Four Days in Mexico City

What we did, what we saw, what we loved

Last week, Clover and I traveled to Mexico City for four and a half days. Neither of us had been before, and we were really excited to explore a new city. CDMX did not disappoint! We had an absolute blast and fell in love with the city, and already have plans for what we’d like to do when we someday go back. This post is a chronicle of what we did with some commentary. We are certainly no experts on CDMX (see above), but if you’re planning to travel there, maybe you’ll find something helpful in this post. Either way, you will find that it is insanely long. Like, way too long for email - click “read in browser” for the full thing. If you like reading my detailed travel chronicles, feel free to check out this post about Provincetown’s Women’s Week and this post about a hot springs-centric road trip Clover and I took in Oregon in 2023.

Some general principles of this trip: due to being busy and overwhelmed by life, we did very little advanced planning. We got some very helpful lists of recommendations from friends (thank you to Hanna and Juliette!) and we sat down two days before leaving to write a very loose itinerary of neighborhoods to visit and main activities to do each day. We wound up totally changing the order around, but pretty much doing everything on the list. We did not do anything that involved advanced planning or making reservations. So, no Casa Azul (totally booked up by the time we went on the website to reserve tickets), and no Teotihuacan (though now I’m dying to go). We also did not do much in the way of nightlife - we went to bars, but didn’t go out dancing or anything, and we were back to our hotel by 11:00 PM most nights. We wound up packing our days so much that we didn’t really have the energy to do much at night, but I’d love to explore nightlife a bit more on a future trip. Okay, let’s go! I’ll share what we did each day, and then some general notes/reflections at the end, plus *Clover’s Corner.*

Monday

This was a travel day! We landed in CDMX at around 2:30. Clover wanted to try to take public transit to our hotel rather than take an Uber, and I reluctantly consented, lol. (We almost never use Uber or Lyft in the U.S. - we pretty much bike, walk, take transit, or drive ourselves everywhere. However, we wound up being a bit more flexible on this policy for this trip.) Taking the train involved walking about 15 minutes through a maze of bus stops and vendor stalls and then up into an enormous concrete elevated walkway to get to the train station. Upon arriving there, we learned that: a. the card readers at the turnstiles didn’t accept our credit cards, and b. the ticket machines were cash-only. We hadn’t taken out cash yet. Public transportation attempt 1: Fail.

We gave up and called an Uber, which whisked us through the city to our hotel in Roma Norte. Roma Norte, as we’d been advised by friends, is a fancy-ish “hipster” neighborhood. It was a cute area to stay in, and also made me at times feel like I was in a global millenial theme park, lol. But those moments were fairly fleeting - it is a beautiful area in walking distance of a lot of nice things, and the *hipness* is also mixed with just, like, regular stuff.

We stayed at the Hotel Milan, which I would rate as pretty good. It was about $40 USD/night for a room with a queen sized bed. It was very clean and normal, and the people working there were all really nice. The negative aspects were that the bed was pretty hard and there was a decent amount of street noise at night that you could hear through the windows. I am a pretty noise-sensitive sleeper and with ear plugs and some white noise I was able to sack out every night, so it was nothing crazy, but the ear plugs were necessary most nights. Anyway, you get what you pay for, and I’d say Hotel Milan was a good value. Note: it was important to us NOT to use AirBnb for this trip, as the housing and cost of living crisis in Mexico City (largely due to tourism and “digital nomads” [more on that later]) is pretty bad. Also, staying at a hotel is chic. I’m not fumbling with a lockbox, thank you!!

After checking in and taking a desperately-needed shower, we went out for a walk around the neighborhood and immediately were giddy at the sunshine, the jacaranda trees, and the beautiful buildings everywhere. Here’s Clover:

I quickly became ravenous, and after a bit of fumbling we located a normal-seeming taqueria. Unfortunately I did not get the name of this place. It was extremely good. We had a variety of meaty tacos (birria, suadero with guacamole), a tostada, a consomme, and Topo Chicos. We went from very hungry to very full in roughly 5 minutes. Note: as you will see going forward, we were extremely NOT vegetarian on this trip, but I am now home and back to my old ways.

