What I Use: Mexico City, August 2022 (Premium)

I wasn’t expecting to write this article, given that we’ve been to Mexico City several times this year, and seriously, what could possibly have changed? I bring the same basic tech on each trip, and I’ve left some things here, as noted previously. But this week, we made a few small additions to our apartment in Mexico City that surprisingly have already made a big difference.

Our goals for the week were simple enough: in addition to letting our son Mark visit the apartment for the first time and explore our Roma Norte neighborhood—our daughter Kelly visited in June—we still needed to purchase several items, big and small, to make this place more livable and less like camping out. Overall, our success was mixed.

The big items we needed included a bed frame for the main bedroom (we’ve been sleeping on a mattress on the floor), a day bed/futon/whatever for the secondary bedroom/office (we’ve been using an inflatable mattress we flew out here with in May), small chairs and tables for the balcony, and, most importantly for this discussion, a smart TV and a TV stand. And we also needed to buy any number of smaller items, which are important for not to this discussion: mirrors and storage for the bathrooms and so. It never ends.

My focus was on the beds, as this is so crucial to staying here. My wife and I have been sleeping on the floor on each trip since May, and it’s been a bit arduous. (If you’ve never woken up on the floor and tried to get up normally, go for it. It’s a blast.) My wife had broader plans, but we set out to Ikea last week to see what we could get done.

We did OK—and we were literally recognized by two of the IKEA employees, which was amusing, and the second of them even remembered what street we lived on—and ended up purchasing two small tables and four chairs for the balcony, plus a stand for a TV I didn’t expect to get until months later. But we completely struck out of the bed hardware: the IKEA base we’ve tried to buy several times has been continually out of stock, and while they did have two biggish king-sized frames, they were really expensive (~$1000) and we just can’t spend that much money. A queen-sized day bed my wife wanted for the second bedroom was likewise out of stock.

I wasn’t very happy about this and left IKEA a bit dejected: we have friends visiting here (with us) in October, and we need—or want, I guess—something a little nicer than an air mattress for them. But we were defeated.

When we got home from that buying spree to await the same-day delivery (seriously, you gotta love Mexico), I went back to work. And so, too, did my wife, I thought. But she had hopped on Amazon Mexico to see if she could solve any of these problems. She came to me with a metal bed frame similar to one we had just bought for a guest bedroom back in Pennsylvania and asked if she should just buy that and see what Amazon’s delivery process here looked like. I said sure. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted but it would be better than nothing.

Then she surprised me by showing me an Amazon listing of smart TVs and asked if any of these met my needs. We had previously visited a Sears—which, yes, here is still open and, perhaps more to the point, is kind of an upscale department store—and were surprised by how expensive they were. We shouldn’t have been. For all the lower prices here, the one thing that is actually more expensive in Mexico is electronics. And that was why I figured we’d wait on the TV: it’s not a priority.

Anyway, I looked through the TVs on Amazon Mexico. I had this idea that I wanted a TV as big or bigger than the one we have at home—a 2016-ish 55-inch Samsung smart TV—and I wanted HDR or Dolby Vision, a reasonable number of connections with HDMI eARC support, and so on. There were many that met these requirements and they were much less expensive than what we had seen at Sears.

Then my wife filtered the list to show only those TVs that could be delivered the next day. There were two: one that was too small (forty-something inches) and a 58-inch Hisense smart TV that, holy crap, looked almost perfect. It has Dolby Vision and HDR10 support, eARC, and DTS studio sound. And it also supports AirPlay 2, Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant, the first of which is excellent for my needs. The “almost” bit is that it’s a Roku TV, but I had purchased an Apple TV 4K on sale a month or so ago and would be using that anyway. But the best bit is that the cost was just MX$9799. Which is about $490.

We bought it.

And it was delivered at 9 am the next day along with a bed frame for the extravagant shipping cost of $4. Again, you gotta love Mexico.

I was happy to get the TV, obviously. And my son was particularly happy since we had started watching a show (The Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix) together at night and had been huddling around a laptop display. And after getting a small voltage protector with six power receptacles at a local Office Max, I wired it all up and configured the TV to boot into the Apple TV. And then I became much more impressed.

The video quality on this TV is fantastic, and it’s better than what we have at home. The sound, for a TV, is surprisingly good, and though I still plan to eventually get a Dolby Atmos soundbar, probably from Sonos, this will do nicely for now. We could even do music night with this.

But even better was the unexpected shift that this TV triggered. When we’re home, we have whatever normal schedule, and part of that involves my wife and I heading to the living room at 8 pm to watch a few hours of TV most nights. We usually binge-watch whatever show once all of the episodes for a particular season are available; we’ll watch the end of Better Call Saul and the latest season of For All Mankind when we return home, for example.

Well, the TV has made this place seem more like home and less like some foreign destination where we have different schedules and do different things. Since setting it up, we’ve pretty much done what we do when we’re home. And now this place seems more … I don’t know, normal, somehow. And my wife and I both arrived at this thought independently.

Getting the bed off the floor helped too, for sure. And we discovered that the small tables we had bought for the balcony just fit on either side of our king-sized bed and could be used as nightstands. And so we’ll probably keep them there—it’s a small space—and just get two more later for the balcony. So that worked out nicely, too. We still need lamps, but the bedroom likewise feels more normal now as well.

With my son sleeping in the second bedroom and retiring to there when he wants to work or relax privately, I’ve put my “more mobile” setup on the kitchen table, which I’m now positive we’ll almost never use for eating anyway.

This has worked out well enough, and I’ve worked and recorded First Ring Daily and Windows Weekly from there without issue. Brad will appreciate that I’ve run an Ethernet cable across the floor to this setup, just as I’ve done at home. And I’m even more sure that I will never wire this place for Ethernet given the thick concrete construction.

Speaking of which, the building architect visited us this past week because we’ve been having issues with water pressure—it goes up and down as you shower or otherwise use the water—and he was the guy who had set us up with Internet access back in May. I asked him about getting a higher-speed connection, and he’s going to make that happen. I’m not sure where we’ll land, but our current connection is just 100/10 Mbps.

Which, oddly enough, has been just fine. My podcasts have been error-free and clear, all our work has proceeded normally, and we can easily stream 4K video to the TV over Wi-Fi with no issues. The three of us did a Facebook Messenger video call with my daughter from the apartment, and each of us was on the Wi-Fi and we had no issues with video clarity, glitches, or whatever.

Point being, 100/10 is probably fine. But I’m compulsive enough to want more speed, particularly on the upload side. So, it’s happening.

And that’s about it, I guess. Some progress. Some unexpected wins. And still lots to do. But this place feels a lot more like a home now. And that’s pretty cool.