Mexico City: Colorful San Ángel and Condesa
April 07, 2020 Mexico City sprawls across 573 square miles, with a staggeringly large population of 8.85 million that makes it the biggest city in North America. You can’t possibly see it all, so you have to pick one neighborhood per day and plan on a 20-to-30-minute Uber ride to ...
Mexico City: Bosque de Chapultepec botanical garden and more
April 05, 2020 One morning during our stay in Mexico City we explored the city’s “lungs”, the Bosque de Chapultepec, or Chapultepec Forest. At 1,695 acres, it’s one of the largest city parks in the Western Hemisphere. Chapultepec means “grasshopper hill” in the Aztec language, and in fact the park ...
Mexico City: Folk art skeletons, devils, and more at Museo de Arte Popular
April 03, 2020 Skeletons may be macabre to American eyes, but they’re a popular motif in Mexican folk art, as we saw at the Museo de Arte Popular (Museum of Folk Art) in Mexico City. Housed in an Art Deco building in the historic center, the museum is perfectly sized ...
Mexico City: Day trip to Teotihuacán pyramids
April 01, 2020 One pleasure of travel is the opportunity to marvel over monuments built by earlier civilizations: Stonehenge, Roman arenas and bridges, castles — and, most recently for us, Mesoamerican pyramids at Teotihuacán, about an hour’s drive northeast of Mexico City. We hired an Uber driver to take us ...
Mexico City: Jacaranda purple haze, Centro Histórico, and native plants
March 27, 2020 A romantic, violet veil brightens Mexico City each spring, when jacaranda trees unfurl a profusion of purple flowers on bare, sinuous trunks lining parkways, park paths, and residential streets. Jacaranda trees I caught sight of the purple haze from the airplane as we descended over the smoggy ...
Mexico City: Coyoacán coyotes, parks, and mole
March 24, 2020 After touring the Frida Kahlo Museum, we walked around Coyoacán, one of Mexico City’s charming historic neighborhoods with sherbet-colored buildings, bustling plazas, green parks, a food and souvenir market, and coyotes everywhere. No, not real ones. “Coyoacán” means “place of coyotes” in the Aztec language Nahuatl. Two ...
Mexico City: Frida Kahlo’s Blue House and garden
March 23, 2020 Bird of paradise flower at Frida Kahlo’s Blue House Before the scope of the coronavirus crisis had crystallized, my husband, daughter, foreign exchange-student daughter, and I made an early spring-break trip to Mexico City. Had we known how fast the situation would escalate at home, I don’t ...
Warm up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
January 07, 2014 Revisiting my trip to Beijing proved so enjoyable on a cold winter day that I’m continuing the travel theme. Next up: Mexico! In March 2006, just one month after I started this blog, my husband and I traveled to San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico. I ...