Erika and I didn’t want to pass through Mexico City without actually seeing it. We also didn’t have a lot of time available in Mexico, though, and wanted to focus most of it in San Miguel de Allende. So, we planned for just one full day in Mexico’s capital at the end of the trip, where we’d do as much as we possibly could in that one day.

We got into the bus station from San Miguel in late afternoon, and took an Uber to our hotel in the very nice neighborhood of Roma. Thunderstorms were threatening, and we hadn’t eaten anything other than a snack on the bus, so we hurried out to the Mercado Roma, just a block from us, to find something to eat. There, we found a very gringo friendly market, and some decent floutas, while the thunderstorm started outside.

We sneaked back to the room in between rain storms, and then sadly got pinned in our room the rest of the night, as the thunderstorms didn’t let up. We’d hoped to at least go walk our neighborhood in the evening, since we didn’t have much time in the city. Tomorrow would just have to be more full!

The Busiest Tourist Day We Had… By Far

Throughout our whole trip, we’d refrained from touring like tourists, because neither of us much enjoyed travel like that, and… well, we didn’t have to. A lot of time was available to us, so we could afford to spread things out. What I mean by ‘touring like tourists’ is the mindset of: we only have a limited time on vacation, so we’ll get up early, do 12 things and dash all over, come to the hotel exhausted, and do it all again tomorrow. I don’t blame this mindset at all! Especially for Americans, who worship at the alter of work, vacation time is limited.

Anyway, we’d rather pointedly avoided that. We’d wake up at 10, have a leisurely breakfast, get outside just after noon, do one thing that day, have dinner and relax in the room. It’s more living wherever we are, instead of just trying to quickly consume everything that place had to offer before moving on. But again, we have this luxury.

We didn’t have that luxury in Mexico City. We had one day, and one huge ass city to tackle, so we had to put our tourist shoes on and get to tackling!

We woke up at 7 (!) and got out without having breakfast (!!), opting instead to pick up bagels from Starbucks (!!!) and quickly get to walking our neighborhood, since we didn’t get to the previous day. There was a free walking tour in the historic center at 10 am we wanted to take, but before that we wanted to walk through Parque México, just a few blocks from our hotel.

Parque México is a beautiful, quiet, relaxing park, which at that hour was full of people walking their increasingly adorable dogs. Sadly, there were no bulldogs on skateboards. We made our way through the park, eating our bagels, then continued south of the park to a subway station so we could get downtown.

Free Walking Tour

We got downtown early, so we had time to wander around the enormous Zócolo square, formally known as Plaza de la Constitución. One of the largest city squares in the world, it’s… well, it’s not charming. It’s a giant concrete expanse, with an enormous flag planted in the middle.

The tour we met for, while not as good as the recent ones we had in Peru, was still quite good. The group of tourists that took it, however, left much more to be desired. One group flaked out about 15 minutes in, acting as though they just realized the tour was longer than 15 minutes and they didn’t have time for it. Another woman ghosted us 15 minutes later. With all the tours we’d taken, we never had attendees like this, it was weird.

We enjoyed the tour anyway. It started briefly going past the Aztec ruins, to talk about Mexico City’s Aztec history. We went through the Catedral Metropolitana, and wound through the historic center of town. We ate buñuelos. It was a lovely time.

One of the striking things about Mexico City is the reminders of its tenuousness. Tenuousness due to the ever-present threat of earthquakes, and due to the fact that, being built on a lake bed, Mexico City is sinking. Our guide pointed these various reminders out: cracked facades of buildings, crooked buildings, leaning buildings. Inside the cathedral this is even more stark, as there are pendulums hung to measure the lean of the whole building. With these pendulums, you can see how significantly uneven the cathedral is.

Major work has been done to save and secure the cathedral, as it was sinking more quickly and more unevenly than the city at large. However, I love this bit from the Wikipedia page for the cathedral:

These efforts have not stopped the sinking of the complex, but they have corrected the tilting towers and ensured that the cathedral will sink uniformly.

The tour ended with two of the most beautiful buildings in Mexico City: the Palacio de Correos de México–the post office–and the enormous, gorgeous Palacio de Bellas Artes. Both were designed by the same Italian architect, with a lot of the intricate pieces that adorn the facades and interiors actually made in Italy. We walked through the Palacio de Correos, gawked at the beautiful Bellas Artes, and luxuriated in the perfect weather, before making our way back to the city center.

Aztec Ruins

There, our aim was to tour the Aztec ruins. These are some of the only remaining Aztec ruins in the world, and hilariously were found in the 70s when they were plowing tunnels through for the subway. There is one spot in the preserved ruins that includes a sewer pipe that was laid right thru the middle of them back in the early 1900s. This stuff was neglected here for a long time.

