Mexico City

I had a very special trip to Mexico City in January 2026. It was Josh’s first time and my fourth, and we were celebrating our dear Jackson Heights neighbour friend Aaron’s 60th birthday in one of his homes in the world.

My first visit to CDMX (Ciudad de Mexico) was in 2008, when it was still known as DF (Distrito Federal). I fell in love at once. I know megacities are not for everyone, but I ADORE them (think Bombay, Bangkok, Dhaka, London…) Mexico City is perhaps one of the most perfect megacities for me because it’s also a 4 hour direct flight from NYC (my megacity home).

My next trip was in 2009 for a month-long working vacation with my sister Simi (CDMX was her fave well before I had visited, same brain). We rented a flat, worked on our respective projects (her thesis, my book), ran huffy puffy around the parks, bought groceries at the market, and cooked at home. What a gift that time was, sisters together in a magical city.

You may have heard, but Mexico City food is off the charts. No matter where you’re eating, from the delicious tlocoyo stall Josh and I found tucked into a random alleyway in the Historic District, to the exquisitely plated high brow fare at Tetetlán, a spacious pink restaurant in the former stables of a (pink) Luis Barragán house. The many markets around the city are righteously famous for their food offerings. We had huevos rancheros one morning at Mercado de San Juan, and chef’s kiss fish tacos at Coyoacán Market.

The parks of CDMX deserve their own section. Bosque de Chapultapec is legendary, the oldest and largest urban park in all of Latin America, and at 1700 acres, almost twice the size of Central Park. Largely forested with well maintained footpaths throughout, it is a sprawling gorgeous expanse that would take weeks to explore, plus it’s home to nine of the city’s almost 200 museums! More on that later.

We stayed in the stylish neighbourhood of Condesa, which boasts two lovely parks including Aaron’s favourite (and now mine too): Parque Mexico, with its profusion of trees and a former racehorse track called the Hipódromo. The Hipódromo is a gathering spot for everyone, from elders sunning themselves to people rehearsing dance sequences to kids on skateboards to lovers under leafy trellises to musicians busking for change to food stalls and more. I can’t think of a better place to people watch, any time of day or night.

Condesa is also an architecture buff’s dream with its art deco mansions and tree-lined avenues and bougainvillea draped buildings. Our AirBnB was its owner’s childhood home, lovingly restored like a palace, complete with velvet and silk furnishings and crystal chandeliers and a Room of the Bells (which was literally exactly as it sounds!).

Art is one of Mexico City’s great offerings. There is public art in the parks, in the subways, in the plazas and parks. There are also more museums than any other city in the world (save maybe London)! This embarrassment of riches is Josh’s jam and only one of the many reasons he is more than eager to go back. That boy could spend days, weeks, wandering museums in a blissed out art fugue.

Palacio de Belles Artes is in the Historic District. It is not only a marvel of Art Deco architecture, but also features gorgeous large scale murals, including by famed muralist (and misogynist) Diego Rivera. I know he was Frida Kahlo’s great love, but I personally think she (and Rivera’s fellow female muralists who he sabotaged) deserved better. Belles Artes has just one mural by a woman, Rina Lazo, which depicts a fantastical day into night, living world into spiritual world mashup.

We walked through the Zócalo - the famed square of Mexico City where many of its major rallies and concerts take place, plus a delightful nopales (cactus) themed art exhibition while we were there. The Metropolitan Cathedral faces the Zócalo and is a towering beauty of a church. Not far from the Zócalo and Cathedral is the Secretaria de Educacion Publica (SEP) which features dozens more of Diego Rivera’s murals. Rivera’s work staunchly centers the working class and indigenous, and the SEP courtyard and open air hallways are a lovely (free) way to spend an afternoon.

Speaking of Frida Kahlo, her house, Casa Azul in the lovely neighbourhood of Coyoacán, is a must-see. The bright blue paint job alone will send you, but it’s also an absolute delight to wander through her old painting studio, and learn about this cultural, political, and fashion legend’s life and legacy.

