I’ve been lucky enough to explore much of the world, but the Americas south of the United States have long remained a blank for me. I’ve nibbled at the edges — Bermuda, the Bahamas, a long-ago day trip to Tijuana — but until recently the closest I’d been to Latin America was a week in Puerto Rico, a not-quite-country which oscillates between being a Spanish-flavored piece of the US and and a US-flavored piece of Latin America.

But recently I finally had the chance to pay a quick visit on the company time to the real Mexico, namely Mexico City (Ciudad de México, aka CDMX; formerly known as the Distrito Federal or D.F.). Here are a few impressions from a maximal gringo.

Climate

Quick, imagine what Mexico looks like. Odds are you’re thinking a stretch of broiling sandy desert, where the inhabitants spend most of their time in hammocks suspended between two saguaro cacti, taking siestas with oversized sombreros covering their faces.

Well, turns out Mexico City is completely unlike this. It’s located high up in the altiplano in the mountains of Central Mexico, so I knew it was going to be cooler than, say, Texas, but being more accustomed the bone-dry highlands of Australia, I did not expect it to be soggy, wet and humid. So much so that, when the departure of my incoming flight from Houston was delayed, it arrived smack in the middle of a rollicking thunderstorm and we ended up having to divert to Veracruz on the hot, muggy, tropical coast instead. I soon found out that at least this time of year, these evening thunderstorms were a daily event and not a day of my visit passed without rain.

The result is that the city is lush and green, with large trees, green grass and moss creeping up stones. Mornings were cool (15 C), afternoons warm (25 C), although the 2,250m altitude amps up the strength of the sunshine. I kept having unexpected flashbacks of Bangkok: in addition to being distinctly humid, both cities have pockets of wealth and quite a lot of poverty, but also a healthy, growing middle class, supporting a lively mix of street vendors, markets, hip little cafes and boutiques. The World Bank agrees, as on a GDP (PPP) per capita basis, the two countries are almost at par.

Getting Around

Mexico City is enormous and lacks an identifiable downtown: being highly earthquake-prone, skyscrapers are few and far between. I was staying the leafy but untouristy residential neighborhood of Anzures, which was convenient to the office, but nowhere near a metro station. Ubers in CDMX are easy to catch and cheap, but they’re a pretty crappy way to experience a city. ¿Qué hacer?

An easy orange answer was parked right outside my hotel: Mobike! Turns out everybody’s favorite Chinese bike share company had just launched in CDMX, and while the allowed usage zone was limited to a few posh districts, my hotel, the office and many sights were in it. While my monthly Sydney pass was no good, single rides were just 10 pesos a pop; pricy by local standards, particularly compared to the 50 peso monthly pass, but still a steal at around 70 Aussie cents each. The city being by and large flat as a pancake, bikes are a very popular way to get around, with copious bike lanes and, much to my pleasant surprise, a large chunk of the Paseo de la Reforma was cordoned off for bikes & pedestrians only on Sundays. ¡Perfecto!

To get to the Centro Historico, though, I ditched the bike and tried out the Mexico City Metro. Still using very distinctive signage and coloring developed in the 1960s, when 40% of Mexicans were illiterate, the subway has a very retro feel to it, with paper boletos purchased from humans behind taquilla counters, although there is now a smart card option. The trains are also best described as functional, with tunnel fumes gusting in through the open windows (there’s no aircon) and a whole lotta shaking going on despite the rubber tyres, with drivers accelerating and braking hard at every station. Still, while it may not be luxurious, it’s a vital service and second only to New York in size in the Americas, with 12 lines criss-crossing the city and more passengers than London or Paris.

The Metro has a bit of a sketchy reputation, and I can see why. Station entrances were often hard to spot, there were often dimly lit inside, and the trains themselves had endless processions of merchants, entertainers and beggars squeezing through the crowds, hawking everything from Silly Putty to mobile accessories and slips with Bible quotations. But there also were plenty of whimsical touches, with staircases turned into piano keys and rather brutalist artworks here and there, and I can’t say I ever felt threatened — either in the Metro or anywhere else in CDMX, for that matter.

My biggest regret of this trip: not having the time to visit the Metro Museum in Mixcoac. Have a read of Craig Moore’s trip report if you’re keen to learn more about this underappreciated system.

Speaking

My rusty high school español got a pretty good workout on this trip, and I was glad I had hit the Duolingo pretty hard for the previous three months or so. Fortunately, while full-on Mexican Spanish is famously fast and slurred even Spanish standards, everybody I met was quite willing to switch to speed-limited Gringo Spanish for my benefit.

I was also a little surprised that virtually everybody assumed I could speak Spanish, despite being a two-meter-tall blond quite clearly outside the generally rather broad spectrum of Mexican appearances; quite the contrast to most of Asia, where nobody even tries to speak the local lingo with me. What’s more, quite a few people actually had more than passable English, although I’ll admit my sample set was rather biased towards the leafy neighborhoods where I was staying.

History

I had one free day in CDMX before getting down to work, so I started it with a visit to the National Museum of Anthropology, which must surely rank among the greatest museums in the world. An average gringo like me has learned in history class about Mexico’s pre-Columbian rulers the Aztecs and the Maya (although they’re likely to mix them up with the Incas of Peru), but this single large building covers not just the big two, but the Olmecs, the Toltecs, the Mixtecs and many more. Nevertheless, there’s a clear thread connecting them all: blood. Or, rather, unfathomable amounts of hardcore gore of the kind that would be rejected as a horror movie plot for being too gruesome and implausible.

