Day 14: To Houston

After waking up at 6 AM, I immediately took an Uber to the airport. Upon arriving, I found out that our flight had been delayed by an hour, which didn't leave me with enough time to make my connecting flight from Houston to Roatan. They promised to provide me with accommodation for the night.

Upon arriving in Houston, customs and immigration went surprisingly smoothly so I decided to try my luck at making the connecting flight anyway. When I arrived at my gate 10 minutes before the stated departure time, a look of horror filled the airline representative's eyes while she told me the flight to Roatan had already left. I had a "JK" moment and she pointed me to the customer service desk to get my hotel and meal vouchers. A shuttle took me to the hotel after some confusion that "the driver won't stop for you unless you wave at him".

The Marriott experience was actually fantastic. I considered catching a two-hour roundtrip bus to downtown Houston and back, but after it began raining that settled the question for me. I spent all day in the hotel room with the exception of heading downstairs for a delicious chicken alfredo dinner.

It felt great to take what was effectively a vacation from my vacation, just one day was sufficient. I slept around 10 PM for the 10 AM flight I had the next day.

Day 13: Riding my Bicycle

Naturally, I still felt tipsy and disoriented when I woke up the next day around noon. I went out to breakfast at El Terrible Juan Cafe with a girl from South Africa who had gone out with us last night. Returning to the hostel, it didn't take me long to lie back down in bed and sip on water until the afternoon.

I decided what would do me some good would be to expend some energy, so I took out a bicycle that the hostel provides for free to guests and rode it east, down the separated bike lane along Calle Manuel Lopez Cotilla. I made it to a quaint park, Parque Revolución, where I stopped to sit and enjoy my surroundings.

The "dedicated bike lane" that Google claims to continue to run down Av. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla definitely does not exist, and I didn't feel like trying my luck all the way down to the city center, so I rode down to Av. de la Paz and over to La Cafétaria for dinner.

After dinner I rode back to the hostel to pack my things and tried to suppress the Friday night festivities and get some sleep. Luckily, the rain outside the dorm room windows drowned out most of the noise. 

Day 12: What Happens in Mexico Stays in Mexico, Especially Teeth

After breakfast at El Terrible Juan Cafe, I decided to do some more shopping. This time at nearby Centro Magno.

I ended up buying some very nice formal pants for about 15 USD each and some jeans that were somewhat expensive, about 35 USD (which, now that I'm rereading this blog post a month later, were 110% worth the price. I've worn them nearly everyday since getting back to Seattle). The man running the store where I bought the jeans was really friendly and talkative. He had lived in the US for a while, working near Sacramento at a Jelly Belly factory before returning to Mexico with his wife to start a family. His amiability may have influenced my decision to go a little overboard on the frugal shopping trip I was trying to achieve, but the pants are quite nice and were definitely worth the (for Mexico, relatively) high price. Unfortunately, my bag now has about 5 lbs of clothes in it that are completely unsuited for my next destination, tropical Roatan, Honduras 😆

In the evening, I went on the weekly pub crawl hosted by the hostel. The area we are in, Chapultepec, is known mostly for its large selection of bars and clubs, so we were within easy walking distance of many places.

After having a few beers from Bar Mex Wey with hostel friends, the pub crawl warmed up with a few tequila shots and we set out for our first destination, Rock It.

I came to Mexico hoping to hear a lot of Latin rhythms, but it turns out that Mexicans really love American Rock & Roll.

While there, it started dumping rain outside. We waited about an hour, but the rain didn't abate and we were made to walk to the next club in a downpour, soaking our shoes, socks, and clothes in the process.

This place even had a live band consisting of some mariachi-esque instruments. (I recall there being a trumpet, tuba, and drums).

For some reason I thought it would be funny to take about half a dozen selfies with this guy from Mumbai

Next stop... well, actually I can't remember where we ended up next. I didn't take any photos so there isn't any metadata I can rely on. I do remember it was a small nightclub and I had way too much fun dancing my ass off.

Afterwards, we stopped by the hostel, which is when my night should have ended, but poor decisions were made and I went with a few others to a nightclub where legend has it your night will always end if you stay up too late partying in the Chapultepec area, Bar Americas.

I was swinging pretty loose by this time and at some point during the festivities I grabbed a beer bottle, went to take a drink, and chipped my front tooth. The tooth bit went off somewhere onto the club floor and I was in no state of mind to go looking for it.

Whoops

This is actually the exact same tooth bit that I had chipped off as a child while ice skating. When that happened, perhaps 15 years ago, we were able to (incredibly) find the tooth bit on the ice rink and get it "glued" back in by a dentist. Then again, while in high school, about 7-8 years ago, I was playing the silent game in a pool with some friends and we were trying to make each other laugh by doing silly things. One of my friends spun around with his arms out and smacked the tooth bit out of my mouth. It landed on the white concrete of the pool floor. The ensuing search was only exacerbated by the refractions of the sun through the water. Amazingly, we found the tooth bit in that situation as well and had it glued back in. That tooth bit has been trying to get out of my skull for the past decade and a half and it finally succeeded in a place that I will never, ever find it again -- a nightclub in Guadalajara, Mexico.

