Mexico City — Week 4
Monday I started the Vistage Chair Academy, a course that will allow me to be the chair of a group of CEOs that work together to share information and figure out challenges that the group members are facing. It’s a 5 day course, from 8:45–15:30 Mexico time every day. Vistage is the world’s largest leadership organization for CEOs with over 45,000 members worldwide. It has been around for over 65 years, and it’s about CEOs stepping away from their day-to-day duties and connecting with other leaders to gain outside perspectives. As a result, they become Better Leaders, make Better Decisions, and deliver Better Results. It is the premiere CEO coaching organization in the world. Dun & Bradstreet data shows Vistage members grow their companies 2.2x faster than non-members regardless of market conditions. You can read more about Vistage here.
This means that I can only start wandering the city around 4pm, which is what I did today, walking to CDMX Centro for only the second time since arriving here. I walked through Masala y Maiz, an Indian-Mexican fare restaurant that we’ve been trying to get reservation for a week in advance, to no avail. So I decide to walk over there and see if my physical presence will make a difference. Believe it or not, it did. The guy looked at his reservation list and found 1 (one) two hours slot in the next couple of weeks, on Sunday at noon. Hurray. But this is not the end of the story. To guarantee the reservation, I had to wait for an email and pay a deposit of 500 pesos (30 USD) per person, or 150 USD for 5 people. Believe it or not again, I did pay it. You get your money back if you cancel up to 24 hours prior to the reservation time. If this is the cost if a reservation deposit, I don’t want to know what it will cost to eat there. Stay tuned.
In one of my first days here I visited Mercado de La Ciudadela, a very cool arts and crafts market, and I decided to go visit it again, as I think it’s one of the top markets in CDMX. This time I bought a very colorful shirt for myself, and a colorful bag for Celesti. It was fun to stroll in the Centro during the evening when it’s cooler and full of people in cafes and restaurants. Like almost any major city in the world, CDMX has a Chinatown, albeit a very small one, one street over one block, which takes all of 5 minutes to cover. I also visited the Sears store in Centro, which the café on top of the building offers a nice view of the center. I wanted Indian food, but couldn’t find a decent Indian restaurant in the center, so I opted for a Thai restaurant, Galanga, in Roma Norte, but took the food to go as it was already late.
Allergy is killing me. I don’t know if this is pollen or something else, but whenever I go out, my nose drips, my eyes get red and teary, and I sneeze almost non-stop. Tal is getting me Flonase from the US, which will hopefully help.
Tuesday was another day of the Vistage Chair Academy training, Another day of sitting on my butt from 8:45–15:30, so by the time it ended, after seating for seven hours, I had to get a massage, which I got at Alterna Salud Spa, and was pretty good and reasonably priced. Walking to Roma Norte — which is becoming my favorite place to talk around, I stopped at Panderia Rosetta, and for the second afternoon in a row they ran out of Guayaba pastries. This is annoying. So I got something else, and sat at Qūentin Café, to get coffee and take from there a one hour phone call. Gracias Madre Vegan Tacos was on my list since my first day at CDMX, and only today I got along to get there and have dinner there. Most of the fare is soy and seitan based dishes, which I don’t like, but the Smoked Vegetables burrito was a nice portion and very tasty. Recommended. Adding a detox drink to the burrito, it all fit into a sub-$10 check. On the way back to the apartment I discovered Sumesa, a large supermarket and a good alternative to Walmart Express, and bought some stuff for the upcoming visit of Tal and Celesti.
Wednesday started very very early. Earlier than you can imagine. Actually, some people will say it was still Tuesday night. It just happened that UEFA opened a first-come-first-served resale for Euro 2024 at noon Israel time on Wednesday. The problem with that is that it was 4AM at Mexico City, so I sat my alarm to 3:45AM to get up for the resale. At some point of time I woke up to discover it’s 4:30am. The alarm didn’t ring, or to be honest, I found out that I set it to 4:45AM instead of 3:45AM.
Then the last day of the Vistage training, which was extended by a social hour on zoom at the end, so I only left the apartment at 4PM, but I was still able to walk 15km, walking thru the park to north Polanco and eating dinner at the Indian restaurant Elephant House (OK, not more) , and then walking all the way back to the apartment.
