All right, welcome back to our channel! We are so excited to be traveling again.
We are here in Mexico City, and that might surprise you because this doesn't look like Mexico City, does it?
And there's been a lot of things that have surprised us about Mexico City during our time here,
and that is what I'm going to talk about in this video, so let's get started.
So if you've been following our story you know that we've been traveling the world for about three years.
We just finished a wonderful year in Malaysia, went back to the US to get our covid vaccine and visit family, and now we are in Mexico.
Why did we choose Mexico for our next destination?
Well our choices were limited, because of covid a lot of the borders were still closed when it came time to book our flights.
But Mexico was open. We decided to start our Mexico adventure in Mexico City mainly because it's one of the cheaper cities to fly into from the U.S.
We've been to Mexico City twice before so we thought we knew what to expect.
But the last time we were here was over 10 years ago. That photo is of us on the pyramid in 2009.
Do I look 12 years younger in that photo than I do now? I don't know.
So yeah, it's been a while since we were last in Mexico City and there were some things that kind of caught us off guard a little bit, things we weren't expecting.
The first thing that surprised us was the prices of things,
and this surprised us in both good ways and bad ways.
I'll start with a good way. Getting around the city is super cheap. The cost of a metro ticket? 5 pesos.
That's like 25 cents. Now to a local Mexican who travels on the metro a lot that can add up.
But for us as tourists it was really cheap. In fact Mexico City's metro is one of the cheapest in the world.
And it's super easy to use. You just go up to the ticket window, get your ticket, put the ticket into the turnstile and then you're free to travel anywhere on the system.
It's a flat five pesos no matter how far you're going or how long it takes.
So getting around the city was cheaper than we thought.
But getting out of the city was more expensive than we thought it would be.
It was about US$35 for us to take a bus to a town an hour and a half outside of Mexico City.
Now that was round trip for two people, but still that seemed kind of expensive to us.
Something else that cost more than we were expecting was the prices at the restaurants.
Here's just one example. We went to VIPs because we wanted to eat something healthy for a change.
VIPs is a chain restaurant you'll find all over Mexico City.
We each got a salad a bowl of soup and a lemonade, and it was really good food, don't get me wrong, but the bill came to 461 pesos.
That's about US$23. Now I mean is that outrageous? No, it's not outrageous.
But, I don't know, we thought the prices at a mid-range restaurant like that wouldn't be that high.
And not all of the food in Mexico City is expensive. The little family-run taco stands on the streets are very reasonably priced,
and I'll be talking much more about these wonderful family-run food carts in a future video, believe me.
And the churros, oh wow, these five churros were around 30 pesos about US$1.50,
made fresh to order and worth every peso, absolutely worth every peso.
Another good surprise when it came to the cost was the price of our accommodation. Let me show you here.
Alright, so we just arrived here Mexico City and we're gonna take a tour of our hotel.
It's pretty nice here. It's called the Posada Vienna Hotel. So let's take a look here.
So let's walk down the hallway here. It's kind of an interesting statue in the hallway of this hotel.
And then let's take a look at our room. So we were not expecting this at all. Look how big it is. Very nice two big beds,
nice sitting area here, and then the bathroom is also pretty big, we've got two sinks, huge shower over here.
This is costing about US$200 for six nights, it's about US$33 per night.
So the next thing we found surprising is that we felt very safe here.
Mexico can have a bad reputation for crime, but we never felt unsafe in Mexico City.
Now the security situation in any place in the world can change quickly so be sure to get the latest information on safety and security before making a final decision to travel somewhere.
All right, the third thing that surprised us was how easy it was to escape the big city atmosphere.
Mexico City is the fifth largest metropolitan area in the world. Almost 22 million people live here.
But to us it didn't feel that big. First of all our hotel was in a quiet neighborhood with buildings that were only maybe two or three stories tall with trees lining the streets.
Alright, I'm standing on a very busy road here in Mexico City, but if you look down this way,
and if we go just a block down this road it's actually a very quiet neighborhood, almost a small town kind of feel.
And then you have Chapultepec Park this is a beautiful park this is a huge park. It's double the size of New York City's Central Park.
When we were in this park we almost forgot that we were in one of the world's biggest cities.
I mean yeah, you can see the skyscrapers in the background but other than that it almost felt to us like we were in, I don't know, like in a wilderness in Montana or something.
And finally in about an hour or two you can take a bus to get completely out of Mexico City and into one of the surrounding villages or national parks.
We chose a day trip to Cuernavaca to be our break from Mexico City,
and how lovely it was, a great place to spend the day.
We enjoyed just walking around the town, taking in the architecture, the ambiance, the laid-back vibe, the lack of hustle and bustle.
The cathedral in Cuernavaca was definitely a sight to see.
The cathedral towers over the town and is, I think, one of the highlights of the city.
So back in the 1950s there was some renovation work that uncovered the murals on the walls of this cathedral, so beautiful.
The main plaza, or the zocalo, in Cuernavaca was also very pleasant.
But our favorite part of our visit to Cuernavaca was our lunch. Yes, we we like to eat.
We had lunch at La Maga cafe. And the word "maga" in Spanish means "magician" by the way.
It was 135 pesos or about US$6.75 for an all-you-can-eat buffet.
There was a great salad bar, after eating too much junk food in the U.S. for a few months we're trying to eat healthier.
The fruit was absolutely delicious and the chicken was absolutely amazing, it was so tender.
And I don't know how to describe that orange sauce that you see there kind of creamy maybe cheesy?
I tried to ask what it was but my Spanish needs some refreshing.
This place was hard to find. Googling "La Maga Cafe" will get you in the general location, but there's no sign for the restaurant.
So just look for this banner with the sun symbol and then find the door that leads upstairs to the restaurant.
And the fourth thing that surprised us: We didn't get sick.
The two previous times that we came to Mexico City in 2009 and 2010 we got so sick.
In 2010 we basically saw Teotihuacan and then spent the rest of our time in our hotel room.
But everything went well this time, delicious food and no food poisoning.
And the final thing that surprised us: we could live here. Yeah.
Now would it be our top choice for a city to move to? Probably not.
If we had to choose between Mexico City and say Kuala Lumpur, we would probably go with Kuala Lumpur.
But if somebody told us we had to live in Mexico City for some reason and we had no choice, we think we would be perfectly happy living here.
There's so much more to do here than what we actually did,
and we decided that we want to come back to Mexico City before it's time for us to leave Mexico.
So let me wrap things up and tell you how much money we spent.
For accommodation it was US$33 per night. Again we had a very nice experience at the Posada Vienna Hotel.
Next is food. We averaged US$32 per day. We would usually eat in one restaurant each day,
and then have something like the fruit you see Emily holding there and other snacks for the rest of our food for the day.
For transportation we average US$7 per day. That includes the round-trip bus to Cuernavaca.
If you look at our transportation costs just within Mexico City it would have averaged about US$1.
And finally for all of our activities we averaged US$12 per day.
This includes a visit to the Frida Kahlo Museum, a visit to Plaza de la Constitution,
touring the metropolitan cathedral, entrance to the viewing deck at the top of this tower to get a panoramic view over the city,
entrance to the cathedral museum in Cuernavaca, seeing the famous Angel of Independence statue (although it was covered in scaffolding),
three visits to Chapultepec Park, and finally tickets to see the Luche Libre, which is a wrestling tournament that I will probably talk about in a future video, that was a whole experience in itself.
Alright, our Mexico experience is just getting started. We have a lot more places in Mexico that we'll be visiting.
Next is San Miguel de Allende, so be sure to subscribe to our channel so that you can see more videos coming soon.