At least now I can tell people that there will always be a part of me in Mexico. 

I soon left the nightclub and surrounded myself with plenty of water before passing out on my bed, around 4:30 AM.

Day 11: Bar Mex Wey

In the morning I went back to El Terrible Juan Cafe. Turns out that was more or less un terrible idea because the wifi was ungodly slow that morning. I left after an hour and went back to La Cafetaria. Around 3 PM I had completed my main tasks for the 3-day block of remote work I had planned and I went back to the hostel to drop off my things.

I then took an Uber all the way out to Centro Comercial Galerías.

After arriving and exiting the Uber among a torrential downpour, I bought myself a wall plug USB charger (I had forgotten mine at home and the first hostel I stayed at had had USB wall outlets). I also bought a few pounds worth of clothes, since this would be one of my last days to buy cheap clothing in Mexico.

Returning to the hostel, I found that they had opened up the hostel bar, Bar Mex Wey. The bar faces the front patio area of the hostel and is open to the public. I met some young locals that lived here in Guadalajara. While most people in Guadalajara speak at least some English, the younger generations are particularly comfortable conversing in English, which makes it very easy for someone like me (i.e., terrible Spanish speaking skills) to make friends with them.

I met a man my age who was originally from Colombia but had traveled the world before settling in Guadalajara recently. He was convinced robots would take over the world by 2030 and that everyone would spend their newly found free time traveling the world. I eventually settled in with a group of locals who were sitting around a table in the hostel's back patio area. They were very welcoming and I had a great time with them, staying up until 2 AM drinking and laughing.

Days 9 and 10: Cafe Hopping and Lucha Libre

Monday morning I walked five minutes from the hostel to El Terrible Juan Cafe.

It's a cozy and lush cafe with both indoor seating and outdoor patio seating within a garden. The drinks and food here were more "artsy" than the other cafes I would visit. I worked there until around 3 PM at which point my brain was about to explode and I left for the hostel.

People had seemed a bit cold at the hostel since I first arrived (I like to think that they just weren't as comfortable speaking English as I was) and I didn't make my first friend until later that evening, a girl from Mexico who loved cartoons. We watched Adventure Time together on the hostel's television in the common area.

On Tuesday morning, I went to Cafe Europa.

Cafe Europa sits along a busier and more touristy street. They had a decent promotion running that I took advantage of — 50 pesos for an americano and croissant.

In the afternoon I went to La Cafetaria.

La Cafetaria was my favorite of all the cafes I visited, though it may have primarily been due to the fact that they were the only place with decent internet speeds. The intersection the cafe sits upon is only moderately noisy, and plants and flowers abound throughout the outdoor patio seating and within the restaurant itself. The food here is very tasty and cheap and they have a decent selection of coffees and a good selection of teas. I worked until about 7 PM before returning to the hostel.

There was a lucha libre event that night hosted by the hostel, and at 8:30 PM we Uber'd over to the hostel's second, centro location. They warmed us up with a free round of tequila and we walked five minutes to Arena Coliseo.

Lucha Libre is definitely an experience to have if you ever visit Mexico proper. There are two distinct seating sections, a lower, ground-floor section and a stadium seating section behind a fence which circumscribes the lower section. Both sections encircle and center upon the lucha libre ring. Naturally, seats in the lower section cost a bit more than the further, upper section, so an activity that both sections expend a lot of energy on is chanting insults at each other. I didn't understand anything they were saying, but from asking around later it seems the upper section makes fun of the lower section for being "below" them, both literally and metaphorically, and the lower sections make fun of the upper sections for being poor, wishing they too could be in the lower section, etc. It's all in good fun, of course. No one is insulting seriously or on a personal level.

I didn't get any good quality videos of the actual wrestling, but it's not difficult to find videos of matches online.

The wrestling itself is pretty fantastical, in the same vein as WWE wrestling in the USA. Supposedly the outcome is predetermined and there are overarching story lines that run across multiple nights of matches. The history and symbolism of lucha libre within Mexico is rich and multi-faceted and I can't pretend to know much about it.

Afterwards, most of our group went out to the bars, but myself and one other girl had plans tomorrow (I had one more day of remote working) and we took an Uber back to our hostel around 12 AM.

Day 8: To Guadalajara

My flight to GDL didn't leave until 3:55 PM, so I allowed myself to join the walking tour put on each day at 10:35 AM by our hostel, somewhat ironically on my very last day in Mexico City. We walked to Avenida 20 de Deciembre and up around the Catedral Metropolitana.