We then wandered over to Parque Mexico in the neighboring area of Condesa (a neighborhood that’s even more upscale than Roma Norte). This is a large, lush, beautiful, manicured park with great people- and dog-watching. There’s a big dog park, a duck pond, lots of little benches, and a big open plaza where people gather around dusk. There were tons of kids running around playing soccer, people practicing dances, well-behaved off-leash dogs running after balls, and lots of people just chilling. We observed, not for the last time, how lively and well-used public spaces are in CDMX.

We finished the night with a cocktail at Bar Felix, which was close to our hotel. A vivacious local pelvic floor therapist wandered over to light our cigarettes and chat with us. She recommended a bunch of high-end restaurants to us (we did not go to any of them, lol) and a gelato place that we later learned is only open one day a week. She was beautiful and iconic, and appeared to be truly living her best life. Bless.

Mezcal negroni and a manhattan, if you were wondering.

We then returned to Hotel Milan and conked the fuck out, exhausted.

Tuesday

For our first full day, we decided to walk to Centro Historico (a neighborhood which, as you might glean from the name, is the historic center of the city) to do some sightseeing. Before we set off, we went to Cafe Tormenta for coffee, a rec from the sexy pelvic floor therapist. It turned out to be a coffee cart covered in punk stickers and staffed exclusively by hot, slightly alt girls, and it had good espresso. Thumbs up. We drank our coffee in a beautiful nearby park with an enormous statue of David in a fountain. Then we got breakfast at a nearby cart (I think called Roma Quesadilla?). We had blue corn tlacoyos - thick tortillas with cheese and toppings piled on top. Sooo good.

Soaking up the sun + breakfast

We then walked to Centro, which took about an hour. We stopped on the way for iced mokas and at a perfume chain store called Fraiche to sniff a million perfumes. We wound up each buying a perfume (which I was convinced would later be seized by TSA, but it wasn’t).

In Centro, we checked out the Palacio de Belles Artes (didn’t pay admission to see the galleries, just poked our heads in to see the insane marble lobby) and the adjoining park. Then we accidentally walked through Madero street, which turned out to be the Faneuil Hall of CDMX (for all you Massholes). There was a really beautiful church there called the Convente Grande de San Francisco which we checked out. Hilariously, there was an enormous tent outside it selling tickets to a Venetian-themed ghost story experience (?).

We then wanted to go see Diego Rivero murals at the Palacio Nacional and/or Secretaría de Educación Pública (both working government buildings where you can view Rivera murals for free). At the Palacio Nacional, there was some sort of large protest happening (one of MANY protests we wandered across - more on that at the end!) and so the building was closed to the public. The education building was also randomly closed. At this point we were starving and also very tired from navigating through large crowds in the sun. We came across a street with a bunch of vendors near the education building and wolfed down a chicken tinga quesadilla, some tacos, and a huge orange juice.

We were bummed that we’d been thwarted by the public murals, so we walked back past the Palacio de Belles Artes to the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, which was built to house his epic mural “Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central.” Note: all the museums we visited cost between $3-5 USD for admission. I discovered that I love Diego Rivera’s art!! The museum is also fun because there are interpretive signs telling you who everyone in the mural is (in English and Spanish).

not my pic, obviously

We really should have called it a day at this point, but we decided to go to the Mercado de Artesanías La Ciudadela, a handicraft market that was sort of nearby. We were too tired to stay there long, but I bought some papier-mache fruits and Clover bought a little painting, and we decided to come back later in our trip because there was a ton of beautiful stuff there.

