Trip Report-Mexico City

Day 1 Thursday

Because of the late arrive there was no plan for this morning except to sleep-in and start exploring when we felt like it. As it turns out, our hotel room faces east onto the Zocalo which is the main square in the city. The official name of the square is the Plaza de la Constitución, but nobody here calls it that. We hadn’t closed our curtains and so the sun came up at about 6:45 directly into our eyes in a brilliant orange and purple sunrise framing the sinking cathedral. Starving, since we hadn’t eaten since before our flight left Calgary 13 hours earlier, we headed to the 5th floor where complimentary breakfast is served on a rooftop balcony overlooking the Zocalo.

The hotel offers it’s a guest a free historical tour of the historical centre of the city every morning at 9:30. We like to start things off with a tour like this wherever we go, however because of our late arrival we had decided we may not make it and had booked our own tour for late afternoon. But since we’re up and ready to go, we met in the lobby with other guests. As it turns out, the hotel contracts the tour out to Mexico a Pie https://mexicoapie.com/ which is the same company and same tour that we had booked through Viator for the afternoon. We made the call to do this tour anyway and could always skip out on the one we paid for in the afternoon. As it turns out, the same tour, done by two different guides can be completely different, as can the tourists. We noticed at breakfast that a great many languages and accents were being spoken, we picked up American and England English, German, Chinese and of course Spanish. However, for this tour there was us 10 or so Americans plus the token Canadians with Carla and I being the youngest in the group.

In a thickly accented English that was spoken at the speed of light our guide was off and running giving a history of Mexico City beginning with the Aztecs, but she was more passionate speaking about current affairs in Mexico City and its current problems. She says the Zocalo is busy everyday with people just hanging out, but also with protests, as the government buildings including the President’s apartments are also right across from our hotel. In her opinion the three main issues facing Mexico today are healthcare and lack of supplies, education and a lack of teachers and women’s safety. She says violence against women is a serious problem and every year on International Women’s Day in March 200,000 protestors will converge on the city to protest the roughly 10 women murdered every day, with 1,000 cases classified as femicide annually. Ironically one of the most violent protests of the year will be on Women’s Day when it’s not uncommon for Molotov Cocktails to be thrown. *to add a note to this, yesterday was the protest and I haven’t seen any news about violence, but I do note that the US had issued a travel advisory warning last week about potential violence this weekend.

Our afternoon tour was just as informative but more focused on the history. And the attendees were much more diverse which was what we commonly saw on this trip with 4 Canadians (all of us from Calgary), 2 Americans, 3 Brits, 2 Germans, 2 Aussies and 1 woman from Nigeria. This time we went from being the youngest on the tour to the oldest….but I still struck up a friendship with the young couple from Germany after he saw my Blue Jays cap and said he became a baseball fan after watching last Fall’s World Series and became a Jays fan and not one of the evil empire in Los Angeles.

Day 2 Friday

Besides the German Blue Jays fan, one of my most amusing conversations of the trip was at breakfast this morning with an American woman on a tour with Road Scholar. She said this was her 2nd time doing this tour and her 40th RS tour (Road Scholar, not the other RS). I asked her if she had done any tours with the other RS and she gave me a strange look like she’d never heard of the guy and said that she hadn’t. She said her favourite tour so far was one she would also repeat this year of Tuscany.

Today is Carla’s birthday and during my early conversations with Victor-the-Butler, I told him that dinner reservations were taken care of but could he arrange something else special. When we got back to the room later this evening our room had been decorated like we were going to hold a birthday party. There was also a small box of chocolates the hotel makes, a couple bottles of wine and a small birthday cake.

Today’s plan was to Chapultepec Park-which is Mexico City’s larger version New York’s Central Park. First stop was the Chapultepec Castle which is the only castle in North America to have housed actual sovereigns; specifically, Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg and Empress Carlota of Belgium. In traditional royal excess of the time, they had it decorated as a luxurious palace with opulent rooms and fantastic gardens. There are two parts to the castle when you visit-the rooms as decorated from this time, but it also houses the National Museum of History, which is interesting but not one bit of English signage. Make sure to bring Google translate. Even though Chapultepec Park was also the vacation grounds for the Aztecs (I’ll stop using this word later in the report) nobility, this museum focuses on the Spanish history of Mexico.