Thursday was the big day. Gali, Tal, Logan and Celesti (GTLC) were arriving on 5PM on a flight from San Francisco, and I went to get them from the airport. The idea was to rent a car, as Uber will be complicated with the baby car seat, plus we will need two Uber rides for every trip, as there are 5 of us. So I did what many people do in normal countries: I made a reservation on Expedia few days earlier in a respected American car rental company, Enterprise rent-a-car, which received 49/100 rating on Expedia. Bad, right? No if you consider that it was the best rating for a car rental company in the CDMX airport, with most of them scoring between 8–15/100… Yes, this should have been a red warning sign. I arrived to the airport half an hour early, and confidently walked over to the Enterprise Rent-a-car to find out that they do have my reservation, but no cars to rent. No apology was offered. I tried to make another successful Expedia reservation on the spot, this time with Alamo (39/100), just to find out that thy don’t have cars either. Tip: don’t use Expedia to rent a car at the CDMX airport, or maybe don’t use Expedia to rent a car at all. Anywhere. I ended up renting car from a random car rental car at the airport, and paid more than double the price. But GTLC arrived on time, and this is what’s important! For Thursday dinner Tal took us to Taquería Orinoco, which can be best described as fast Mexican food, but the food was good. For
Friday and Saturday were going places in CDMX with GTLC, obviously to places I have already been too. I don’t think I need to tell anyone the difference between walking the city by myself, or even with Gali, to walking with a 2 years old baby. She dictates pretty much everything: the pace, the breaks, the naps, the food places. But she is the sweetest thing in the world. How can someone makes you do things against what you would want to, and you still consider her the sweetest things in the world? It must have to do something with DNA.
Friday we just walked around in Condesa and Roma Norte, while Saturday we went to Panderia Rosetta, and then continued by foot to the Utilitario Mexicana store and to the Ciudadela market. For Friday dinner we made reservations at a Mexican restaurant in Condesa where I ate before and liked (La Tromperia Condesa), but Tal and Logan seemed more excited about the taqueria from last night. The Margarita was special though.
The amount of stuff sold on the streets in more than I’ve seen in any other city I visited so far. Starting with food, almost every street corner, and on many of the sidewalk, they are food booth selling tacos, tostadas, gorditas and more. And in every such food booth, there are always people around it standing or sitting and eating. Then there are booth of proper selling such random stuff that it’s even hard to put under any category, than something of everything. And finally there are these people that are going around, entering cafes and restaurants, approaching you on the street to sell you everything from water to shoelaces to carpets.
Sunday started with another coffee at Fuego y Café, which has become the Café of choice of the coffee aficionados in our group, i.e. people that don’t just drink Starbucks, like myself, and then straight to lunch — the elusive lunch at Masala y Maiz I reserved a week ago and paid $130 just as a deposit for the reservation. It was a good and special meal mixing the Mexican and the Indian cuisines with a variety of interesting dishes, but the surprise in the menu was not the food items on it. The menus had all over them the saying: “A free Palestine is a feminist struggle (see photos). Now, I am all for a Palestinian state, but I bet you the folks at Masala y Maiz have no idea what it means and what’s really is going on. Should we have left the restaurant at that point in time? Maybe, but we didn’t. We just ate the food which was good and special, but probably not worth the hype.
After lunch Gali and I took the one hour walk to Polanco, as Gali hasn’t been there yet. The more I visit Polanco (although it’s nice), the more I am convinced that Condesa or Roma Norte are the place to stay at CDMX. Polanco’s main avenue is Avenida Masaryk. Per Wikipedia, it is one of the most expensive shopping districts in the world[. President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río named the avenue in 1936, in honor of Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia (from 1918 to 1935), recognized for his democratic politics. The Israeli village Kfar Masaryk is named after that same person.
Monday is my last day at CDMX! Gali and I decided to give Tal and Logan free time and took Celesti with us to the Chapultepec Park. The only problem was that the park was closed, not sure why. We were dumbfounded, but as we say in Hebrew “מעז יצא מתוק”: looking at what to do, we found the nearby Children’s Museum (Papalote Museo del Niño) and took Celesti there. It’s a great museum with lots of activities for kids and highly recommended if you are with kids in CDMX.
If you read all the way to here, you deserve seeing:
My CDMX Highlights
- The weather. Just perfect. Not too hot during the day, mainly when walking in the shade of the many trees, and cool in the evening and night.
- The guayaba. In pastries and in ice cream. Amazing. I re-discovered new flavors of a fruit that grows in my backyard.
- Condesa with its numerous trees and broad avenues. Just fun to walk in the middle.
- Roma Norte with its small plazas (Luis Cabrera, Rio de Janeiro) and many food gems.
- The markets: Ciudadela, San Angel and Tianguis Cultural del Chopo.
- The trip to Teotihuacan and the lunch after the visit. One of the best Mexican meals I ate here.
Total km walked this week: 94km
