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

I’ve somehow managed to travel to Mexico City three times this year, for a total of five weeks. But this time I left something behind: thanks to us finally closing on that apartment purchase, we now have a base there and I can start thinking about having a More Mobile computing setup in a second location.

It’s been a strange year. We visited Mexico City in January with an eye to the future, with the express goal of scouting neighborhoods to find the places we liked the most. Then, we were going to visit again later in the year, staying in our favorite areas, with the notion that maybe, just maybe, sometime in a more distant future we’d rent for longer periods of time as we honed the list and found just the right place. The idea was that we’d split our time in the future between here and whatever place in Mexico City.

But life smacked us right in the face, and, long story short, we skipped right to the end of that story and ended up purchasing an apartment in Roma Norte, the neighborhood we fell in love with in January. Over a three and a half month period that was excruciating in the living by a brief snap of time once it was over, we paid a down payment, waited for Mexico to cough up the required paperwork, and then closed on the apartment about 12 days ago. We had booked three nights at the Hilton Reforma in Mexico City at the start of the trip, unsure when we’d be able to take possession of the apartment. And then we basically camped out in the new place from then on, staying longer than expected when United Airlines suspiciously canceled our flight home.

We got a lot done in what ended up being a 12-day trip.

We had the electricity, gas, and Internet turned on, all major wins, and all required for us to stay there. (Saving us $150 to $180 a night in hotel fees.) We’re still working through how to pay those bills regularly but it’s getting there. We now have two Mexican phone numbers, one a (pretty much useless) land line via the Internet access and one an eSIM from AT&T Mexico. (I will discuss both below.)

For furnishings, we went cheap. We’re not rich and if needed we can upgrade later. We purchased a couch and loveseat for the living room. A kitchen table and four chairs.

A washer for the laundry room.

A refrigerator, two stools, and a Nespresso machine for the kitchen.

A king-sized mattress (but not a bed frame/base, as it was out of stock) for the main bedroom. (We had brought an air mattress, which we used before the mattress arrived.)

A computer desk and chair for the office/extra bedroom.

Three fans. Shower curtains and rods. Various sundry items. And so on.

To find furniture and the other stuff we needed, we visited a distant IKEA, laboriously, three times, Costco, Walmart, Home Depot, Office Max, and local places like Gaia and d’Europe.

Much of this required a lot of building. A lot of building.

We still have much to do. We have black-out drapes on order for our three massive floor-to-ceiling windows. (Really, walls, two of which have sliding doors out to the balcony.) We are awaiting an estimate on Trex compositive flooring for the balcony. We need a TV, soundbar, and TV stand. Mirrors and/or medicine cabinets for the bathrooms. Small chairs and a table for the balcony. Everything imaginable—silverware, kitchen utensils, pots and pans, and so on—for the kitchen. It goes on and on.

We have to figure out when we come back next. I need to expedite my passport renewal, which I’ll get going this coming week, so the current plan is for my wife and daughter to go out for a week in June and continue getting the things we need and hopefully do some decorating. I have that July TWiT cruise in July, which I’m looking forward to, but it’s also right in the middle of everything now. Perhaps I’ll get out again in late July or August with the wife, maybe with the kids. We’ll see.

Anyway.

I preach the travel-light thing, as I’m sure you know. I never check backs, ever, for any trip. Whether it’s a long weekend getaway or a three-week home swap in Europe, I carry the same Rick Steves Ravenna rolling case and a laptop bag (which has lately been a nice HP Renew Backpack that can carry two laptops and a lot more). That’s it, and my wife does similarly but with even smaller bags. My basic setup is the same that I always use; my two writeups from January—here and here—tell the basic tale.

But this trip was a little different. We knew we’d take possession of the apartment during this trip, but we weren’t sure when (it happened earlier than expected). So we brought an extra bag that we actually checked—the first time I’d done so in years. This bag contained the inflatable mattress, which we’d never opened, a bit of a risk, to keep it as small as possible. Plus a few small items. We also jammed extra clothes, some of which we left behind. And I brought extra computing equipment, which we also left behind, and detailed below. Long story short, we flew home with less and didn’t need to check a bag again. I hope to never do so again.

I wasn’t able to attend an HP reviewer event the week of the trip; it would have been my first in-person work even since November 2019 (Microsoft Ignite) and I was really looking forward to it, plus I would have gotten at least one review laptop. But the rescheduled trip happened when it happened, and so I was a bit stuck. And instead of bringing something new, I brought something well-known and reliable, the Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 I recently reviewed. I’ll be sending that back to Lenovo this week, but it worked out well on the trip.

The second laptop, which I left behind, is an older HP ZBook Firefly Ultrabook-style portable “workstation” that is similar to the model I reviewed last August when we visited Mexico (San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, and Mexico City). I have an emotional attachment to these laptops now because that one saved my bacon when we had a little water issue. I also left behind the new HP Thunderbolt Dock G4, the Nexstand Portable Laptop Stand I’ve been on the road as part of my More Mobile setup, and a new Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Mouse setup I purchased, originally as a backup.

(I may in the future swap out the Nexstand for the less portable but more stable Lifelong Ergonomic Laptop Stand I got in November. Or, I should say, for a second one of those, since I’d like to keep using the original at home. That would let me travel otherwise with the lighter Nexstand.)

The idea behind the above is that I’ll always have something there to work comfortably at a desk, and that will save me from having to fly with a second laptop and the More Mobile stuff. I will likely get a 27-inch external display at some point, but I will need to buy that locally. I’m also going to buy an arm for the Audio-Technica ATR2500x-USB Cardioid Condenser Microphone I’ve been using lately, and when that happens, I’ll leave that microphone there as well. (I was interested to see that the built-in microphones and webcam on the Lenovo worked well enough for work calls and for First Ring Daily. I can’t keep that laptop, but this suggests that most future laptops will be decent enough, too, and that the era of carrying around extra A/V gear is coming to a close. We’ll see.)