Somehow I never realized that the unearthed ruins of Temple Mayor, the main Aztec temple, are located just to the east of the giant cathedral, which I'd seen just about every day during my time here. This is why you do the walking tour!

We saw Palacio de Bellas Artes and the inside of the opposing post office before ending the tour at an upstairs bar located along Avenida 5 de Mayo, one of the main walking streets.

One last look at Palacio de Bellas Artes

Returning to the hostel I had plenty of time to gather my things and get on the metro back to MEX. My flight to GDL left two hours late. There's a nice feature on flightaware.com that if you search for your flight number it will tell you the average delay of that flight. This specific flight left, on average, over an hour late. Had I known that I probably would have tried to show up at the gate just 20-30 minutes in advance rather than more than an hour.

Arriving in Guadalajara, I took an Uber to my hostel, Hostel Hospedarte Chapultepec.

It's warmer and greener in Guadalajara than in Mexico City. I'm planning on working remotely for the next three days, taking advantage of events in the evening, then having Thursday and Friday completely open before flying to Roatan, Honduras on Saturday.

Day 7: Meeting an Old Friend and an Extravagant Night Out

In the afternoon I met with an old friend from high school, Daniel, who I had ran many miles with back in the day. He was in Mexico City to complete a priesthood program that he said would take at least a year. Both Daniel's parents are from Mexico, but this was his first time ever in the country. His mind must be racing!

We watched some freestyle jump ropers in the square near the store where Daniel's friend was doing some shopping. The street artists included me in one of their demonstrations where they gather a bunch of volunteers from the crowd and jump over us in a line. I was made the crux of many of their good-natured jokes as I was obviously the only non-Latin-American in attendance 👱

Afterwards Daniel, myself, and his friend got lunch at a nearby restaurant before saying our adioses.

It's great to see you again, Daniel!

I then set out to the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino, an art museum in the suburbs of Mexico City containing Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paintings. But after just a few metro stops I found out from their website that the Frida Kahlo paintings were on loan, which caused me to lose my motivation to make the two-hour roundtrip out to the museum.

Returning to the hostel, I met up once again with the two Australian girls that had been included in our group from last night. They were meeting their university friend Rodrigo, who lives in Mexico City and who they hadn't seen in 10 years!

Rodrigo works in the Mexican film industry and to describe his personality you only need to quote him from that night: "Your thirties are just your twenties with money."

We all met at La Capital, a nice restaurant in the upscale area of Condesa.

After we ordered drinks, Rodrigo would order dishes on the menu for us and we would share them potluck style. Two hours of dining later, we split the bill evenly and went out to a jazz club, Casa Franca.

Casa Franca looks like it occupies what was once a colonial apartment. It has various small rooms with furniture arranged in an intimate setting. Two bars sandwich a performance room, which also acts as the upstairs entrance to the entire establishment.

The mezcal flowed freely that night until around 2am when the Australian girls and I took an Uber back to the hostel.

Salud!

Day 6: Teotihuacan

In the morning I went with the two British girls I had dined with last night, Charlotte and her sister Lexi, to the Teotihuacan Pyramids. There are two pyramids, the larger one being the Pyramid of the Sun, and the smaller one the Pyramid of the Moon. After taking a local bus to Terminal Central de Autobuses del Norte, we took another bus an hour northwest to Teotihuacan.

A poorly representative photo of the sprawl of Mexico City on the way to Teotihuacan

The steps leading up the Pyramid of the Sun are steep, but you reach the top surprisingly quickly, that is, if you take adequate breaks after each section of stairs. Weather was nearly perfect when we went -- overcast, but not hot. To the southwest, the edge of Mexico City's sprawl could be seen. In other directions, small towns lazed in the desert. We took bucketloads of photos and a snack break before climbing back down.

Charlotte, Lexi, and I with the Pyramid of the Moon in the background

After climbing Pyramid of the Moon (halfway up was as far as was allowed), we exited through Puerta 3 and caught the bus back to Mexico City after snacking on some fruit cups from a nearby vendor. The bus back to Centro Historico from the main bus station was so full it felt like there was a queue just to get off the bus. You would need to get up from your seat a few stops early so that you could shuffle back a few people, one stop at a time, before arriving at the exit doors hopefully by the time your stop came up.

Later that night myself, the British girls, and the Australian girl from the previous night and her friend who had just arrived that day went out to dinner. The place we originally had in mind didn't have space for our group but we found a building nearby that had a ground floor bar, and about a dozen different restaurants and bars in a loft and covered balcony area upstairs. I would later find out it was actually a hostel.

The place was really neat, with many large, picnic bench style tables for sitting at, and you had your choice of many different varieties of food.

