Down and Out in Mexico City (Premium)

Our trip to Mexico City on Sunday was tiring but uneventful: we stayed at a hotel near Newark Liberty Airport to avoid having to get up at a ridiculous hour and drive 90 minutes to get there two hours ahead of our 8 am flight, and that worked out well. Our flight even arrived a little early and we discovered that Mexico City finally had done away with the silly Multiple Immigration Form (“FMM”) immigration papers the country had previously required for tourists. Now, they just stamp your passport like every other country and add a notation about how long you can stay. 180 days, in our case, though we only needed two weeks.

There were a few troubling differences from previous trips, however. This was the first time we’d had to wait in line in customs, and it was a long line, and the drive to our apartment, normally about 20 minutes, was about 10 minutes longer thanks to traffic. But when we finally arrived, it all felt worth it. Roma Norte, at least, was comfortably familiar. And then we walked into the apartment.

I’m usually pretty compulsive about charging my devices on the plane, but this time I had left caution to the wind, and it seemed to work out. The HP Envy 16 I was reviewing, which had never gotten better than 3.5 hours of battery life, survived the entire 4.5-hour flight. And my iPhone still had over a 70 percent charge when got off the plane. That had dropped dramatically on the way home from the airport, to below 50 percent, thanks I’m sure to me checking the Uber directions against Google Maps repeatedly and whatever other cellular nonsense. Anyway, we wanted to charge our devices a bit and then head out for a late lunch at one of our favorite local places.

Unfortunately, I noticed while unpacking and plugging in that our Internet connection was down, and I could see a red blinking “LOS” (loss of service) light on the Huawei router that TotalPlay, our Internet provider, had supplied. Great. We then spent the next hour and a half on two concurrent attempts to get help, with me on WhatsApp and my wife on text message. My attempt was ultimately futile---after fumbling to get past the Spanish language bot-based help system, I was told repeatedly that a human who never arrived was on the way---but my wife finally got through. And after a bit of basic troubleshooting, we were told that someone would come to fix it. The next day (Monday). Between 9 am and 4 pm.

There was nothing to do about it, and by then, our phones were charged, so we headed out. There was nothing more to do: I had written an article, much of that Envy 16 review, and Monday’s Thurrott Premium newsletter editorial on the plane, and we had basic Internet through our phones: Me, with 5 GB of international data thanks to my recent switch to T-Mobile, and my wife with 500 MB per day via Verizon, so we figured we could get some basic things done later. We also have a phone with an AT&T Mexico eSIM in it, but it needed to be renewed. A...