What I Use: Mexico City (October 2022) (Premium)

Our final trip to Mexico City in 2022 has given us a glimpse of a future in which we split time between here and someplace in the United States. We’re only here for two weeks, too quick in some ways. But after spending the first week with our first visitors in the apartment, my wife and I have spent the second week experiencing a normal daily existence, similar to our lives and schedules in Pennsylvania.

It may not be obvious why that’s important to us. But we’ve sort of formalized the schedule that we first adopted on home swaps over 15 or so years, where each day is split up into a bit of work in the morning, some form of sightseeing in the middle of the day, and then a bit of work again before dinner. I’ve often referred to it as a perfect schedule, and during that first week, with our friends here, we mostly stuck to that, and I was more productive from a work perspective than I usually am. So there’s something to it.

But if we’re going to spend months at a time here, things are going to change: we’re not going to have the energy or desire to go out and see new sights every day, for starters. And we couldn’t afford to do that anyway. Also, we have, to date, eaten out every single meal during every trip to Mexico, even though we now have an apartment with a refrigerator and stove in its kitchen. Things are inexpensive here, like really inexpensive. But it’s not hard to imagine that things are even less expensive if we start eating in.

And so for this second week, that’s what we did. We bought breakfast food—eggs, bacon, yogurt, and sometimes bread—and we’ve eaten breakfast in the apartment most days. (At least twice, I just had a $2.50 Jugo Verde (green juice) made by a woman with a street stand, an incredible mix of cucumber, parsley, spinach, ginger, nopal (cactus), pineapple, guava, and oranges, it’s quite filling.) We’ve gone out for lunch most days, but much more cheaply than usual: we’ve averaged about $8.50 total per lunch. And then we’ve gone out for dinner normally.

Based on these and other similar experiences, my wife and I going to discuss the cost of food here in a future Eternal Spring video. But you can get by very cheaply here. It’s rather incredible.

Anyway. Onto more pertinent matters.

Home Internet

As I’ve mentioned in the past, the people who built our apartment building were nice enough to set up our apartment’s Internet access with a company called TotalPlay, but they set it up with its slowest 100 Mbps connection tier and a bundled TV and phone that we will never use. And so I checked out the different Internet-only packages they offer, and there are much better options, including 200 Mbps ($35 per month), 500 Mbps ($45 per month), and 1 Gbps ($80 per month). 1 Gbps is overkill, especially given how little we’re there, but with 500 Mbps costing just $10 a month more than 200 Mbps, that seemed like the obvious choice. (Plus, it drops to $40 per month after 6 months.)

When we arrived here, our Internet connection was down, and in the ensuing scrum, my wife and tried two different ways of contacting technical support, me on WhatsApp and her on text messaging. She got through first, discovered there was an English-language option, and saw that we could upgrade the line that way too. Of course, the first order of business was just getting the thing fixed, which happened the next day. And then we had friends visiting for the week.

This past week, I tried to upgrade the connection twice over text messaging in English. Each time, I was put on hold and told repeatedly that a representation would be there soon. They never came and, in each case, I gave up after over an hour. Today (Friday), I decided to try again after finishing up Ask Paul. But this time, I did it in Spanish. I got right through, made the change, and arranged for them to pick up the TV box the next morning. Success. My first few tests on Ethernet—the router here is still Wi-Fi 5, so wireless isn’t quite as good—were about 400/200 Mbps.  Nice.

SIM card

On our May trip here, we purchased an AT&T SIM card so we could get the Mexican phone number we’d need for certain bill-paying activities (some of which require them to text a code to a local number). That wasn’t very expensive—about $15 a month for 3 GB of data and free U.S. usage—but it has a major downside because we don’t have a Mexican Registro Federal de Contribuyentes (RFC), which is basically their version of a social security number: we have to show up physically at the local AT&T store, which admittedly is only a few minutes walk from the apartment, to pay the bill. And because we’ve only been here roughly every other month since then, the line kept dying until we paid up.

I figured we could do better. And in the wake of the iPhone 14 launch, and the news that U.S.-based models of Apple’s latest phones would only feature eSIMs (embedded SIMs), I had a new thing to investigate: as you might expect, all of the Apple blogs are downplaying the eSIM requirement, and claiming that eSIMs weren’t just not a problem for international travelers, but that the advantages of eSIMs somehow made the iPhone 14 lineup better than ever for those coming to foreign countries.

That wasn’t my experience, at least not in Mexico. Over the previous 7 trips to Mexico City, I’d seen that physical SIM card availability was common at the airport and at local 7-11-type stores like Oxxo. But I’d never seen an eSIM for sale. So I was curious to check that out.

My previous experience was correct: at both the airport and at all of the mobile stores and Oxxo locations we visited, only physical SIMs are available. (And in the case of Oxxo, most don’t even offer that.) So I can safely shatter that myth and be silently glad I wasn’t stupid enough to upgrade my year-old iPhone 13 Pro (which supports eSIM and nanoSIM) to a newer model this past month.

