What I Use: Mexico City (Premium)

For our first international trip in almost two years, we’re visiting Mexico City, which can stand proudly alongside Paris as one of the world’s greatest destinations. Naturally, I had some cobwebs to shake off. And some personal technology decisions to make.

I originally planned to bring the HP Elite Folio on this trip, and that would have been a great real-world test for Windows 10 on ARM. But I was distracted by a higher power: Two days before our flight, a pre-release version of Windows 11 leaked, and I installed it on the HP Spectre x360 14 I had previously reviewed (and on the desktop PC I use every day). I debated whether to stick with my original plan or to see whether Windows 11 could work well enough for day-to-day use at this early stage. But the allure of Windows 11 was too strong; all these years later, a new version of Windows still excites me. So I took the Spectre.

On that note, Windows 11, of course, is really just Windows 10 with a new user interface, at least at this point, and so almost everything has worked normally and as expected. I wrote about this experience separately in Windows 11: Real-World Use (Premium), so there’s little reason to belabor the point here. Other than to point out that Paint has never worked again, and that uninstalling it didn’t help as its availability from the Store disappeared after I did so. So I’ve been making do with other image editing apps for the duration of the trip. It’s very inefficient.

As you may recall, I purchased an iPad Air earlier this year, replacing an older 9.7-inch iPad that had developed some performance issues. In the past, I’d usually upgraded the storage on each iPad so I could load them up with movies before trips. But this time around, I stuck with the base 64 GB of storage almost as an experiment.

It’s worked out fine. I downloaded 6 movies in Netflix rather than the Apple TV app since I knew they’d take up a lot less space. And sure enough, Netflix is only using 3.4 GB of storage and there is 24.6 GB of free space available. I’ll call that a win.

Well. Except for a small audio snafu, that is.

As you may recall, ­I previously purchased a pair of Bose QuietComfort Earbuds, and I was able to test them for the first time on a one-way flight to Charlotte in May to pick up our daughter at the end of her first year of college, and then again on the commuter train between Newark Liberty International Airport and New York City. The flight to Mexico City was another great opportunity to enjoy its excellent active noise-canceling (ANC) functionality, and it really is excellent. But I also ran into a problem that potential buyers should be aware of: You can only sync them with one device at a time. And since I wanted to switch between listening to music on my phone and watching a movie on my iPad Air, this limitation proved to be tedious.

What I found is that you should disconnect the Earbuds from the current device before pairing them with a new device. I didn’t do the disconnect initially, and when I tried to use them again with the first device, sound only came out of the right side. So I had to disconnect them twice and reconnect. This isn’t quite a deal-breaker for me, since the audio quality and ANC are so good, but it’s a pain.

As you may know, I’ve been using a Google Pixel 4a 5G since late 2020, and while I really like it despite its mid-level components, I have a few quibbles. I had to replace the display in December, which was concerning, given my previous Pixel reliability problems. And while the camera is generally excellent, with wide-angle and ultra-wide-angle lenses, it’s missing a telephoto lens and its zoom capabilities are thus almost non-existent.

I’ve also been using Mint Mobile as my wireless carrier since March 2020, and I’ve enjoyed the service and its low cost so much that I re-upped for another year in March 2021. If Mint has a downside, it’s lack of international usage: They let you buy international calling and texting capabilities, but not data. This wasn’t a problem during the pandemic, since we couldn’t travel. But with the Mexico City trip on the horizon, I re-signed up for Google Fi, which has terrific and affordable international data capabilities. My idea is to “sleep” the account during those months in which I’m not traveling internationally and not have to pay the base $20 fee each month. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, between the phone and the wireless service, I had some decisions to make. For the most part, the Pixel 4a 5G would serve me well from a picture-taking perspective. And this phone will, of course, work fine with Google Fi. In fact, I can use that with the eSIM and keep the Mint Mobile SIM inserted, which is nice.

