- Hello tangerines, from Queretaro, Mexico.
- (rolling R) Queretaro.
(laughing)
We recently signed a one-year lease in the city
and we've been all over Mexico
to just about every single state in the country.
So why the heck did we choose Queretaro?
Today we're gonna tell you.
- One of the biggest reasons we chose this city to live
is because the climate is perfect.
This is some of the best weather in the world.
- Yeah. I mean, absolutely amazing.
Pretty low humidity,
pleasant temperatures during the daytime
- Year round. - Year round.
I think we just surpassed the hottest month of the year.
And I think the highs were maybe like 85
And then it cools way down at night
into like the fifties or so.
So to me, this is perfection, zero complaints at all,
and kind of along the lines of weather,
another reason is because
there's no natural disasters here really
like not significant earthquakes
like you have in Mexico city,
no hurricanes like you have in the Riviera Maya.
- No tornadoes, no blizzards. None of that.
- Yeah. I mean, what's not to like?
Another thing we really loved about the city is that
when we came here for the very first time,
just a few months ago, and we were kind of exploring,
seeing, is this gonna be the right city for us?
People were really nice.
Like, we felt a very friendly vibe from everybody.
And the strange thing is some people say, oh yeah,
people are really closed off here.
Or people aren't that friendly with people they don't know,
but I've never gotten that impression.
- No, not at all.
- We've made friends so easily,
if we ever need something or if we're lost or need help,
somebody is always happy to help us.
So that was great.
I felt like right at home,
like we could plug ourselves in here and have a life here
and that's not the case everywhere. So...
And another reason is Queretaro is really pretty.
We're currently in this park, Parque dos mil, Park 2000.
And this, I don't even know. It's so big.
On the map, you can see it compared to the city.
It's a huge park, really pretty,
lots of grass, lots of trees, lots of shade.
There's people out here having picnics
and having family time
and playing with their kids at the playground.
- But it's not just the park.
When people talk about the city being really pretty,
they're usually talking about the historic center, which is.
You have all these colonial buildings
that are well cared for and look awesome.
- And the aqueduct.
- And you have the beautiful, gigantic aqueduct
going through the city.
But it's not just that,
there are so many really pretty neighborhoods
throughout the city.
- Uh-huh. And there's a variety of different ones.
Like, you know, you have the gated communities,
you have really family oriented and loads of mature trees,
like Carretas and stuff, it's so beautiful.
I was gonna mention something else to do with this.
And now, I forgot.
- How about like the nature around.
- Oh yeah. That's it.
There's mountains surrounding the whole city.
I think it's so, so beautiful.
Like we're up at pretty high elevation,
but there's also even higher mountains around,
which is great for us 'cause we like hiking,
but it also is even more of
a variety of scenery and landscape.
- Another reason why we chose this city to live in
is it's known as one of the safest cities in Mexico.
- And I felt that when we first got here,
I felt like it was fine to walk around.
This isn't the type of city
where I needed to put my backpack on the front
when you're walking through crowds or anything.
- And nobody does.
- Nobody does. That's typically how you can tell.
But yeah, it's super palatable in that way.
And like, how I feel walking around
and also the fact like we noticed,
we're not seen as like the rich gringos walking around.
- Yeah.
Because like, as we're driving around
our car is nowhere near the nicest car.
Like every other car is a Mercedes or a BMW or a Porsche
or something like that.
We've even seen a Bentley and a Lamborghini here
in the time we've been here.
So I like that there's a lot of wealth here,
so we actually look poor compared to a lot of people,
unlike we're driving around Oaxaca or around where we
were living in Puerto Morelos.
And we have the nicest car there.
Or nicer than almost every car we passed.
- Just to clarify, by the way guys,
Tangerine travels is our Tangerine mobile.
That's why it's called that. It's a 2016 Prius C.
So it's not even like a nice, nice car.
It's not new or anything like that,
but still it has been the nicest in the area sometimes,
which doesn't make us feel super secure,
unlike here in Queretaro.
- Okay, so this reason might sound a little bit silly,
but it actually is a big selling point for us.
And that is there is Uber.
And why is that a big selling point?
Because about half the cities we've been to in Mexico,
didn't have it.
And we would have to either drive ourselves
or take cabs to get anywhere, or public transport.
