Mexico City, Mexico

We landed in Mexico City and dropped our bags at our hotel before immediately heading out for some dinner. Got to get stuck in immediately to beat the jet lag. And that’s how we ended up sitting on two little plastic chairs on the pavement late into the evening, tucking into the best tacos we’ve ever had.

We had a couple of days in Mexico City before heading to explore some of the rest of the country, so we quickly got to work soaking up the city. We were staying at the Red Tree House Hotel in Hipódromo, a leafy and reasonably safe area. Mexico City has a bit of a reputation, but there are plenty of walkable areas to base yourself and explore. This taco stand was a short walk from our hotel, and it was fantastic. El Tizoncito claims to be the birthplace of ‘tacos al pastor’, a dish of marinated, slow-cooked pork served with pineapple, chili and coriander. I’m not going to wade into the whole who-invented-what debate, but the tacos were great, and we ordered plate after plate, sitting on our little plastic stools on the pavement. A great start to Mexican food.

Mexico City is absolutely vast. It’s among the largest cities in the world, with 21 million people, most of whom seemed to be in their cars and driving in the same direction as us. On our first day, we visited the Zócalo, and had a mooch about the main square and its cathedral. We wandered the nearby ruins of Museo del Templo Mayor, which are incredibly wonky. The guides all say that Mexico City was built on a drained swamp bed, so the foundations are still sinking under the weight of the modern city. Based on the wonkiness of every building, this checks out. After a busy morning of exploring in the heat, we stopped for an ice cold orange juice at a deserted rooftop bar with a view over the square. Ice in a questionable bar, what could go wrong?

Next up on our list was the Casa de Azulejos, a house clad entirely, inside and out, in painted ceramic tiles. I’m still unsure why they’ve tiled every surface, but it made for a very nice place to have a cup of coffee. In the afternoon we stopped for a lunch of tamales, a dish of pork and corn wrapped in a corn husk. They’d been recommended in a guide book somewhere, so we didn’t bat an eyelid when we got to the street food stand and the woman hauled two tamales from a cool box under the table. They tasted delicious, anyway. And eating lukewarm pork from a box on the street? What could possibly go wrong?

There are a million things to see and do in Mexico City, each one about two hours of traffic away from the other. Frida Kahlo’s house, Casa Azul, was one we were most keen to see, so we hopped in an Uber and headed there. Casa Azul is indeed very, very blue, and exactly how you’d imagine Frida Kahlo to have lived. Colourful, airy, light, full of plants and artistic clutter. Her studio and gardens are preserved as she left them, except possibly the gift shop and public toilets, as that’d be a weird one. We had a lovely time walking about her house, reading all the little boards and finding out about her realistically quite traumatic life with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera.

Colonia del Carmen, the area around Casa Azul, is quite chilled compared to some of the rest of Mexico City, so we had a nice wander around a park, did some souvenir shopping, Nicola antagonised a dog for no real reason, and then we went to a rooftop café for an iced coffee to escape the heat. Lots of lovely ice was poured into the glasses, and we guzzled it down. 

On the way back from Casa Azul, our Uber driver had propped up his phone on the dashboard in front of the speedometer, linked it up to the car audio, and was watching Pirates of the Caribbean at full volume while driving us back to our hotel. We sat in the back, looking out at the busy streets of Mexico City, accompanied by Hans Zimmer and the swashbuckling sounds of sword fights.

So, we don’t quite know what it was. Could have been the lukewarm pork. Maybe the iced coffee or the orange juice. Whatever the culprit, that evening I started to feel very rough indeed. I ended up spending a couple of days in bed while Nicola explored the local area, until I eventually mustered the energy to head to the small nearby convenience store to see if they had anything for food poisoning. And for a small shop, this shop sold only two things: tuna sachets in mayonnaise, and a five metre long wall of fridges selling almost exclusively rehydration drinks. Clearly it wasn’t just me with an issue.

This minor bout of food poisoning unfortunately meant that my Mexico City exploration and food odyssey was temporarily put on hold, and I ate mainly plain tostadas for a couple of days. But the good news is that I started to recover just in time for us to head to our next stop, the food capital of Mexico: Oaxaca.