But I decided to go in a different direction. The two-year-old Huawei P30 Pro takes similar pictures to the Pixel, but it has an excellent telephoto lens with optical zoom capabilities, which I knew I’d want, and it’s particularly good for food photos. So I put the new Google Fi SIM, with my new Pennsylvania phone number, in that phone. And I’ve been walking around Mexico City mostly with just the P30 Pro, not the Pixel.

I semi-regret this. The P30 Pro does still take some great shots, especially for food, and I’ve really enjoyed the telephoto capabilities.

But I did take the Pixel along a few times as well, and did some side-by-side shots, and I was surprised to discover that I like the Pixel shots better. I stuck with the P30 Pro, but I’m really looking forward to the Pixel 6, which will finally add that telephoto lens. Ah well. The pictures are still very good overall, and some of them are stunning.

From a packing perspective, I was able to keep it light, with only carry-on luggage. I needed 5-6 days of clothing, and that’s roughly what I bring on a three-week home swap (where we have laundry facilities each time), so I knew it would all fit in my Rick Steves Ravenna Rolling Case, along with a small gadget bag and my toiletries. I also went small with my laptop bag, using the Rick Steves Velocé Shoulder Bag, which carried the laptop and charger, iPad Air, the Bose Earbuds, our passports and related documentation, an extra smartphone, and few other small items.

A year and a half ago, my wife and I booked a 30th-anniversary trip to Paris. We always fly coach, but I do try to upgrade to some kind of extra-legroom seats when possible, and for the Paris trip, for some reason, business class seats weren’t all that much more, so we opted for that. But thanks to the pandemic, that never happened, and United put the amount we paid into our account so we could use it on a future trip.

This year, the pandemic began easing up, and we all got vaccinated, and we ended up booking this Mexico City trip as our first international travel since August 2019. Because I did so pretty early, the tickets were cheap, so cheap, in fact, that we went business class and grabbed seats in the second row, and still have money left over in our United account.

This may have been a mistake, since this is clearly the ideal way to fly commercially, assuming you can afford it: We were the first people on the plane, the seats were spacious, we had power, and we are going to hate it when we fly back to Mexico City in August since prices have escalated dramatically and we’ll be in coach again as usual. We decided to just enjoy it while we could and not think about the next trip quite yet.

As for Mexico City, most Americans have some misconceptions about the place. It’s the largest city in the Americas by far, and larger than any metropolitan area in Europe. I was disappointed that some coworkers and readers thought this trip might somehow be dangerous, thanks to constant misinformation about the security situation here from both the U.S. government and movies. And Mexico is an incredibly diverse place from a weather/climate perspective; it’s not all beaches and deserts, and thanks to its altitude of about 7350 feet, Mexico City experiences a sort of eternal spring. During our stay in mid-June, the daytime temperatures never got out of the low 70s, and the nighttime temperatures have been in the 50s.

Two general observations.

First, the price of everything here is disarmingly cheap, assuming you’re familiar with US prices. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve paid for something, done the conversion, and thought, that can’t be right. Lunch has been averaging about $7, and dinner has landed around $40 at indoor restaurants. (With a few more expensive places, of course.) Every Uber ride is $4 to $5. It’s silly.

Second, the people are incredible. So incredible that I’ll be writing about this in the next Premium newsletter. I’ve lost track of how many people have helped us on the Metro, on the streets, whatever, without any asking. Just super nice, super friendly people. It’s off the charts.

I do have one complaint, and I guess this one is about Mexico in general: Its approach to the COVID-19 pandemic is scientifically unsound and pointless for the most part. And this country could save a lot of time, energy, and money by reevaluating that. The one thing it gets right, and this is stunning, is mask usage. Mask usage here is somewhere between 95 and 99 percent. Good for you, Mexico.

