Mexico City 2019 Cost of Being a Nomad

A few tips for visiting Mexico City…

• Although it didn’t cost anything we had to get a special permit to drive the van into Mexico City. In order to keep smog down, the city has a system called Hoy No Circula that only allows cars to drive on certain days and at certain times depending on the last letter of your license plate. A Mexican vehicle can be exempt from the program and granted a special sticker if gets a good score on an emissions test. People with foreign vehicles, like us, can apply for a special tourist permit for one or two weeks. The Mexico City police are pretty serious about this – we know this because we got stopped. Luckily we had all of our papers and were sent on our way but as I understand, there is a pretty hefty fine if you aren’t compliant.
• The CDMX subway is super easy to get the hang of. Here is a little tutorial. Because there are so many lines we found having a Subway app to be invaluable. There are several out there. The one I liked most is called Metro – Metrobus Mexico and is available for Android (and I believe Apple) phones. It included all the bus lines as well as the subway line.
• On Sundays, a lot of the museums have free entry. We visited the Modern Art Museum on a Sunday. I expected it to be super crowded – and although there we lots of people there, it was a very pleasant experience.
• The Anthropology Museum is fantastic. There are two lines for tickets – a shorter one for credit cards (the line we chose) or a long one for cash. Both lines moved pretty well. It is a huge museum (we only saw half of the museum), so allow plenty of time. Unfortunately, most of the display info is in Spanish. But even if you can’t read Spanish, I think you can get quite a bit out of it (Wayne seemed to enjoy it).
• It is best to buy tickets to the Frida Kahlo Museum ahead of time online. Tickets are available for specific time slots. We bought tickets for an 11 o’clock entry (the first of the day) thinking it wouldn’t be as crowded then. When we showed up at 11, there was a long line in front of us. The line moved fast and they do a good job of controlling how many people they let in at a time so it isn’t crazy crowded. My tip here is – if you want even less of a crowd buy a ticket for the first entry time and then get there well before the door opens.
• Some museums charge extra for taking photos. I paid an extra 30 pesos (about $1.50 US) at the Frida museum for photos and it was totally worth it.
• Lucha Libre was fun. I think it would be quite enjoyable even for someone who isn’t that interested in wrestling. Here is a good article about attending. It is in Spanish but if you have the Chrome browser with the translator extension it does a fair job of turning it to English. You can buy tickets from Ticketmaster or you can buy them directly from the box office (taquilla). After getting confused by Ticketmaster we decided to just drop by the box office. Luckily the box office was open (they are only open when they have events). Buying tickets was easy. It turns out we probably could have waited until the night of the match to buy our tickets – despite like the article says about there being lots of scalpers outside of the arena, there were lots of empty seats inside. I am not sure if that is because it was a holiday show (Three Kings Day) or if the scalpers are just selling the best seats (We were about 11 rows back and there were lots of empty seats around us but probably the first 7 or 8 rows were completely packed).
• If you are coming to CDMX and want to go to Teotihuacán – here is a good article explaining how to get there with public transportation.
• Lots of museums are closed on Monday which makes Monday a good day for just roaming around taking it all in. But really there are a ton of museums in CDMX so if you are still in a museum mood Monday here is a list of sites that are open.
• Street food is super cheap and super tasty. A friend recently posted that going to the most popular food stalls means that the food is usually fresher.
• I love Walmart. I can’t believe I would ever hear myself say that but there was a Walmart right around the corner from our Airbnb and we visited it often for snacks and beer. I recently got admonished on Facebook for making a post about finding a grocery store that sold some of the American foods I had been missing and was told that I should only be eating Mexican food. Of course, we have been eating plenty of Mexican food but since I cook most of our meals finding the foods I know how to cook with can sometimes be a challenge. Walmart is all over Mexico and I love it because I know I am more like to find what I want there. When you travel and are exploring and learning new stuff almost every single day – having a constant that is familiar like a major grocery store is nice. Actually, there are many major American stores in Mexico City. We also visited Office Max to get make copies of our Mexico City driving permit. Wayne made many trips to 7-11. Of course, there is American fast food like McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC. You can buy Dominos Pizza in the subway. And across the country, we have also seen Home Depots, Costcos, and Best Buys.