And Uber just makes getting places so much easier.
I much prefer that over cabs.
- And of course we do have our own car,
but sometimes like
if we wanna go out and get a couple drinks,
we don't wanna be driving after that.
Or parking could be an issue, so taking an Uber is
cheaper, easier, more convenient, whatever.
So, yeah, it's nice.
And also just not to have to go with the taxistas
that scam you all at the time.
And perhaps the biggest reason
that we ended up choosing Queretaro to call home
is our home that we found.
- Yeah, seriously, we are in love with our rental.
It is amazing.
- It's a palace.
It's probably the nicest, most awesome place
I've ever lived in in my life.
And before going into this, we had been like, okay,
so what are we really looking for in a home?
Before we even got to Queretaro, we were making this list
and it was our must haves, essentials,
like high-speed internet, our nice to haves,
like being in a wa- mm no, that's not one.
What's a nice to have?
- I forget.
- Or our dream home things.
And things on this list would be like,
if a genie popped out of a lamp and granted us three wishes,
that they would be on that wishlist, dream home.
- You know, I was just looking back at these lists we made
and the place we found has almost everything,
all but one thing that was on our dream home list.
Which is just crazy.
- I miss bathtubs.
- That was one.
(laughing)
They just aren't common here.
- So not common.
But yeah, I mean, because we found that place,
it was like, yes, we can definitely make a life here.
And especially with all these reasons
that we've already mentioned
and more that we're gonna be mentioning,
it was like, I heart Queretaro.
Another gigantic selling point is that
Queretaro is super centrally located in Mexico.
So from here, within an hour or even two hours,
you have numerous different states.
You have Pueblos Magicos,
a variety of different landscapes and things to do,
like going on nature hikes with waterfalls,
going up into the mountains.
- If we want a huge city,
Mexico city is just a few hour drive away.
Guadalajara just a little bit further than that.
So there's a ton to do.
And it's almost the exact geographical center of Mexico.
We basically said this without saying it,
but there's so many day trips you can take from Queretaro.
Like, you can go to Bernal.
You can go to one of the many vineyards around.
You can go to the uber popular San Miguel de Allende.
- Or there's thermal waters and...
- Oh, like a beautiful place like Pinal de Amoles
with the most amazing hiking in the world.
I'm so excited to take a trip there.
- We keep saying in the world.
Like, we're just so enamored that we're like
best weather in the world, best hiking in the world.
Centrally located best central thing in the Mexico world.
(laughing)
- Well, I love it here. So what can I say?
I'm gonna make this next one pretty quick
because we've harped on this like a million billion times
in every single video we've made in Queretaro,
but it is probably the cleanest city
that we've been to in Mexico.
Okay, I seriously don't know
why we've never been to Parque 2000 before.
This is so pretty. And up here, there's actually a lake.
You can see half the city.
It's super peaceful, even though we're right by a freeway.
So somehow I don't know how that works.
And, seriously beautiful.
If you're digging this video,
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Pretty soon,
we're gonna get back on the road a little bit more.
Start doing those day trips,
going to Pueblos Magicos around here.
So we'll have all that coming up for you.
- When you come to Mexico,
there's going to be a lot of things that overwhelm you.
So at the end of the day,
the last thing you're gonna want to do is
go to your favorite websites
and find that they're all in Spanish.
Some websites, you can change into English,
but a lot of them don't have that option
or they make it like nearly impossible to do that.
One way around this though, is to get a VPN.
A VPN allows you to like virtually change your location.
So I can locate myself in Chicago
or some other US city that I want to be in.
And boom, all my websites are back in English,
back in US dollars and Fahrenheit and all that good stuff.
So if you would like to check out our favorite VPN,
you can go to TangerineVPN.com. That's our affiliate link.
And it will take you right to their website.
They're running a sale right now.
It's 83% off plus three extra months free.
We've used a lot of different VPNs.
And this is by far the best one that we have tried.
So again, that's TangerineVPN.com.
- Well, I have really enjoyed our time here in this park.
This is our first time coming out,
even though we've wanted to come here for a while,
I can totally see us coming back
under the shade of one of those many, many trees
and bring a picnic with like some snacks,
maybe some secret wine,
because alcohol is probably not allowed,
but for now I'm getting hungry.