We spent about 3 hours at the castle and then a 20-minute walk through the park to the Anthropology Museum which is one of the most spectacular museums I’ve ever visited. It has 12 galleries featuring pre-Hispanic history of various indigenous cultures from across Mexico. We spent another 3 hours here and saw about half of it. Another warning, most of the signage is in Spanish but at the beginning of each gallery there is at least an English explanation of the history of what we were going to see. Today we focused on what we were going to be seeing over the next two days which were the galleries dealing with the Templo Mayor which are the Aztec ruins underneath the historical area of Mexico where we’re staying and the Teotihuacan gallery which are the incredible ruins NE of the city.

So far, we’ve been on our feet for 6 hours for 2 straight days, and had another 30 minute walk into the Polanco neighbourhood for Carla’s birthday dinner at Parole Polanco Italian restaurant. I mentioned that the city can be expensive, and this is a high falootin’ restaurant full of pretty dresses and Rolexes and menus featuring $1200MXP ($100CA+) pasta dishes. I saved money by ordering steak at $900MXP. Really nice restaurant but kinda overpriced in my opinion, but Carla’s birthday rules are that she will be kept happy and spoiled.

Last night I had asked Victor about how to get to Chapultepec, and I was perfectly willing to take the subway, but he insisted that there was more value taking an Uber. He stressed, Uber and not taxis because they’d try and rip me off. He said Uber was safer and more comfortable…just not the one we took back to the hotel…the driver’s google maps said it was a 47-minute drive…he made it in 32 without using his turning signals once. I wasn’t sure if I should give him no stars for that, or 5 stars for cutting 15 minutes off the drive…

Day 3 Saturday

Since 2008 when we visited the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza I’ve wanted to see the ruins at Teotihuacan 50km NE of Mexico City. Finding a tour that met our ‘wants’ was a bit more difficult. Most tours offered cover more than the ruins and make touristy stops to sample tequila, visit shops and visit the church in Guadalupe. We finally found the immersive tour we were looking for through Viator. The tour is operated by Paseos Olmedo https://paseosolmedo.com/ but when you go to their website and click on tours you get ‘site not found’, so we had no option but Viator-which was fine. What we enjoyed about this tour is that it was led by an archaeologist who was very serious about his job and would only talk about facts with no fiction. For example, before we even set foot on site he told us that if anyone dared ask if aliens were involved in building the pyramids that he would walk away and not let them back on the bus. He said it with such a scowl on his face that I suspect it has come up more than once. He had a pretty prickly personality, but he knew his stuff. The most interesting takeaway I got from the tour is that nobody really knows who lived in Teotihuacan. It was populated staring in about 100BCE, peaked in around 550CE with 200,000 inhabitants and then was abandoned about 200 years later. The Aztecs discovered it on their way to Mexico City and named it Teotihuacan and called the two pyramids the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and passed this information onto the Spaniards. But the Aztecs didn’t know either. It’s also just a guess that the inhabitants dedicated the two largest structures to the sun and the moon. According to our archeologist, Rudolfo, the latest theory is that the inhabitants worshiped the mountains, as both pyramids line up with the mountains behind them.

Carla’s birthday extended into another day as another expensive and very good restaurant was on the menu. Azul Historico https://www.azul.rest/ is in the centre court of a former palace and the ambience is terrific, as was the Mexican cuisine. Unfortunately, prices reflected this and my credit card took another $2900MXD hit. I love Mexican food; always have and I especially love mole sauce, I just didn’t realize though that everyone has their own take on the recipe. Every chance I got this trip I had something with mole sauce. “I’d eat it for breakfast” I told Carla after this meal. And I did, a couple of days later at our hotel. The free breakfast offered is a buffet, but there are also menu items to choose from including something I’d never heard of with mole sauce. My only regret is that I was strictly forbidden this trip from picking my plate up and licking it clean.

