Mexico City – Last Days

I think I did pretty well in writing five blogs on this trip. Still, not the daily blogging I had planned. Now excuse me while I go full-travel blog on you for the last few days.

I squeezed in an exhaustive amount of activities in the first week. In addition to going to Las Grutas and Teotihuacán, I visited Museo Nacional de Antropología, El Palacio de Bellas Artes (for the murals, though the theater is also amazing), Castillo de Chapultepec, Museo Tamayo, and the Museo del Objeto. I wanted to go to the Museo de Arte Moderna and many others, but had reached museum burnout.

For food I ate at local and high-end places. To be honest, I liked it all the same. There’s just more fuss and finer dining ware at the more expensive restaurants. The most I paid for a meal was around $60, and that included tip, two drinks and appetizers. I went to Carmela Y Sal with an expat American who I met on the tour to Las Grutas. I drank a cool smoking mezcal drink that made me existentially hung-over the next day, and we talked about how ex-pat dating is much like dating in LA. I also ate at Lardo, Azul, where the tacos seemed like just a fancy version of the local tacos, just wrapped in a banana leaf, and Merotoro, where I had grasshoppers on the beef tar tar. I regret not going on the “Eat Like A Local” food tour which is owned by women and pays partners and vendors a living wage. Next time.

In my last few days, exhausted from being such a hardcore tourist, I wandered around Condesa and Roma, looked at stores and sat in coffee shops. I find that sometimes I discover just as much about a city through aimless wandering, like when I walked to the amazing Parque Mexico. It’s an enormous green, tree-filled park filled with cute canopied benches and teenagers making out. It’s a great place to walk after a churro from El Moro.

For my last night, I moved to another B&B because I decided to extend my trip a few days and my B&B had been AirBnB’d to a bachelorette party. I liked the location of this first B&B on a quiet street near an Helado shop, but won’t say the name of the place because the manager became a little too friendly. Since my first day he Whatsapped me things like, “What are you up to?” I should definitely know better (especially because I danced salsa for 15 years) but at first I thought maybe this is what modern B&Bs are like now, like you have your own personal concierge. But, no, once I checked out he sent me a flurry of texts about taking me out, until I gave him the “friend zone” text. Which, yes, is a lie, we will never be friends, but I was just feeling too chill from being on vacation to get mad. I think because I was alone and maybe an American woman (who might have a reputation for being slutty), he thought that I was somehow available. I don’t think he’s a bad guy, but besides it being unprofessional, I would prefer not to have the managers of the place where I am staying hit on me. Which brings me to an important point about solo traveling as a woman. Men gonna be men. In the event of feeling too uncomfortable, I would have reached out to the owner or left. Which brings me back to a point in my first blog about solo traveling in Mexico: always stay alert.

Many of my friends were shocked to hear that I was going to Mexico City by myself. “Isn’t it dangerous!” said more than one. I mean, in some parts, yeah, but so is Venice, where break-ins are routine. Where else is dangerous? Any American school in a state with lax gun laws. But I feel so at home in Mexico in a way other foreigners might not because I have spent so much time there as a kid and an adult. It was the a place I visited so often with my mother. It was like our Disneyland. With less costumes. A place filled with magic, fun and happiness.

Also, Condesa and Roma are Mexican version of Brooklyn, filled with white people (American or Mexican), which did feel problematic. As much as I speak Spanish fluently, I did feel like a privileged remote working expat sitting in a coffee shop with my MacBook Pro and Cappuccino. It’s inherently an imperialist position, whether I like it or not. There’s not much I can do about it except speak in Spanish, respect customs, tip well, and take an interest in the lives of the people I meet, the cleaning staff, Uber drivers, tour guides, baristas and waiters. Every interaction seems so much kinder than in the US. Though Mexico has its share of problems, the culture, and deep sense of mysticism, seems to fulfill the people in a way that Target never will. (Though, I do love a good Target.).

Most Americans who choose to visit Mexico have some respect for the culture, mostly because the press in the US about Mexico is so negative, that they have somehow found a way to discount or avoid it. Most of the expats or travelers from America who I met and befriended are like-minded progressive liberal people, like myself, but I did run into condescending tourists. And I can see Mexico City becoming a playground for Americans who love the cheap and, frankly, better food. The gentrification of Condensa and Roma has already pushed the locals out of the city.

Overall, my trip was incredible. Both to be in Mexico City and to be a solo traveller.