One side of the upstairs loft area

We turned in relatively early at 11 because the British girls had an early bus the next morning.

Day 5: Chapultepec Castle

In the afternoon I set off by myself on the metro to Bosque de Chapultepec, one of the largest city parks in the western hemisphere and certainly the largest in Mexico City.

My tentative plan was to first visit Chapultepec Castle then the National Museum of Anthropology as well as see what the park itself has to offer. The vegetation and meandering paths of the park are a welcome respite from the city and the temperature was noticeably cooler. A sloping path brings you to Chapultepec Castle.

The combination of the breeze and views of the city from the top puts you in a contemplative mood. Wandering the castle grounds you stumble upon surprisingly bold artwork and warmly quaint architecture.

The ceiling mural of the previous photo

After seeing the castle I decided to skip the National Museum of Anthropology because rain was in the near forecast and I really wasn't that interested in looking at artifacts of Mesoamerican culture.

Back at the hostel, I met my Australian bunkmate and joined her and her two British friends out for dinner. The three of them were good company and a good time was had by all (Except for maybe Ashley, the Australian, after we accused her of not being able to read 😂). Upon returning to the hostel I ran into another American whom I had met that morning. He had liked the hostel we were currently staying at so much that he canceled the AirBnb that he had booked for the next week and with the money he saved from the cancellation attended a 4-hour tasting room at one of the best restaurants in Mexico City and the world, Pujol. What an experience to hear about!

He, myself, and a Dutch/Lebanese girl that was soon to be starting her masters at a university here in Mexico City chatted in the common room late into the night until retiring ourselves to the dorms.

Day 4: Palacio de Bellas Artes, Biblioteca Vasconselos, and Zinco Jazz Club

I had spent enough time with my symptoms at this point to be near certain that I had some sort of parasitic worm infection -- either from something I ate, or most likely from naively drinking the tap water regularly at the beginning of my trip. I picked up some Mebendazole from the nearby pharmacy, a low-risk medication that is commonly used to treat such diseases. After dosing up, I walked to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, known for its opulent architecture and for housing works by some of Mexico's greatest muralists.

One of the most stunning works there is Man Controller of the Universe, a massive mural by Diego Rivera. Originally titled Man at the Crossroads and commissioned by the Rockefeller Center, there was a furor in the press after it was unveiled that the mural contained a portrait of Lenin. Rivera was sacked by The Rockefeller Center and the mural destroyed. Rivera eventually returned to Mexico to complete the mural under a new title.

My appetite had come back with a vengeance at this point and I picked up a juice and a sim card as I meandered south of Alemada Central. Lacking ideas of where to go next, I took the metro back to the hostel. After a refreshing shower, I took an Uber to an interesting looking library, Biblioteca Vasconselos.

I have to admit part of the reason I was intrigued to see this library was their Sala de Música, a room full of instruments that library users can use.

The floating shelves of Biblioteca Vasconcelos

I spoke with the man at the front desk of the music room and he told me it was necessary to get a library card before playing on the pianos. My reaction: Why not? So after speaking with the lady at the front desk I was directed to the Credenciados room where I spoke with a few people, filled out a form, had my photo taken, and voilà! I had a Mexico City library card.

My crowning achievement thus far as a foreign language learner

I returned to La Sala de Música to put my card in the queue with all the other library uses. The library was only open another hour, and my name didn't come up before 10 minutes to closing and they started to shut the room down. The man at the desk had some pity on me and said I could play just a tantito, so I did get to exercise my fingers for about five minutes.

Leaving the library, I entered the adjacent Forum Buenavista Centro Comercial, a joint train station / shopping mall. Exhausted from so much cultural immersion, I made dinner of a McDonald's big mac combo meal before taking the metro back to Centro Historical.

My day wasn't over yet, though. I had found a jazz club near my hostel, Zinco Jazz Club, that was having a performance by Las Swing Sisters that night.

Doors opened at 9 PM and the performance ran from 10:30 to midnight.

After a full day of activities, I walked the half kilometer back to the hostel without incident and swiftly succumbed to sleep.

Day 3: Polanco

I was low on energy and didn't have much of an appetite so I spent the morning at the hostel. In the afternoon I decided to go out for a walk.

Not wanting to return to the hostel for the rest of the day, but not feeling well enough for anything too adventurous, I took the metro to one of Mexico City's most upscale barrios, Polanco.

Piano stairs at Polanco metro station! They sounded a bit out of tune to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After buying an umbrella from one of the metro station hawkers, I set out by foot along a rainy Avenida Horacio.

I stopped at a cathedral, Parroquia de San Agustín, and the shopping mall El Palacio de Hierro Polanco. After resting in the food court, utilizing the free wifi to look for nearby attractions, I decided to just turn in for the night, taking the metro back to the hostel.