So we should go get some grub.
- Let's do it.
- Well, we decided to come to
this place called Estacion Central,
which is kind of like a container park food truck village.
It's really cool.
And we wanted to record this part actually inside there,
but they have a DJ with music
and it's a really cool ambiance and vibe,
but copyright strikes
are always looming in the distance for us.
- But I love this place.
There's all kinds of cool designs and a couple of levels,
really cool stuff here.
But one of the things I love about Queretaro
is all the restaurants.
I love the restaurant scene here.
- Yeah, I mean, if you really
never wanted to eat at the same place again,
you wouldn't have to, there are so many restaurants,
a variety of different cuisines,
even like in here, for instance,
there's hamburgers, Mexican food,
- Pizza, hookah.
- Ramen. Yeah, hookah.
I mean, there's such a variety even here.
So I would definitely come back here.
- Yeah, for sure. I'd love to hang out here again.
- Although we didn't actually realize this at the time
when we got to Queretaro,
because it was a little bit chaotic
for us to drive around the city, just because it was new,
and we weren't familiar with the roads
or the driving habits here,
after a while, we were like, actually,
it's not that stressful,
especially for the size of the city.
So that was a huge selling point for us because...
- Well, put this in context,
nearly every other city we've been to in Mexico,
we parked the car and take Ubers or taxis everywhere
because it terrifies us to drive there.
But here it doesn't.
So that's, it's a really nice feature for us.
- Yeah.
So we can actually make use of our car
and not have to rely on Uber so much.
But like we said earlier,
it's still nice to have that Uber just in our back pocket
Queretaro was also very appealing to us from the start
because we found that it had some super, super nice
luxury grocery stores.
Like this behind me is city market,
which I would love to go inside and show you,
but they've kicked us out from recording in there before,
but there's also stores like should Chedraui Selecto
and now we're at Antea, a super nice luxury, fancy mall.
And we're gonna go inside.
Hopefully they don't kick us out of there too.
- Something we love about Queretaro is
it has all the luxuries of a big city
without being too big of a city,
like you have lots of really nice malls, gyms,
nice restaurants, an airport.
- And not only that,
like without it being too big of a city,
focusing on that part,
you can pretty much drive
even from one suburb to one other suburb in like 30 minutes,
if there's not too terrible traffic,
if it's not rush hour,
and yeah, I really like that there's a ton of malls,
ton of stores, lots of variety within the city,
even though it's kind of like a medium sized city.
It's like a happy medium.
- Speaking of conveniences of a big city,
we have super fast internet available here.
At our home, we have 300 megabits per second.
So lightening fast
that allows us to work online really easily,
upload our videos in no time
and just makes life really easy.
- Which admittedly is far too much, even for us.
Really, for anybody,
you would need like an entire army of people
on Netflix at the same time to use up that much internet,
but it is nice.
And that was on our must have list.
When we were coming here, it was like,
the city must have high-speed internet,
ideally must have fiber-optic,
not every city in Mexico does.
Well, I would say probably most cities,
but the smaller you get into towns and stuff,
the less likely.
So that was definitely a big seller for us.
- Something that appealed to us when we got to Queretaro
was that a lot of the neighborhoods are very walkable
within the neighborhood.
Obviously it's a big city,
so you can't walk from one end of the city to the other,
anything like that.
- And you know, I would argue that that was a,
that would be a big selling point for us,
like before Queretaro, too,
I like walkability
because I don't like having to rely on a car or Uber
or public transportation or anything.
So it's nice that there are some pockets
like Carretas or Jardines.
- Central. - Central.
And I mean various parts across the city.
So yeah, like you said,
you can't walk from tip to tip or anything,
but there are some spots.
So that was a nice feature,
knowing that we could do some stuff on foot
and we didn't have to depend on transportation
in between point A to point B for everything.
- Exactly.
- So with everything that we've mentioned in this video,
you can probably deduce what we did,
which is that it's a pretty freaking awesome city
with a really high quality of life,
high quality of living
at about 50% of the price of what we were paying
in Phoenix, Arizona.
- Yeah.
So when we got here, there were a lot of things
that shocked us about the city though.
So if you want to check out that video that we made,
the things that shocked us about Queretaro,
that's on the screen here right now.
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