Mexico City

 

The Angel of Reforma

I just spent a few days in Mexico City over Easter and I enjoy it more each time I visit. It is such a large city--around twenty-three million people--that it takes a while to get comfortable with it. I guess I am slightly comfortable with a few colonias in the centre: Polanco, Condesa, Roma and Chapultepec. With Uber it is dead easy to get around. A car will pick you up in three or four minutes and take you anywhere in the central part in fifteen minutes for about 120 pesos.

Mexico City has some fine, world-class museums like the National Museum of Anthropology which has important artifacts from all the important civilizations of Mexico: Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, and Aztec. Alas, apart from a few codices from late in pre-Columbian times, we have no written records, no Herodotus, so the innumerable stone sculptures and temples remain mute. The Museum of Anthropology is huge with an enormous fountain in the forecourt:

Here is a particularly famous item, the so-called Aztec calendar stone which is actually a sacrificial altar.

But there are many other museums like the Frida Kahlo residence, the Soumaya museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and so-on, something like a hundred in total. In recent years Mexico has become more and more well-known for its gastronomy and there are several Michelin star restaurants in the city. But since there are roughly fifteen thousand restaurants all together, there is something for everyone. And no, that doesn't count the street-food a favorite of Anthony Bourdain. I had a lovely lunch in a Chinese restaurant on Presidente Masaryk, surrounded by flowers:

A very famous shopping Mecca is the Palacio de Hierro which has nearly every luxury item you can imagine from Hermés scarfs to Russian food:

Yes, they have an entire floor devoted to gourmet food, not quite as good as the KDW in Berlin, but pretty good. An entire floor devoted to men's fashion--I was there to buy some Florsheim shoes:

And many floors devoted to women's fashion. I stayed in a modest hotel in Roma Norte, venturing out of Polanco where I usually stay. Roma Norte has become a destination for many American digital nomads who can be found clustering in lovely little coffee shops where you can sit for hours with a single latte.

That was I think the best iced latte I have ever had. It even came with tasting notes. Right in front of my hotel was a lovely small park, frequented by dog-walkers at all hours. It had an interesting fountain with hundreds of jets of water that acted like an outdoor air-conditioner.

The hotel offered a pretty good breakfast, though not to be compared to the huge buffet one finds at the Hyatt Regency in Polanco:

This is about the sixth or seventh time I have visited Mexico City and it is a favorite destination. It doesn't have the incredible art museums of Madrid or Paris, or the wealth of music performances of Vienna or Berlin, or the architectural beauty of Florence. But it has a bit of all those things in its own unique way--and at a fraction of the cost!