Mexico City – the Most Magical of All

July 30, 2024|Rick Juliusson

I have always been afraid of Mexico City and never wanted to visit. Just as my preconceived notions of Africa paralyzed me my first time there, I somehow envisioned “CDMX” to be a monstrously wide basin so smoggy that it’s dangerous to breathe, so teeming with druglords and pickpockets that leaving the hotel would be certain peril, and so overpopulated that you literally couldn’t walk freely in the streets with elbows out.

Where this impression came from I can’t pinpoint - can’t blame National Geographic or even Trump this time - but it does mean that Mexico City was the biggest and happiest surprise of our travels. For $10 we had daily access to city bicycles to pedal along bike lanes and quiet streets, past endless excellent restaurants filled day and night with patrons at outdoor tables, out to see Aztec ruins and towering Diego Rivera murals and flower markets and local artisans and parks and sculptures and modern architecture and… It’s an immensely livable and enjoyable city that we could happily return to for a few months to settle in and truly absorb.

Stunning modern architecture and old monuments

Beautiful old architecture

Giant bat sculpture

Look closely - 50 delicious crickets!

Temptation was everywhere

Museum of Anthropology

Well-stocked grocery stores!

Azteca Stadium - 7,200 feet above sea level, 87,523 seating capacity

Just the post office, nothing special...

Traditional dance performers

City bikes everywhere

Modern art display

Handcrafted chocolate drink

Mothers Day special dress

Frida Kahlo's House

An even bigger highlight (possibly) than watching Liga MX soccer playoffs at Azteca Stadium was our visit to Frida Kahlo’s house. Usually these famous-people houses are simply period pieces that anyone could have lived in (with the exception of Elvis’ Graceland and Prince’s Paisley Park), but this house and garden truly embodied the creative spirit as well as the personal suffering of this unique, genius person. We could feel her: gazing out over the garden from her wheelchair, lying for days and months in bed painting self-portraits using the mirror mounted on the bed canopy above, decorating furniture, adorning and selecting shoes, sitting by the pond with her great love Diego, painting the body caste that constrained but never smothered her fire for so much of her life.

Also pictured below are gigantic-powerful-overwhelming murals by Diego Rivera and his contemporaries - many painted at the same time at different sides of the vast gallery of the Palacio de Bellas Artes.