People at the restaurant were dressed more casually than at the Italian place last night. While the locals were dressed in pants, the tourists, including me were mainly in shorts. It was 29C today which was a 49-degree difference than at home, so I was making this a pants-free trip. When I read about how to dress here, the consensus was that Mexicans dress more European than their neighbours to the north, but we found no standard. While there were plenty of tourists in the Historico area, the vast majority of people were locals and when wandering at night we encountered locals wearing everything from sweats and tank tops to linen shirts and pants. Of the tourists, about half the men in our tours wore shorts.

Day 4 Sunday

The Aztecs never called themselves Aztecs. It’s more of a modern reference to describe the people in the area of Mexico City. The ‘Aztecs’ called themselves the Mexica (mehSHEEka), which the Spanish turned into Mexico as we know the country today. The Zocalo area of the city used to be the city of Tenochtitlan in the 1300’s with a population in excess of 200,000. The Mexica were not a popular bunch and depending on reports there could have been as few as ‘hundreds’ to as many as 20,000 human sacrifices/year. Buried underneath the Zocalo are walls built from the skulls of the sacrificed. Enter the Spanish in 1519 and with the help of very angry tribes that had been used as the sacrificial victims, the Mexica were conquered and Tenochtitlan buried until 1978 when electrical workers discovered it after digging a trench. People were aware of what may have been underneath, but nobody seemed to care. Now it’s a major tourist attraction with a fabulous museum. Unlike the anthropology museum, this museum is dedicated to Tenochtitlan and it’s worth the time.

I mentioned ‘the latest theories,’ by our archaeologist/guide Rudolfo yesterday. He specifically mentioned Templo Mayor and how most of the information in the museum is based on discoveries in the 1970’s and 80’s. He says new things have been discovered since, but the signage of the museum hasn’t kept up. He suggested many museums; due to lack of funding, don’t keep exhibit information current. I wonder how common this is around the world.

And now for something completely different, we went to Lucha Libre wrestling tonight. It’s the Mexican version of pro wrestling highlighted by masked wrestlers, acrobatics and the typical good guy/bad guy story lines. It’s a fun time and even Carla was laughing. The crowd really gets into it with people wearing masks of their favourite wrestler like we may wear a team jersey to the game at home. Even some couples were decked out in his-and-her masks.

I’d read that it’s easy to get a taxi or Uber there, but it could be problematic getting one back to the hotel because of the crowds streaming out of the arena. I got Victor involved to make suggestions. He told me he’d find a driver that would wait for us until after the wrestling to bring us back home. Victor is a young guy-20-25 is my guess, works hard, eager to please, but is still a bit green. He said he found a guy that would do it for $1200MXP. A little pricey, but Carla wanted nothing to do with public transit and was nervous about being left in a strange place after dark. Our driver shows up; a young guy, and while I didn’t ask, my guess is Victor hired a friend who borrowed his dad’s car to chauffer us for the evening. It all worked out but I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a typical hotel approved transaction. As it turns out, Friday is the big wrestling night in Mexico City, and on Sunday evening the arena was only 1/3rd full and we watched people hailing cabs and using the Uber app to get rides back so we could have saved some money. I can’t speak for Friday night, but the arena isn’t in the finest looking neighbourhood and so our solution may have be the best one for a different night.

Day 5 Monday

So, we managed to survive the hysteria back home yesterday regarding the cartel rampage in Puerto Vallarta and can report that we didn’t get murdered even once. We were completely unaware of the violence until Carla’s phone blew up with concerned messages from family and friends about what was going on 800km away. I have to say that Carla appears to be a more valued friend and family member than me, while her phone wouldn’t stop buzzing, mine stayed silent and the only message to make sure I was OK was from Tassie Devil of this Forum. Thanks Ron, I get exactly one message more from you than everybody else combined.

