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

I wasn’t expecting to write this article, given that we’ve been to Mexico City several times this year, and seriously, what could possibly have changed? I bring the same basic tech on each trip, and I’ve left some things here, as noted previously. But this week, we made a few small additions to our apartment in Mexico City that surprisingly have already made a big difference.

Our goals for the week were simple enough: in addition to letting our son Mark visit the apartment for the first time and explore our Roma Norte neighborhood---our daughter Kelly visited in June---we still needed to purchase several items, big and small, to make this place more livable and less like camping out. Overall, our success was mixed.

The big items we needed included a bed frame for the main bedroom (we’ve been sleeping on a mattress on the floor), a day bed/futon/whatever for the secondary bedroom/office (we’ve been using an inflatable mattress we flew out here with in May), small chairs and tables for the balcony, and, most importantly for this discussion, a smart TV and a TV stand. And we also needed to buy any number of smaller items, which are important for not to this discussion: mirrors and storage for the bathrooms and so. It never ends.

My focus was on the beds, as this is so crucial to staying here. My wife and I have been sleeping on the floor on each trip since May, and it’s been a bit arduous. (If you’ve never woken up on the floor and tried to get up normally, go for it. It’s a blast.) My wife had broader plans, but we set out to Ikea last week to see what we could get done.

We did OK---and we were literally recognized by two of the IKEA employees, which was amusing, and the second of them even remembered what street we lived on---and ended up purchasing two small tables and four chairs for the balcony, plus a stand for a TV I didn’t expect to get until months later. But we completely struck out of the bed hardware: the IKEA base we’ve tried to buy several times has been continually out of stock, and while they did have two biggish king-sized frames, they were really expensive (~$1000) and we just can’t spend that much money. A queen-sized day bed my wife wanted for the second bedroom was likewise out of stock.

I wasn’t very happy about this and left IKEA a bit dejected: we have friends visiting here (with us) in October, and we need---or want, I guess---something a little nicer than an air mattress for them. But we were defeated.

When we got home from that buying spree to await the same-day delivery (seriously, you gotta love Mexico), I went back to work. And so, too, did my wife, I thought. But she had hopped on Amazon Mexico to see if she could solve any of these problems. She came to me with a metal bed frame similar to one we had just bought for a guest bedroom back in Pennsylvania and asked if she should just buy that and see what Amazon’s delivery process here looked like. I said sure. I...