From the Editor’s Desk: Research (Premium)

Here in Mexico City last night, my wife and I took an Uber over to the one place in the area where we can buy capsules for our silly little Nespresso machine. But we decided to walk home and figure out a place for dinner somewhere along the 30-minute route. My stomach had been mildly upset for most of the day—I still suspect a somewhat gamey oyster from the day before—and I was in that weird place where I couldn’t tell if my stomach was churning or I was just hungry. But I wanted something familiar that wouldn’t make matters worse.

You may laugh that what popped into my head was sushi. But not expensive, high-end sushi with lots of fish. Instead, I was looking for the more pedestrian sushi we now eat on most Wednesday nights at home, small rolls that are mostly rice. We have a favorite sushi spot near our apartment, but they don’t have that kind of sushi. (Indeed, they were the source of the suspect oyster.) So we walked and looked around on Google Maps for something suitable.

There are sushi joints all over Roma Norte near our apartment—indeed, it’s a little strange how many there are—but we’d never bothered to try any because we’d already found that one special place. But after a bit of searching around, we came across a restaurant that is about four blocks from our apartment and had very good reviews.

Four blocks is not far. But we have so many excellent restaurant choices that are even closer to our apartment than that, including many, many inexpensive places, that we rarely seek to go further. So in the strange world that is this place, we had never heard of this nearby restaurant that is so highly rated.

And it was exactly what the doctor ordered. I could have gotten something more daring, but all I wanted and maybe needed was some basic sushi rolls, and that’s what I got. That was good, and my mild queasiness passed nicely with no drama, but I was most taken with how we have just settled in here. We have already kind of stopped looking for anything new.

This reminded me of the copious amounts of research I did before our first trip to Mexico City, especially, but also the ongoing research I did over the first year or so. One way that I store “to-do” type information for restaurants, bars, and other locations is to mark them with a “Want to go” pin in Google Maps. And for places like this area, where we travel a lot, the local map is a sea of those green pins.

I add a lot fewer “Want to go” pins here these days, but it still happens. More common, I guess, is that we’ve visited a place on that list and it either turns into a “Starred” place or is removed from the list. Sometimes it’s removed from the list because it’s not great, but as often it’s just a common place like a monument or park that doesn’t need to be called out anymore. (I did add this sushi place to the “Starred” list.)

I was likewise reminded by how much I enjoyed discovering how much Mexico made sense for us, how I would present this idea to my wife, who I knew would have a knee-jerk reaction to this suggestion as I had originally, and how the more I found out, the more I was intrigued. This is a common phenomenon, I guess: in the same way that a child’s anticipation of a holiday or birthday or whatever is often more memorable than the actual event, preparing for a trip—or, in our case, a future—is likewise more enjoyable, in some ways, than actually doing it.

And just as these thoughts were going through my mind, I became aware of the two women sitting next to us at the sushi bar. They were American, obviously—like us, all Americans here stand out in ways that are often frustrating—talking too loudly, spending too much time on their phones, and not trying all that hard to speak even basic Spanish. And so their story entered my ears without invitation. And what I heard, and what I later learned in talking with them, was interesting.

They were visiting Mexico because of a destination wedding in nearby Oaxaca—which is delightfully pronounced “wah-hah-ka”—and decided to spend a few extra days in Mexico City. They were staying in a nearby Airbnb, of course, and it was pretty clear that their plan was just to walk around the area and see what they saw. But a guy on the far side of these two—also an American, raising the ugly possibility that we had been planted next to each other on purpose, as one might do with a kid’s table at Thanksgiving—had clearly done more planning. And once he realized we knew the area well, he started asking for suggestions. Which we were delighted to give.

(When we first moved to Pennsylvania, we met an older couple at a local sushi bar—classic coincidence—and they were incredibly helpful with area restaurant suggestions. So helpful that I filled up Google Maps with “Want to go” pins and then we paid for their meal on the way out without telling them as a thanks. Figuring they’d run into us there again, they waited and returned the favor, and we’ve been good friends ever since.)

I was struck by how differently the two women and the guy had prepared for their respective trips. The women seemed almost clueless, and even their behavior in the restaurant was a bit off, as if they were just stumbling through life and taking it as it came. But in this place, they were lucky to find a soft landing: for all the bad news we hear about Mexico, the reality is that it’s full of the friendliest people on earth, people who—as these women correctly noted—apologize to you when they don’t speak your language. And so their bumbling lack of research ended up not being a huge problem. I suspect they believe this experience confirmed their lifestyle and wasn’t just them being lucky.

But the guy was much more interesting to me: he was eager to know more, and he wanted to make sure that he did the right things in whatever time he had in this area. This was additionally curious because he kind of gave off a bro vibe at first glance but was in fact a nice guy with an interesting story. So much for first impressions.

In the end, maybe it’s just a curiosity thing. The women were at least curious enough to come to Mexico City, and I should at least give them credit for that. But the guy was curious enough to do the research. And I gotta say, that resonates with me a lot more than just showing up.