Consider this: the Great Temple (Templo Mayor) of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica tribe of Aztecs that is the predecessor to today’s Mexico City, was consecrated with the ritual sacrifice of several thousand captives every time it was expanded when a new king took power, or when there was a festival, or when a war was won, or whenever any other convenient excuse presented itself. And by ritual sacrifice, I mean strapping the victim down to an chac-mool altar, carving their still-beating hearts out with an obsidian knife, smearing the blood on the statues of the gods, then throwing the corpse down the stairs to be eaten. Meanwhile, the victim’s head would be skillfully flayed and mounted on the skull rack (tzompantli), with the main one (there were several) in Tenochtitlan (only one of many cities) having the capacity for 36,000 skulls. This was just temporary storage, mind you, once they had dried out properly the skulls were removed, decorated and passed around as handy decorative knick-knacks.

The museum consists basically of variations on this theme. Here’s Coatlicue, who wears a dress of live serpents and necklace of human hearts, hands, and skulls. Here’s a ball court where teams played pelota maya, which was kind of like volleyball, only you can’t use your hands and the losing team is sacrificed to the gods. Here’s the rain god Tlaloc, who was worshipped by sacrificing children, who first had to endure torture so their tears would moisten the earth. And on and on, for thousands of years!

In case all this seems too abstract when presented in the dramatically lit but carefully cordoned off confines of the museum, or you doubt the florid accounts of the conquistadors who are our primary source of written evidence for Aztec/Mexica life, you can also go visit the actual ruins of the Templo Mayor, lurking right behind Zócalo Square in the heart of CDMX. The final incarnation of the temple was largely razed by the Spaniards, but as it was built like a Russian matryoshka doll with each version simply built on top of the other, some of the older parts remain. The chac-mool sacrifice altars, the stairs the victims were thrown down, the skull racks, it’s all there… including a particularly lovely hall where nobles practiced the art of auto-sacrifice, purposely bleeding their ears, tongues, genitals etc. This blood was collected and mixed with amaranth seeds to create an idol of Huitzilopochtli, which was ceremoniously eaten every year during the feast of Panquetzaliztli, with the accompaniment of (what else?) copious human sacrifice. Delicious!

Food

Congealed human blood idols aside, I have long been a huge, tragic fan of Mexican food, the tragedy being that my chosen abodes for the last 16 years (Singapore and Australia) are both laughably terrible places to find any of it. It’s saying something that the arrival of Guzman y Gomez, a semi-decent burrito chain founded by a distinctly non-Mexican former hedge fund trader from New York, was a highlight of my culinary calendar.

So I was tickled pink to get a chance to visit Mexico and eat actual Mexican food, and I did my best to devour everything in sight. Huaraches (literally “sandals”, because that’s what they look like, smeared with beans and salsa), sopes (small, thick tacos), pozole soup (“these days we use pork, but traditionally the Aztecs used human flesh!”, a colleague informed me slightly too cheerily), sopa azteca (tortilla soup), cochinita pibil (slow-cooked pork in achiote sauce)…

Yet the culinary highlight, in fact one of the most sublime dishes I’ve had anywhere, was chile en nogada at Angelopolitano. I had tried this before (in Singapore, unpromisingly) and been somewhat non-plussed by a squishy stuffed pepper covered in grainy, cold walnut sauce. Originating from the nearby city of Pueblo, they’re a rare, somewhat expensive delicacy in Mexico, and Angelopolitano, a place that’s very serious about poblano food, only serves them in pomegranate season between August and September. The walnut sauce was smooth this time, studded with pomegranate seeds and still served cold, but it was the filling that made it sing: panochera apples, pera de leche pears, criollo peaches, minced meat and a complex mix of spices, all washed down with a shot of tequila. Incredible.

The intended highlight was scheduled for Tuesday night, when I had managed to secure a seat for the taco degustation at Pujol, which is arguably the most famous restaurant in Mexico: think el Bulli, only with Mexican ingredients. Alas, the plan went, ahem, down the toilet when, on Monday night, I contracted violent food poisoning, aka Moctezuma’s revenge.

I’m still not entirely clear what hit me, although odds are it was something in that pretty flower-like taco platter above. Both restaurants I went to on Monday were really popular, so the food certainly wasn’t sitting around, although tacos al pastor, the porky Mexican version of doner kebab (bottom right taco), is somewhat notorious even among Mexicans for causing attacks of la turista. I also wasn’t as careful as I should have been about fresh herbs and vegetables, which Mexican food uses with abandon even though tap water in CDMX is not safe to drink; in retrospect, piling raw lettuce into my lunch pozole was asking for trouble. Or maybe it was something as innocuous as the fresh salsa accompanying the tacos.

Regardless of the cause, the end effect was that I spent the next two days unable to do much more than tap away at my laptop or ingest anything more electrolyte drinks and the occasional banana. Fortunately loperamide worked its magic and I was able to survive the 24-hour flight odyssey back to Sydney, although I had to give the rather spiffy-looking Polaris lounge restaurant in Houston a miss.

So adiós, Mexico, I hardly knew ye. I’d like to say I’ll be back soon, but that’s pretty unlikely — however, this did definitely kick my long-incubated first visit to South America (Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil…!) a few notches up the bucket list.