More importantly, we shopped around to see what the best deal was on a SIM card, and we found a card at a Telmex retail store called Celmex that offered the same pay-as-you-go 3 GB of 5G data per month as the AT&T card, complete with a Mexican phone number and unlimited calls and texts, for just $10 per month. As good, I can pay that bill online (in addition to doing so at Oxxo and other local stores). Problem solved.

I used the Telmex SIM to take what ended up being a single screenshot for the Windows 11 Field Guide, letting me put the Cellular Data chapter to bed. And I then put it in my iPhone, where it may stay for the duration. I did switch over to this data plan (from T-Mobile) and it’s worked great.

Apple Watch

I wrote a bit about my Apple Watch experiences in this past week’s Thurrott Premium newsletter. If you didn’t read that, or don’t have access, here’s the short version: I almost died from High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE) on a Colorado skiing trip in 2005, Mexico City is high altitude, and so I have my worries. On our previous 6 trips here, my Fitbit reported that my resting heart rate would be elevated for the first several days and then would go down toward normal if we were here long enough (or, if not, when I got home). And that’s fine, but what I was really concerned with was my blood oxygen levels, since HAPE—which was either the cause or an effect of something that I believe could kill me someday—is all about low blood oxygen levels.

Apple Watch, unlike Fitbit, does an amazing job of recording and presenting data about blood oxygen levels, and so I was very interested to see that it buzzed on my wrist exactly a week into this trip to alert me, go figure, that my blood oxygen levels were low over the previous week. That makes sense because of the altitude, and I appreciated the heads-up. But since then, of course, I’ve been interested to see how (or if) my body reacted over the second week. As I write this, I’m not quite at the two-week mark of the trip—we fly home Sunday—and Apple Watch hasn’t proactively communicated anything on this topic. But I can monitor it manually, and I have. And what I’ve seen is what I had hoped to see, a gradual increase in my daily average blood oxygen level as time goes on. I know it will go back to normal by the time I get home, but I need it to normalize while I’m here, too, because our plan is to spend a lot more time here once that’s possible. So that’s good news, at least preliminarily.

I have a lot of other observations about the Apple Watch, but I will save them until I get home. In lieu of reviewing the thing, I will instead write periodic articles as I gain more experience and as the device collects and processes more data. So more soon on that.

Computers and tech

I brought two loaner laptops with me to Mexico City and completed and published my reviews of each while here: the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s and the HP Envy 16. Both are excellent laptops for the most part, but they couldn’t be more different. Where the ThinkPad is tiny and light and based on Windows 11 on Arm and the latest Snapdragon chipset, the Envy is a huge and heavy desktop replacement and gaming powerhouse. I surprised myself by using both about equally during the trip: I had expected to move onto the Envy full-time once my X13s review was up, but I used the ThinkPad for a lot of book-related writing after that as well.

I also keep a previous generation HP ZBook Firefly 14 here for “just in case” purposes, along with some of my “More Mobile” gear, which includes a Nexstand Portable Laptop Stand, a Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Wireless Keyboard and Mouse, an Audio-Technica ATR2500x-USB Cardioid Condenser Microphone, and an HP Thunderbolt 4 Dock G4, all of which I left here in the apartment on previous trips. Ideally, this would be set up on the desk in the office/second bedroom, but because we had guests that first week, I set it up on the kitchen table we will literally never use anyway. After they left, I would have moved it all, but a queen-sized daybed arrived for that room, so we built that over time in there instead.

(The ZBook is an older version of the HP ZBook Firefly 14 G8 that saved my bacon in August 2021 during a previous trip to Mexico, and I love it despite its 16:9 display. It’s a classic.)

I flew here with two phones, as always, my daily-use iPhone 13 Pro and my Pixel 6 Pro, which I’ve so far resisted upgrading to a Pixel 7 series device. Google is offering killer trade-in deals right now, however, and I could trade in the Pixel 7 Pro and pay just $100 for (non-Pro) Pixel 7. I may do that despite the lower-end camera system, so I can at least review it. I’ll decide when I get home.

I also traveled here with my usual gadget bag full of useful accessories, including the ever-so-useful Anker Power Strip with USB-C (an extension cord with three power outlets, two USB-A ports, and one USB-C port), and various other cables and adapters. I use an Anker 40-watt USB-C charger with two USB-C ports at home to charge my iPhone and iPad, and I brought that along here to charge my iPhone and Apple Watch by the bed. (I bought a second Apple Watch charger for travel.)

There were no changes to the bags I travel with: I still use the Rick Steves Ravenna Rolling Case for luggage, but since I’m leaving so many clothes here now, it was half-empty and easier to cart around. And my HP Renew Backpack, which had no problems swallowing the two laptops, my iPad Air, extra phones, various earbuds and cables, and whatever else.

I think that’s most of it. For the most part, this has been a normal work week. Or, as normal as it can be in a place we don’t live permanently.

We fly home Sunday.