Anyway, that’s the home office, such as it is right now. We threw the inflatable mattress in there for now, and I propped it up to block some light during podcasts last week because the blinds aren’t in yet. But we’d like to replace that with some kind of futon or whatever for when we have guests or the kids come.

As for the Internet, that was only connected via the largess of the company from which we bought the apartment. They’ve been incredible at every step of the way, and we really lucked out there.

(That all requires just a bit of explanation, but here I will just mention that my wife and I are going to blog and create videos describing what we’re doing in Mexico and how it all came together. The blog isn’t up yet, but you can find the first, and very basic, videos on YouTube. We’ll record a few in which we discuss what’s happened soon.)

Long story short, the seller connected our Internet for us, which was nice of them, but we got the basic package from Totalplay, which consists of a 100/10 Mbps Internet connection, basic cable TV, and a landline we’ll probably never use. Which is … OK. But not ideal. I was at least able to change the Wi-Fi name and password while the installation guys were there, as I don’t see a way to do this from their app, and I’ve not yet explored what’s possible with the (Huawei!) router they gave us. The good news? It’s just $30 per month.

We don’t have a TV or TV stand yet, but the router and TV box are on the floor where those will go for now. And I’d like to upgrade the speed—it can go as high as 500 Mbps, and I’ve routine hit 160 Mbps on the connection we do have—mostly because of that upload number. I do a lot of live video. Someday. (For reference, our connection at home in Pennsylvania is 330/30, which isn’t incredible either, but better.)

It took these guys almost three hours to connect the Internet. One of them dropped their hardhat while on top of the ladder!

One thing we won’t need is mesh networking. Our apartment is tiny, just over 700 square feet, and has just three main rooms, and the one router seems to work great from anywhere despite all the concrete. At some point, I may investigate whether I can save money by getting my own router, but that’s a concern for a later day, as it works fine now.

Speaking of connectivity, I switched back to Google Fi recently and am using this service with my iPhone 13 Pro, which I used semi-exclusively during the trip, with a Fi data SIM in my Pixel 6 Pro as a backup. (I only used the Pixel for a few moon/distant photos, and to tether my laptop at the apartment the day before our Internet was connected.) This was the first time I’d hit Google Fi’s maximum 6 GB limit in a long time. But we ended the trip having used over 7.2 GB by the most recent count. The way Fi works is that data is free after 6 GB each month. You can see the tethering day as the tallest line in the graph below:

My workdays over the last week or so were similar to my workdays here at home, though we were highly distracted because of all the things we needed to get. It was also less comfortable. We slept on the inflatable mattress for two or three nights before we secured a real mattress, but that’s just sitting on the floor for now because we couldn’t get a base/frame, and it was like camping out or going back to college. Between all the furniture building—a lot of our stuff came from IKEA—I didn’t quite throw out my back, but I did hurt it, and I ended up spending a lot of time working while laying on my stomach, which seemed to help. I sat at the desk when possible, of course, and that worked out fine.

Working remotely is a skill I’ve honed over many years doing home swaps, and I’ve described my schedule on these trips as being somewhat ideal: I typically worked a bit in the morning, went out and explored the world mid-day, and then came back and worked more in the late afternoon until dinner. This trip did not afford me this schedule, and it felt wrong. We were so busy trying to figure out furniture and deliveries, and working that between fixed meetings and podcasts on our schedules (my wife has daily interviews via Zoom) that it all felt very rushed and hectic. Now that we’re set up, however, I think future trips will go more smoothly, and whatever work needs to be done won’t be so disruptive.

Late in the trip, my wife realized that we would need a local phone number that we could actually use, mostly for bill paying, but also for communicating with locals. And eventually, we’re going to need a Mexican tax ID, which will require us to become temporary or permanent residents. This, like so much, was something for the distant future, as we’d always known we’d need some form of residency to spend a lot of time in the country. But the sudden apartment purchase has upended everything, and for the short-term, some things—like paying bills—will be more complex.

Again, that’s for the other blog/video thing, but I think the local phone number issue bears mentioning here. I had it in my head that AT&T Mexico and Telcel were the best options for foreigners looking to get a local SIM, based on research, and Stephanie, my wife, confirmed that in a Facebook group she’s part of. So we headed over to the mall near us, as we had seen an AT&T store there when we were looking for furniture.

AT&T offers contract plans (which can be broken at any time, nice) and pre-paid plans. The contract plans require a tax ID, which we don’t have yet, but the pre-paid plans do not. So we went with the base monthly plan, which provides 3 GB of data, unlimited calls and texts (from/to both Mexico and the US), and a few other little perks we’ll mostly not need; that said, Mexicans rely on WhatsApp in a way that I think most Americans (and maybe others) would never understand, and one of the perks is free usage of WhatsApp over cellular. This plan costs just $10 per month.

We could choose between eSIM and physical SIM, and we chose eSIM for easier portability. We wanted to add this account to my wife’s phone, since she handles the bills, but we couldn’t figure out how to add it to her Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra (which I had purchased and reviewed a few years back). I had looked at it myself before we went to the store, and couldn’t see how it would work, so I brought my Pixel 6 Pro just in case. The guy at the AT&T Store couldn’t figure it out either, so we just gave up and configured it in the Pixel for now. Seems to work great, and we had 5G in Mexico City.

And I think that’s about it. It was nice to travel home more lightly again, and I look forward to leaving more clothes and other items in the apartment on future trips as well.