What it gets wrong, however, is everything else. Every time you enter any location, often multiple times, you have to get a temperature check and a dose of hand sanitizer, and about 75 percent of the time, you have to clean the bottom of your shoes. COVID-19 doesn’t transmit to people in those ways, and these steps are all pointless; COVID is a respiratory disease. One time, we had been walking in the hot sun and when we went into a museum, my wife and I both failed a temperature check, so we were asked to step aside and wait two minutes. I jokingly moved the bottle of water I was holding to my forehead, which caused the woman guarding the entry to burst out laughing—again, nicest people on earth—and we of course passed the second time. We were just hot from walking in the sun at altitude.

Despite being fully vaccinated Americans, we don’t feel entitled to special treatment, and we’re going to do whatever the host country asks of us. So we wore masks the whole time, of course, no complaints. But the non-mask requirements here, which mostly impact the locales, are silly. That’s all I’m saying.

And we had to get a COVID-19 test just to come home. That’s a US requirement.

One weird side-effect of this trip is that I had too much time to research Mexico City. I purchased four books and watched an uncountable number of hours of videos documenting what it’s like here. I always research places to which I travel to some degree, of course. But with a year off from travel, and it being a new and unfamiliar destination, I wanted to make sure that we understood what we were getting into. Unfortunately, I also had months of time before the trip. And by the end of it, I was pretty sick of reading and watching videos. I just wanted to experience it for myself. I feel like I spent more time researching the place than being here.

I won’t make that mistake again, hopefully. By the time we were just a few weeks out from flying, I had pretty much had enough, and I had lost interest in watching yet another vlogger walk around the same places with a selfie-stick, narrating as they went. I don’t know what possesses normal people to think that their perspectives about a place they’re seeing for the first time are interesting to others, but I guess it’s just an extension of the world we created when we started letting everyone review products on Amazon or restaurants on Yelp or whatever. Citizen journalism is one thing. But a lot of these people are tedious, and I wish there was a Rick Steves-style Mexico City expert that I can trust. There isn’t.

We’ve had some interesting technology fails here.

Mexico City has cabs, of course, but the general advice is that you have to be careful about hailing one on the street because there are scams where the driver tries to charge more once you arrive at the destination; the exception is when you go to a dedicated stand, as at the airport. But that’s fine, Uber is common here and, as noted above, the prices are cheap.

Here’s what happened: We arrive at our destination, get out of the car, and immediately want to rate and tip the driver. A 20 percent tip on a $5 Uber fare is roughly $1, which seems impossibly unfair, but when in Rome, etc. So I leave the tip and we start walking to wherever we’re going. When we get there, I look at my phone and I have notifications from both Uber and Citi, the company behind my Costco credit card. It turns out that Citi has denied the 98 cent fee for the Uber tip, maybe because it looks like fraud. So I approve it via text messaging and the payment goes through belatedly, and I think we’re OK.

We’re not OK. This happens every single time, so Citi is not learning that a tiny charge from Uber after a small charge is normal. And all of a sudden one day, I cannot get any Ubers. None are available. We take the Metro, we walk, and finally I ask my wife to try her Uber account and that works fine. Clearly, some drivers weren’t tipped promptly, or, to their minds at the time, at all, and I’ve been downgraded because of Citi. And now no one will pick me up. Thanks, Citi.

The other issue, and this isn’t unique to this trip, it’s just something that came to a boiling point because of the volume of photos I’ve been posting, is that Instagram is the most horrible app on earth, and it’s so bad that I’m going to start a series about bad UX. So I’ll be writing more about this soon. This is an issue that has bothered me for years, and I feel like I see bad UX everywhere. And it is a delight to me that my son, through no prodding from me at all, has gotten a degree in this field since he can carry the torch forward and, hopefully, help be part of the solution. For now, I’ll just say that Facebook, which owns Instagram, can go F itself. There is no excuse for this sorry app. At all. (Uber, not coincidentally, has major UX issues too. Yes, it’s on the list.)

Anyway. This trip has been magical, in part because Mexico City is so wonderful and in part because it’s been a while, a long while, since we’ve been able to travel like this. I can’t wait to do it again.

We’re flying home tomorrow, on Tuesday. See you soon.