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.