Edd's Travels: Mexico City

In Spanish it's Ciudad de Mexico, generally abbreviated to CDMX. Normally in my blog titles I include the country as well as the city, even when doing so can appear a little superfluous (eg "Madrid, Spain"). But there are some occasions when it's definitely redundant and this is one of them.

Coming here from Medellín was one of those journeys that makes you realise how small Europe is. You assume that going to central America from the northern part of South America is a reasonably short hop, but in fact it's a longer journey than Dublin to Moscow. It was a night flight with no in-flight entertainment other than a frankly titanic thunderstorm visible a few miles to the west. My arrival went smoothly, although as you can imagine, there's no option of 'nothing to declare' when you fly into Mexico from Colombia.

My first impression was that it felt like being back in one of the bigger cities in Texas: the wide streets, the skyscrapers, the familiar American chains like 7/11 and Dominos. (And of course the millions of Mexicans, ha ha.) Much as I've enjoyed my time in Colombia, it was all a bit noisy and manic there, and things here are slightly more orderly and sedate. In Medellín I was on the 28th floor and I could hear the street-level partying all night long; here I'm on the 5th floor and I sleep in peace.

Also, while I liked the food in Colombia, Mexico is a whole new level. It boasts one of the world's most enjoyably distinctive cuisines, and I have enthusiastically plunged snout-first into it. I'm being a bit more careful with my money here because there are a lot of very rich people in CDMX and in certain places they push the price of food & beer up to UK / USA levels, if not further.

But the main thing about Mexico City is that it's big, very big indeed. In fact it's ridiculously big. It literally contains more people than Greece and Portugal combined. I'm going to have to spend a bit more time in this city than usual. There's also the fact that road-tripping around Mexico has certain pitfalls - I did a bit of homework and it made for rather frightening reading. As such, the element of surprise will be missing from the next blog. Stay tuned for more of the same.