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.
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