Now, though, it’s a tourist attraction, naturally. It’s cheap to visit, and fascinating to see and contemplate, being surrounded by the modern Mexico City while imagining being in Tenochitlin.

Bosque de Chapultepec

We took the subway back out to our neighborhood of Roma, and found an excellent taco lunch. Feeling re-energized, we decided to walk out to the large park we could see on our map, the Bosque de Chapultepec.

It was a long, long walk to get there. Once inside, the park proved to be truly huge. There’s a castle of some sort in it, that we’d intended to walk to, but it turned out to be up a very big hill and we decided nah, nah we can’t do that. We caught a glimpse of it from below and decided that was good enough. Time to work on the long walk back to Roma!

Dinner With a Friend

Erika had a friend that she knew used to live in Mexico City, and it turned out he still did. We set up dinner downtown with him, so that evening we jumped on the bus rapid transit system to head downtown to meet up with him.

Halfway there, though, the thunderstorm of Lucifer showed up, dumping an enormous amount of rain and hail on us. We’d seen an article from a few weeks earlier about a massive hail storm that had ruined traffic in the city, due to the sheer amount of ice it put on the streets. This one didn’t get quite to that level but, whew, it was still a lot of hail.

We hunkered down in the bus station for over half an hour, waiting for the storm to let up. Entrepreneurs seemed to materialize out of the ether, selling umbrellas and ponchos. Some enterprising types were even simply offering to use their umbrellas to escort people across the street, for a fee.

We just waited until the rain eased enough that we could sprint across the street, then we called an Uber to take us the rest of the way to the restaurant.

Dinner with Nathan was a great time. It was good to get the takes of someone who’d lived in Mexico City for a few years to compliment the impressions we’d been developing from our day in the city. Plus the tacos, while naturally not as good as the ones from our stand in San Miguel, were fantastic.

Toward the end of dinner, suddenly everyone in the restaurant jumped up from their seats and headed for the exits. Nathan, too, looked unsettled as he got up as well. What had we missed? Uneasily, we got up and followed, and it wasn’t until we got outside that I found out what was going on.

It was an early warning earthquake alarm.

The main fault line that usually wrecks Mexico City is well to the south of the city, which means that when it goes off, Mexico City can have 30 to 60 seconds warning that the quake is coming. We hadn’t heard anything, but apparently alerts on people’s phones had gone off. Nathan said usually you can hear the alarms in the city. He also said people have been fairly on edge since the massive earthquake last October. You can’t blame them.

As it turns out, this quake was small. Apparently it could be felt in a few spots in Mexico City, but we didn’t feel anything where we were. So after waiting it out in the street for a couple minutes, we went back inside to finish our dinner. It looked like we’d get through Phase 1 of our trip, after going through many areas of heavy seismic activity, without feeling any earthquakes!

Impressions

Our whirlwind day in Mexico’s capital started early, ended late, and included 9 miles of walking. We obviously only saw a small portion of this massive city, one of the biggest in the world. But what we saw defied the things we’d usually heard about Mexico City.

We’d worried it would be particularly dangerous. Granted, this was partially fueled by Erika’s own experience. The last time she’d been here, with Nathan, that very friend we met for dinner, they’d been there less than 24 hours when he was pick-pocketed. It can leave an impression!

Our impression this time, though, was overwhelmingly positive. The city seems very comfortable and livable. It’s full of beautiful, enjoyable green spaces. It’s a place I would gladly and enthusiastically go back to.

What’s Next?

Sadly, what was next was the end of Phase 1 of our grand adventure. We had another two weeks before we’d pick back up with Phase 2, which would take us to Namibia, Africa to start. But for now, we had some time with family and friends back in los Estados Unidos.

We left Mexico City early for a flight to Washington, DC, where we’d connect to a following flight to Raleigh. Despite it being an international flight, United charged for baggage and for movies on the plane. What the hell? Almost everything about the flying experience is better outside of the US and their carriers.

Clearing immigration in DC was surprisingly easy–pretty much the least stressful I’ve ever had coming back into the country. Naturally, there was a decently long line, but Erika and I figured we’d have some questions once we told them all the countries we’d been to. They never asked, instead just giving us an uncharacteristically chipper ‘welcome back’ and we were done.

Once in Raleigh, we for some reason were not getting cell phone reception at baggage claim, and our bags took for-fucking-ever to show up. All of which added up to getting my mother, who was waiting outside somewhere to take us home, very worked up.

After we finally got our bags, and finally found mom outside, we piled Franz and Helga into the trunk of her car and got in for the last leg of this part of our journey, the short drive to Greensboro.

Mom’s phone started to ring. She looked at it, then held it up, looking at me. “John, you’re calling me,” she said confused.

Sigh… one last act by my horribly broken phone before I could get it to the Apple store tomorrow. It couldn’t come soon enough.