We walked back to the hotel and crashed for awhile (something we did before dinner every day of the trip) and then got dinner at Pozolería Teoixtla, a nearby restaurant. We shared a pozole verde and some enchiladas verdes, and both had margaritas, all of which was very good and well-priced. Then we went to La Nuclear, a bar in the neighborhood which a friend had recommended to us. We loooved this place! They serve mezcal shots and pulque, which is a lightly alcoholic fermented beverage made from agave nectar. As we learned (on Wikipedia), it takes TWELVE YEARS to grow agave plants big enough to harvest the nectar. As we also learned, there is a saying in Spanish that pulque is almost meat, because it’s so nutritious. We love drinking pulque, and this bar is so divey and cute.

me w/ the pulque mug

Wednesday

Wednesday morning, we went to a cafe in Condesa called El Minutito recommended to us both by Clover’s brother and the hot pelvic floor therapist. This place was VERY stylized, with all mid-century modern furnishings and male baristas in suspenders. We had very good flat whites, and I had a fancy parfait of unpasteurized yogurt, raw honey, and pistachios, which tasted faintly of hay.

We then took an Uber to Museo Anahuacalli. HUGELY RECOMMEND this museum! It was designed by Diego Rivera to house his enormous collection of precolumbian art, mixed with contemporary Mexican art. There was a wall text with a quote from Rivera’s second wife complaining about how he was always going to archeological sites and walking around digging up artifacts and licking them and then taking them home, and how his house was full of a million pieces of pottery on every surface. The building is built of volcanic rock and is absolutely incredible - just one of the coolest architectural experiences I’ve ever had. You a ascend from a cave-like first floor to a second and third floor flooded with light, to a surprise at the top (won’t give it away). The contemporary art currently on display, which is mixed in amongst the precolumbian art, was also really cool - paintings, video, ceramics, dynamic sound installations. After we finished in the museum, we had some much-needed fancy iced coffees at the museum cafe - the espresso tonic with tamarind was particularly insane.

While in the neighborhood, we also went to the Parque Ecológico Huayamilpas on the recommendation of our friend Juliette. It’s a kind of locals-only, overgrown park with trails and raised boardwalks. There was supposedly a small fee to enter but the person in the booth didn’t seem intent on actually collecting it, so we just walked past, lol. It was a beautiful place to walk around and we saw some cool plants and birds, including parrots!

Then we took another Uber to Coyoacán, the neighborhood where the Casa Azul (aka the Frida Kahlo museum) is. We went to the Mercado Coyoacán and got tostadas (the aguachile one was the best!) and wandered around, buying some syrupy fruits that we then never ate. We strolled around the neighborhood, which is beautiful, passing long lines at Casa Azul. We wandered over to the Trotsky Museum, which reminded me of a communist museum I went to in Vietnam when I was 20 - lots of blown-up black and white pictures mounted on stark white walls. We didn’t really connect with this museum TBH, but the garden was really pretty and it was funny to watch really normy American families wander in to read wall texts about how Trotsky was the most persecuted guy of all time. It was also a good opportunity for Clover to tell me about the communist history she learned as a dirty punk in Worcester, MA. I know almost nothing about communist history, as I was never a dirty punk in Worcester, MA.

We crossed a huge highway to check out a cemetery, which was cool, and then were kicked out because the cemetery was closing and also we were tired. We decided to try to take the subway home. This time we were able to buy a card and get onto the train. The train sat, doors open, at the station for ten minutes while trains whizzed by in the other direction. Finally, we moved and went two stops. Then, ten more minutes of sitting. We gave up and got an Uber. Public transportation attempt 2: Fail.

That night was the only night of our trip that we got a little drunky. We went to a bar called El Palenquito on my friend Hanna’s recommendation, and got a flight of mezcal and a queso fundido with flor de calabaza. This fucking queso was INSANELY TASTY. Then we walked over to Revuelta Queer House, a queer bar that Clover had found. To enter the bar, you go up a flight of stairs to an art gallery (also part of the bar) on the second floor, and then up another flight to the rooftop bar. The bar was packed with hotties on a Wednesday night - a real mix of fags and dykes. There was a hot DJ spinning fun club mixes of pop songs. There were bartenders making elaborate drinks with 10 ingredients. It was popping. We were impressed!