The last two museums we visited were both in Chapultapec Park. The Museo Nacional de Antropología is staggering, with the largest collection of pre-Columbian art in the world: more than half a million pieces! There’s a gigantic stunning two-story fountain built into the edifice of the museum courtyard, and lovely gardens around the museum itself. We only made it through a few rooms on the first floor and never even made it to the second floor. It’s the kind of place you need to go to multiple times over months or years.

The Museo de Arte Moderno (also in Chapultapec) was another highlight. It features a gorgeous sculpture garden around the museum. Inside, the surrealist wing was my favourite arty experience of all: chockful of women artists, including my new favourite artist, Remedios Varo, she of the wild and fairytale like paintings.

We spent a day in the neighbourhood of San Jerónimo Aculco-Lídice with my dear Icelandic friend Elin. H/T to our mutual friend Mahmud (who went to college with Elin) for hooking us up back in 2008! Despite Elin’s Viking heritage and colouring, she is perhaps more Latin than her Mexican husband Luis! She has lived in South and Central America her entire life and teaches Spanish to foreigners at UNAM. Elin’s father, Ingmar, was a renowned marine biologist and professor. I was lucky enough to meet him back in 2009, when he took me and Simi to their lovely country home in Tepoztlán (a sun-spangled dreamy memory).

Elin gave me and Josh a tour of the ginormous campus of UNAM. It is the largest university in Latin America with more than 300,000 students! The Central Library on campus is a showstopper, with enormous mosaic murals on all four sides of the building. One could just sit outside the building and stare it for a while. Indeed, Elin takes her language students to do exactly that (and to talk about the historical and cultural stories embedded in the mosaics).

Mexico City is easily traversable via the fast, frequent, very affordable metro system (5 pesos a ride: ~$0.28). Uber is also easy and cheap. We had a midnight flight on our last day, and I was thrilled to find self-storage lockers in Condesa, which made it super easy to whizz around the city on our last day, unburdened by bags.

Our last night in Mexico City was spent taking in Lucha Libre, the campy Mexican version of WWF (dramatic costumed fake wrestling). Fighting, even fake fighting, is not my cup of tea, and I would have never gone if it hadn’t been highly touted by literally everyone who’s done it.

Turns out they were right! Lucha Libre is energetic and acrobatic and silly and funny and flamboyant and ridiculous. Plus the audience is SO into it that the energy is infectious and delightful. I’d definitely recommend going at least once.

In care work for the world, I have been continuing meeting with my Jackson Heights Indivisible crew, a bit too intermittently for my mental health. It really makes me feel better to commune with these can-do principled neighbourhood activists: whether it’s hitting up local business with “Know Your Rights” training materials, or dancing and cheering on a highway overpass with political messaging (NO WAR IN IRAN was our latest), or protesting TD Bank which is letting ICE use its private parking lots to stage raids, or meeting up with our revolutionary book club members (the last thing I read was Hannah Arendt’s brilliant and still-timely 1964 essay, Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship).

I also joined in a fierce and impromptu anti-war rally on the first day of US/Israeli military assaults on Iran. Josh and I headed to Times Square, hours after the Iranian girls elementary school bombing, and rallied and marched with fellow New Yorkers.

We are now more than three weeks into a horrifying tragic war crime of a war, which news, at least in America, overshadows the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the Lebanon bombings by Israel, the Epstein files, the Ukraine war, the ICE kidnappings, the ruling that antifa protestors are domestic terrorists, and more.

We need each other more than ever. Sign up for your local mutual aid community groups. If you feel safe enough, put your body into the world to protest and speak up. Call your congress people every moment you think of it. And remember, this coming Saturday, March 28 is the next No Kings protest and we will make it the biggest American turnout yet. New York, I’ll see you in the streets.