CDMX: Eat, drink, walk, repeat (a quick recap)

Our trip to Mexico City is officially over. We are in the United Lounge at the airport (my husband had two passes from opening his new United Visa), enjoying complementary coffees and waters (and alcohol and food if we want it, which right now we don’t.)

The trip was a huge success. We had a great time. We filled our days and had so much fun. Eat, drink, walk, repeat. That was the trip. And it was marvelous.

Truly, nothing bad happened. The worst part was abandoning our two jars of salsa macha at security an hour ago. Neither of us thought about how big they were and we were worried they would leak chile oil all over our clothes if we went back and packed them in a checked bag (which otherwise would not have been checked), so we left them there. I just hope the (very kind) man who had to confiscate them keeps them because they are so good. (I’m telling myself he’s keeping them so I feel less sad.)

I plan to put up more detailed day-by-day posts of the trip, but for now I’ll just publish a little recap.

Eat

Our trip was pretty much centered around food. And drink. But mostly food. We ate so much amazing food. And while some meals were at fancy restaurants, most of the best meals were at some seemingly random taco spot on a busy corner.

My husband did a lot of research for this trip. He had a detailed itinerary for each day, and meals were the foci of each day’s itinerary. We ate so, so well and we honestly didn’t spend much on most meals. The expensive meals were much less expensive than at home and the cheap meals were so, so cheap. That chilaquiles sandwich was less than $4 and so big and so good.

Drink

So evidently three of the world’s ten best bars are Mexico City. And we drank at all of them. My husband made reservations at all of them long before we landed and they were definitely required; we watched people being turned away at every spot that we had reservations for.

Most of our reservations for fairly early in the evenings, because we had such long days. The drinks were all very good but none of them were very large or strong, so we were able try a lot of different things. So many intriguing flavors and so many surprising flavor combinations.

Walk

We walked or took the Metro everywhere in Mexico City. We only took above ground buses three times; to and from Teotihuacán and to La Casa Azul (Frida Khalo museum). We never took a cab or Uber. The Metro is amazing: big and cheap and safe and fast. We never waited longer than three minutes for a train.

We also just walked a lot. My Health app said we walked between 6.5 and 11 miles each day. I’m not sure how accurate that is but we definitely walked A LOT.

We walked to eat. We walked to drink. We walked to museums and landmarks. We walked everywhere. The weather was beautiful and we didn’t have kids to slow us down. My back definitely felt all the walking, especially on the days I didn’t wear my Hokas (for purely reasons of wanting to look less like a tourist), but generally it was fine. The sidewalks in Mexico City can be a little hazardous and my husband had the extra job of watching for low hanging hazards, but we never went down. We were honestly really surprised that neither of us tripped really hard.

We saw…

It really was an awesome trip. No one got sick. The weather didn’t turn against us. The AirBnB was lovely. I hope to write full day posts this weekend (we still have three days before returning to work!), but I’ll just post this now before we take off.

We excited to see our kids (who seem to be doing fine without us) and we’re relieved to return to a clean house. The trip was everything we hoped it would be a more. We are very happy.