An cute anxious twink host came up to us and asked if we had a reservation. We were like, no? It turned out that the bar was mostly sit-down, and you had to reserve the tables. We could get drinks standing up, but there wasn’t really a good place to stand without being in the way of servers. Eventually the host came back to us and told us that we could go to a table in a tucked-away corner reserved for people with no reservations, lol. We had three drinks each there (not super cheap, BTW - closer to U.S. prices) and had a very cute time but also we wished that it was more of a stand-up-and-mingle set-up so that we could’ve tried to chat up local queers! This was true of most bars, cafes, etc. that we went to in CDMX - at places where in the US you would order at the counter, in CDMX you typically sit down immediately and have a server. Anyway, I do recommend checking out this bar if you go, and maybe make a reservation so you can sit in a more central location and be amongst the crowd.

We were quite tipsy by the time we left and got a quick street taco. We also stopped in a late-night bookstore that was open and staffed by cute punks, and Clover bought a book of political cartoons from the 1970s. Unfortunately I did fully eat shit while walking home and skinned my knee, lol.

Thursday

By this time, we were getting kind of tired! I was feeling especially beat this morning. We stopped in for coffee at an adorable new cafe we noticed on the street, called Cara de Taza Cafe (they have lots of fun hand-made ceramic mugs with faces on them) and then walked to a kind of mid (by the standards of this trip) chilaquiles place. From there, we Ubered to a fancy perfume store called Xinu that Clover really wanted to go to. This place was so cool!! They make six different perfumes from local botanicals, and they display them all on a big table, surrounded by dried plants and whimsical glassware. For each perfume, you can smell how it smells fresh, how it smells after 6 hours of wear, and how it smells on fabric. There was one that smelled exactly like green leaves, and a floral one that smelled more for-real like a flower than any perfume I’ve ever smelled. Clover bought one that had smoky vanilla notes. There was one that I really liked but it felt like too much of a splurge for me at the moment.

Then we walked to the Archeological Museum. We’d initially thought we might skip this, but Hanna’s recommendation list marked this as a don’t-skip and she was RIGHT! There was a kind of overwhelming line of tourists to get in, but it moved quickly and once we were in it felt spacious. It’s a gorgeous and incredibly well-done museum. We learned so much about Teotihuacan, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and more. Highly, highly recommend. Even though I was feeling exhausted and my feet hurt, I kept wanting to see just a little bit more.

cool stuff from the museum

We stopped outside for a snack of fruit, agua de jamaica, and potato chips, and wandered into the Bosque de Chapultepec, an enormous city park. We sat and watched people in little paddleboats on the lake, and then walked over to the botanical garden in the park. Loved this botanical garden - it was much bigger than it seemed from the outside, and had lots of beautiful cacti and other plants. This park also has lots of herons, and we watched one for a long while. Unfortunately we weren’t able to explore the park further!

We decided to take the bus home. We walked to the bus stop that Google Maps told us to and stood there as small purple buses with unclear signage kept pulling up and driving away, each one telling us that it didn’t have a working card reader. We didn’t have the right change to pay in cash. Also, we could not tell which ones were going where we needed to go. We gave up and again took an Uber. Public transit attempt 3: Fail.

