The Palace/ National History Museum and the Anthropologie Museum were fantastic and not to be missed. The murals and paintings in the former really brought to life the history of Mexico and the huge quantity of artefacts in the Anthropologie Museum were curated beautifully with a lovely warm palette running through the ‘salas’ – a really great building.