Needless to say, while I’m sure there was a lot of commotion and concern in the government buildings across from our hotel, it was business as usual for everyone else here. Monday was no different as we did a whole lot of aimless wandering. We started with an Uber to the Condessa neighbourhood and spent the morning simply walking up and down neighbourhood streets. If you watch House Hunters International this is where Americans moving to Mexico City want to move. Likely because it’s reasonably pretty and more than half the conversations we had were in English, whereas everywhere else we went, there was a lot of hand gesturing and Google translating to speak to the locals. We’d gotten spoiled in our 3 European trips last year to England, Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland that we had no trouble communicating in English. Maybe I should say we got lazy and didn’t try very hard last year. Mexico City is different, outside of our hotel and higher end restaurants we couldn’t count on getting by with English only. Even in the restaurants where there was an English translation underneath the Spanish we couldn’t count on ordering in English. Every time, the server would have a look of confusion on their face, and we’d end up pointing at the Spanish entry of the item in the menu and letting them read it.

Condessa is a very nice neighbourhood and if we were to come back, we’d consider staying here but I think I’d miss the constant street noise and action going on in the Historico. If I wanted quiet and pretty, I could stay at home. Gritty and noisy brings a sense of adventure and feeling that we’re somewhere new and experiencing a different way of life. There were a lot of legitimate street vendors calling out loudly trying to drum up business, but also a lot of homeless and beggars; more than once a young child would come up to me a tug at my pant leg asking for change with his hands held out. I’d shake my head no and he’d run back to his mother. On our 2nd tour on Thursday in the late afternoon, I happened to glance into the shadows near a church we were passing to see a homeless guy squatting and then I realized he was taking a poop. On reflection, at no time did we feel in danger; it’s just the part of the life down here. I don’t think I’d feel this safe in San Francisco anymore.

But it’s always noisy. Even at 3:30 in the morning…every morning at this time I could count on someone out on the Zocalo blowing a conch three times. Apparently, it’s some kind of indigenous spiritual thing. And since there is always something going on in the Zocalo, construction crews would often work through the night. We woke up this morning to see them tearing down one stage and putting up a larger one for what we later learned was for a free Shakira concert that would attract 400,000 people on the Sunday after we went home.

Day 5 Tuesday

We rarely go to zoos when we travel, but the one here is highly rated and is accredited. It’s free which always makes me happy, but there are a few $100MXP extra for certain sections such as a butterfly exhibit or $6MPX for the bathrooms. It’s one of the nicer zoos we’ve been to, and it’s designed so we were mainly walking in shade. We had to snicker when we came across an enclosure featuring Canadian Geese. It never occurred to me that something so common at home would have a place in a zoo. And these ones seemed so calm. At home, Canadian Geese are called a lot of names; my favourite is cobra chickens because while the rest of us Canadians thrive on a reputation as being nice, and polite, heaven help you if you cross paths with a cobra chicken as they’ll snarl and snap and chase small children across the park. We should send an army of these to clean up the cartel (or America?).

We saw most of what needed to be seen at the zoo in about 2.5 hours and then it was a 15-minute walk to finish up at the anthropology museum. If you can, buy tickets online because both times we were here there was about a 15-minute lineup. Also, you can’t bring a backpack or water bottle and you’ll be directed to a locker. The line for the lockers was longer than the line for the tickets. Overall, if you want to take a deep dive into pre-Hispanic history at the museum, count on a full day. We paid the $210MXP/pp entrance fee twice to spread the visit over 2 days. I guess we could have saved money by doing it all in one day, but that’s a lot of museum in one day.

One of the other perks of our hotel was the 24-hour café in the lobby. You can get bottled water, pop, beer, snack and food such as pizza, salads and sandwiches at no extra cost. In theory, thanks to this and the breakfast, we wouldn’t have had to pay for a meal for our entire stay, and we did take advantage on a few days for lunches and if we got back to the hotel late but we definitely would have missed out on some excellent restaurants if we had decided to keep our budget low. Honestly, while I think the hotel had excellent value, I don’t think you’re going to be staying here if you’re on a tight budget.