After a siesta, we got dinner from Taquería Orinoco, a chain that had a location next to our hotel. We’d seen long lines there every night, as it is both good and clouty. We beat the rush by eating early, and we got tacos al pastor, a taco de chicharron, an order of fried smashed potatoes, a bean soup, and a very tasty enormous guava hibiscus agua fresca. Everything was really good - the chicharron taco and the bean soup were my favorites. The salsas on the table here were also great.

abundant spread at orinoco

We rallied to go to a salsa dancing meetup called Bachata Feeling, which was hosted at a 1950s-American-diner themed restaurant. We wanted to do at least some dancing on this trip, and considered going to a salsa club, but this seemed like a more chill option. It consisted of a group class followed by a social, and it was free for ladies if you arrived before 8 PM. We got there a little too early and got some pulque around the corner and then circled back. The instructors, who were all magnetically good at dancing, led us through a warmup and then we broke into two groups: one for salsa and the other for another dance style I didn’t catch - we joined the salsa group. The teachers led us through a solo salsa combo, and then a couples’ combo, and then we combined the two. For the couple’s dance, all the men and a couple of women stayed stationary as “leaders,” and the remainder of the women rotated around as “followers.” I am twitchy about touching with men who I don’t know and so I was a little nervous, but it was a very chill and respectful environment and it took the pressure off dancing with any one person to know you were always about to rotate. The instruction was obviously all in Spanish and the routine was fairly complex, so this class was CHALLENGING! By 9 PM, Clover and I were both sweating and tired, so, though we had fun, we decided to bounce. We went back to La Nuclear and had more pulque and watched a very cute casual jazz show in their back room.

the decor at the diner restaurant; pulque and jazz

Friday

Our last day! We went back to Cara de Taza Cafe, and then walked over to the nearby Museo del Objeto del Objeto, a small museum that showcases art mixed with everyday objects. The show on display was work by incarcerated artists, with whom the museum has a relationship and provides art classes. There was a lot of really cool and beautiful art (I especially loved one artist’s elaborate fantasy drawings rendered in ballpoint pen) although the objects mixed in as part of the museum’s conceit didn’t really add much IMO.

Cara de Taza; art at MODO

For lunch, we had the best meal of our trip at El Hidalguense in Condesa at Hanna’s recommendation. It’s a barbacoa restaurant open only Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. You can get a kilo of barbacoa and tortillas to make your own tacos, but that’s pricy and also seemed like way too much for us, especially with the tummy troubles that we were both at this point suffering from (especially Clover). We shared an order of three barbacoa tacos, a platter that came with perfect avocado slices, crumbly queso fresco, and a tangy nopales salad, and an order of guacamole, plus cafés de olla. Everything was absolutely perfect and delicious, but the barbacoa especially was insane. Each bite hit you first with rich fattiness, then deep smokiness, then a delicious goat flavor. We wanted more but knew that it would not be wise. Note: this was the splurgiest meal of our trip, basically comparable in cost to going out to eat in the US. Very worth it, huge recommend.

our spread; clover reacting to her first bite of barbacoa

We went for a little walk around Parque Mexico to digest, and then headed into Centro to go back to the Secretaría de Educación Pública to try again to see the murals. We decided to take the bus, which involved a connection. We had to wait a while for the second bus and almost gave up and walked, but it eventually came. It also gave Clover an opportunity to chat in Spanish for a while with a kindly older man at the bus stop. Public transportation attempt 4: Success!

Mural attempt 2: also success! The Rivera murals at the education building really are amazing. The building is built around an open courtyard, with murals (mostly by Rivera, a few by other artists) on all the walls. Lots of communist propaganda and murals of common people at work. We stayed a while and could have stayed longer but I got too thirsty and under-caffeinated.

We stopped at a leftist bookstore for an espresso, and then headed back to the Ciudadela market for a last round of souvenirs. We got a bunch of little gifts for friends, some ceramics for our house, a quartz mushroom lamp, and we each splurged on a silver and opal bracelet. We took the bus back to the hotel - Public transportation attempt number 4.5: Also success! I will note that the bus got SUPERRR crowded (and I noticed a lot of buses we saw were similar). If you, like me, have claustrophobic tendencies, you might find this to be challenging. Anyway, we had dinner at a nearby Yucatán-style restaurant called El Habanerito. We had delicious cochinita pibil tacos, empanadas de chaya (a leafy green), and chicken and lime soup, and a less-delicious order of hardboiled egg tacos. Clover was really suffering in the digestive department at this point, so we called it a night. Otherwise, we probably would have gone back to Revuelta Queer House. And that was our trip!! Bye!!

