I spent 2 weeks in Mexico City and had the best time, it is a true world class city with so much going on and so much to see. I was only able to scratch the surface and will definitely be returning. Honestly, I spent most of my time there just living. I’m realizing that I can’t treat this entire year like a week long vacation; where you are trying to hit all the tourist destinations at each location in a short period of time, because you get burned out trying to keep up that pace for months on end and all the tours and sightseeing start to blend together.
In Mexico City, I stayed in the Roma/Condessa area, which I highly recommend if you’re planning a trip there soon. The neighborhood was beautiful and full of great restaurants and bars as well as a beautiful park, Parque Mexico. The park is curiously oval-shaped, which I learned is because it used to be a horse racing track. I found myself chilling in this park pretty much every day, reading and people/dog watching. Mexico City has a really awesome dog culture, so many residents have these amazing pure bred dogs that are incredibly well-behaved and would run around the park off leash.
In regards to more tourist things, I spent a Friday at a Lucha Libre wrestling match which was awesome. Lucha Libre is effectively the Mexican version of US professional wrestling (WCW/WWF/WWE/whatever they call it now) and it brought me back to my love of the “sport” in elementary school. I did it as part of tour which started with a mezcal tasting and history lesson on Lucha Libre, then we got street tacos and headed to the arena. The arena sat about 11,000 people and they put on one hell of a show, with some very impressive acrobatics from the top rope. I also learned a lot of fun new Spanish curse words 😂.
Additionally, I went to Teotihuacan, the ancient ruins of several historical groups who ran this area of the country thousands of years ago. The sheer size of Teotihuacan was mind blowing. It is an enormous complex highlighted by a couple massive pyramids, dedicated to the sun and moon. Another thing that was amazing about Teotihuacan is that every 52 years the citizens would conduct a renewal, where they would fill their houses with rocks and rebuild all the houses, temples, etc on top of the old layer. There were areas where they had excavated and you could see the same buildings built on top of one another over the years. I also found it very interesting that due to how old it is, they don’t really know a lot about it or who actually originally built it (the city was taken over by the Aztecs eventually, but at that point had already been around for thousands of years)
I also went to the National Museum of Anthropology, which was amazing. The museum is enormous and has more artifacts than I’ve ever seen in one place, all broken up into different sections focused on the various regions of Mexico. There were so many more civilizations in Mexico than just the Mayans and Aztecs and it was interesting to learn about them. I spent a solid 6 hours in there before I had to tap out.
Beyond that, I pretty much just enjoyed 2 weeks of living in CDMX. Lots of great tacos, long walks, met some new friends and caught up on some reading.