Day 6 Wednesday

It’s our last day; however, our flight doesn’t leave until 2am Thursday morning so we kept our room for the day and would check out tonight at about 10:30. These wacky flight times did create some initial confusion in our planning because our arrival was at 1am on Feb 19th and so I needed to book the hotel like I was checking in on the 18th, and of course while checking out on the 25th, I needed to book like I was checking out on the 26th. Booking the driver had the same confusion and I initially booked the driver for the 26th at 10:30pm because that’s the day our flight left. Luckily, I caught it in time and changed the dates on Welcome Pickup’s app without issue.

We’d been fascinated all week by how much the city is sinking. The Mexica built it on an island in the lake and created additional land by creating islands by bringing in dirt and driving stakes into the ground to support their buildings, similar technology to Venice and Amsterdam. After the Spanish took over, the lake was drained so they could build their new city including a massive cathedral to hide the very uncatholic like temples of the Mexica. Cathedrals especially, are so heavy and especially prone to sinking. When you look at the main cathedral in the Zocalo straight on it almost looks like it’s going to split in two. Inside the floor is noticeably tilting toward the west. Engineers ‘think’ they have it under control, but there are portions of the city that are sinking at 50cm/year and there is nothing that can be done about it. We became fascinated by this and dropped into several churches nearby and the sinking is obvious. I found this short video on YouTube that shows a good example. https://share.google/auONB30b2W1N0v9Am Not only is the city sinking, but it’s prone to earthquakes and there is still a live volcano nearby that burps ash into the air. But everyday life continues.

Another thing that caught our attention is the seemingly endless number of manual street sweepers the city has. They’re everywhere we went, these sweepers with what we were calling witches brooms made from a long stick, duct tape and twigs from trees were constantly sweeping leaves and at this time of year, purple flowers from the Jacaranda trees. The city has about 8500 on the payroll and they work around the clock. Apparently, they’re provided with corn brooms but most still prefer the traditional broom. In any case it’s a unique site to see these sweepers go about their business keeping sidewalks and streets clean in a city filled with poverty, crumbling infrastructure, sinking buildings and graffiti covered storefronts requiring steel shutters with 4 padlocks. It’s like I said in my introduction to this report, it’s a city of contradictions; it’s dirty, but it’s clean, it looks scary, but it’s safe, it’s visually unappealing, but it’s charming. I highly recommend it.

Hi Allan

So glad for your report.

I live in Austin, TX which is just up the road from Mexico City but have never been. Been to a few other places in Mexico but never Mexico City and have been considering it.

I would be going alone and am a senior citizen. Have concerns about the size as well s the air pollution because I have bronchitis.

If I went, what neighborhood do you think would be best for me. I would want a neighborhood that is easy to get to from the airport and back to the airport as well as convenient to the major attractions.

Bostonphil, that's a tough one to answer. Mexico City is kind of like London in that it's spread out and you'll need to rely on public transportation and/or Uber. I'm hoping Toby reads your question as he was recently in Mexico City as well and did take public transit so he may have some opinions on that. We really like the Centro Historico area but I'm not sure if you'd feel comfortable there as it is very gritty. The Polanco and Condessa neighbourhoods is where I'd recommend you research first. If you're on Facebook, check out Mexico City Travel Tips. Both Carla and I found it useful.

As for pollution, it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to believe, but I also don't have lung issues.

Edit to add, here's a link to Toby's TR, he Sorrento a few days in Mexico City https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/mexico-and-a-bit-of-florida

Thanks for your detailed report, great read! Mexico City is on my list for someday. So many interesting things to see and learn about. It sounds like the mole is worth the trip alone. I'd probably book myself a food tour because that's one of my favorite ways to sightsee. Sorry your Welcome Pickups wasn't exactly what you thought it would be - I've used them in other large cities with success but will note that for Mexico City.

I chuckled at your description of Canada geese, we here in Oregon get a lot of migratory cobra chickens as well as a robust resident population. They are not to be trifled with.

Thanks Allan for another well written trip report. I've been interested in Mexico City for a long time, and your report was really helpful.

What a great trip report! Thank you for taking time to share the little details that make travel interesting. It was such a fun read!