Just kidding! Here are some stray observations that didn’t fit in elsewhere:

Protests: Feels notable that we saw like ten different protests (either active protests, or evidence left behind by them) during our four days. One was about compensation for indigenous language translators for the government, a couple we were not able to comprehend, and the rest were all about women’s rights. I really got the sense that, even if racism, patriarchy, and homophobia are serious issues for people in CDMX (toootally unlike here…), there’s a really vibrant protest culture. Cool to see.

On the other hand…

Police: We were actually shocked by the number of cops everywhere. Just big groups of cops, milling around, wheeling their bikes, getting into and out of big police trucks. We only saw them actively hassling someone once, but it definitely made me uneasy to see so many cops all the time.

Digital Nomads: Don’t really have too much to say about this other than that it seems like Americans (and Europeans maybe?) posting up in CDMX to work remotely while getting paid in foreign currency and paying no local income tax is fucking things up in Mexico City. It does sound like they’re trying to regulate it a bit more, which seems needed. At the airport on the way home I heard a 20-year-old American girl with a Mexican boyfriend who she met working at summer camp loudly telling everyone who would listen about her plans to get a remote US job and move to Mexico City and I was like :(

We saw this sign in Condesa telling people to become “ethical nomads”- the link was encouraging them to pay voluntary taxes. I am fascinated by this discourse.

Gay Stuff: Just wanted to say that we felt very comfortable being visibly queer on this trip. We saw gay couples all over the place, and people consistently gendered Clover correctly (we got a lot of “hola, chicas” when walking into places :)). Also there’s a wonderful culture of people canoodling on park benches there which made me feel very liberated in my PDA tendencies. Ok Clover take it away!

Clover’s Corner: Hey everyone it’s Clover, from the photos. Ciudad de Mexico was a beautiful, lively, troubled, enormous city that we saw only a fraction of. I was really drawn to a vacation here specifically because it is not just a vacation spot or resort town, but a global megalopolis twice the size of New York City with tons of history and factions and viewpoints. Those who know me well know I love The City, and seeing large cities around the world is a desire I only just got to indulge this last week with CDMX.

In general, I loved CDMX for its constant sense of historicity — it felt a given pedestrian was constantly reminded, by architecture, of the colonial roots of the city, and by culture of the pre-colonial roots as well. I loved how much I learned on this trip, and I think I might’ve become a bit of a Mexiphile, or at least my interest in precolumbian Mesoamerican society and city-states was enflamed. The museums are really top-tier. It was a real joy to enter a gargantuan city I felt I knew almost nothing about and be able to leave feeling like I actually got a sense of its lineage (still lots to learn about the 20th century though).

I also loved CDMX for its sense of possibility and multiplicity even through there’s trouble — it’s not news that the city has its share of issues, including soaring cost of living (partially caused by tourism like ours and “digital nomadism”), cartel influence in the nightlife, general neoliberalism bullshit, and literally sinking into the ancient lakebed that its built on; yet a sense of creation and purpose seems to live on most everywhere you look. That’s also something I enjoy about a place like Philadelphia, where it feels like, even if things are shit, things are also possible, so I loved seeing that in CDMX.

Obviously a capital city is less a vacation spot and more a place you actually live. Cities reveal themselves more authentically as you get to know people, create a routine, and find your niche. Ojala, we visit Mexico City enough that that starts to happen for us! If there are other global cities that had a magic you couldn’t resist, please do let us know in the comments. I really want to visit more.

Alright that’s all, if you read this far, THANKS you crazy bitch!!