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| Arrived in Mexico City in the afternoon. Direct flight from LAX to Mexico City on Delta. (about 3.5 hours of flying time) The weather is good in Mexico City. It was good the entire trip. Lows in the 50s when we left the hotel and highs in the low 70s. Very pleasant weather. Wore shorts a couple of the warmer days. |
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| Going through immigration at the Mexico City International Airport, upon arriving. It's an automated system. You scan the passport & step into a station that takes your picture and gives you a piece of paper that you need when you leave. The line wasn't too bad. About 20 minutes to get through and head for outside. We didn't check any bags so pretty easy. |
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| Walked out to the terminal curb & used Uber to get a ride to the airport. Wasn't exactly sure where the pickup location would be so walked up and down a little bit but it ended up being the location with the "4" on it, which is about where we came out of the terminal. |
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| Saw a lot of makes & models that are not available in the US. Some European (Renault, Peugeot) and Chinese (BYD, Haval) brands. A lot of small cars. It felt almost European in terms of how most of the cars are small. |
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| Waited less than 10 minutes for the Uber. The Uber ride was pretty inexpensive. About $13. We rode Uber to get around for everywhere. All the drivers were pretty good. Had no issues. Didn't converse much since our Spanish is pretty poor. It's pretty inexpensive. Some of the rides were ridiculously cheap. One of the rides through a very busy area that took about 25 minutes was $3.50. Tipped $5. Felt kinda bad for the drivers so tipped generously on all the rides. |
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| Ride to the hotel took about 25 minutes. The hotel (Isaaya Hotel Boutique) is small but pretty nice. We were on the 3rd floor (really the 4th in the US). The room is modern, spacious and clean. It had motorized blinds on the large windows that would open automatically when you entered the room. There were three areas. A sofa with a TV, entry with a desk/coffee machine/fridge & the bed area. The bathroom was spacious and the shower had a rain type of head. All was nice and worked well. Had no issues with water pressure, power, etc. Very nice. They have a small restaurant on the main floor but we never ate there. |
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| Found a place for dinner using Google map's restaurant finding feature. There's lots of places near the hotel. We walked to most of the nearby places for meals. |
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| On the major streets, the busses run along the middle of the road. The bus stops are on the middle divider and are enclosed glass sided stations. The busses seem to run frequently. Most of the busses have two or three sections. They look pretty clean and modern. Because of Uber, we never rode the busses. |
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| Walked about 15 minutes to a steak place called Pakinubis, This is how they served "chips" and salsa before the meal. |
It seems that all the restaurants had a lot of staff. Felt like almost too many people working!
Very different from the US.
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| Got an appetizer; fried octopus with guacamole. It came with both types of tortilla (in a warmer bag) to put the appetizer in. Very good! |
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| We were seated in a front corner area. The restaurant design is very attractive. They have these unusual brick domes inside. They have TVs in multiple locations (seems to be very common in Mexico City). The sound was off so not too distracting. They had an NFL game on. Kinda strange. |
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| Got a steak. It came on a hot grill pan/plate. It was cooked perfectly (medium to medium rare). I had a negro Modelo & CM had a sparkling water. (never drank tap water, but ordered lemonades & such where we don't know what the water source was. Never had an issue with the food or drinks on the entire trip.) |
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| CM got a mushroom "steak". It was also very good. Dinner was pretty reasonable. Food seems to cost about 1/2 to 2/3 of what it costs in the US for pretty high quality/high end places. We chose to eat at the highly rated and slightly upscale type of places. There seemed to be lots of lower priced places and lots of street vendors but we didn't eat at any of those. Things are so inexpensive that there's really no reason to. |
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| This nice looking church is just a few buildings from the hotel. It's fenced in. Most places have fences around them. Some with barbed wire on the top of the fences. Like a lot of places (like Brasil), it seems that theft/muggings are an issue. There seems to be a big gap between the haves and the have-nots, which seems to breed this type of crime. In our time in Mexico City, we didn't run across any issues or even come close, as far as we can tell. There was a lot of police presence pretty much everywhere we went. I don't know how much of a difference it makes but we liked seeing the presence. A few feet from the church is a tiny gelato place. Got a small pistachio (went there 3 times during the trip). We usually turned in pretty much after dinner. There was an English Premiere League soccer game on TV nearly every night during prime time so I watched a game pretty much every night. |
