What I Use: Mexico City (October 2022) (Premium)

Our final trip to Mexico City in 2022 has given us a glimpse of a future in which we split time between here and someplace in the United States. We’re only here for two weeks, too quick in some ways. But after spending the first week with our first visitors in the apartment, my wife and I have spent the second week experiencing a normal daily existence, similar to our lives and schedules in Pennsylvania.

It may not be obvious why that’s important to us. But we’ve sort of formalized the schedule that we first adopted on home swaps over 15 or so years, where each day is split up into a bit of work in the morning, some form of sightseeing in the middle of the day, and then a bit of work again before dinner. I’ve often referred to it as a perfect schedule, and during that first week, with our friends here, we mostly stuck to that, and I was more productive from a work perspective than I usually am. So there’s something to it.

But if we’re going to spend months at a time here, things are going to change: we’re not going to have the energy or desire to go out and see new sights every day, for starters. And we couldn’t afford to do that anyway. Also, we have, to date, eaten out every single meal during every trip to Mexico, even though we now have an apartment with a refrigerator and stove in its kitchen. Things are inexpensive here, like really inexpensive. But it’s not hard to imagine that things are even less expensive if we start eating in.

And so for this second week, that’s what we did. We bought breakfast food---eggs, bacon, yogurt, and sometimes bread---and we’ve eaten breakfast in the apartment most days. (At least twice, I just had a $2.50 Jugo Verde (green juice) made by a woman with a street stand, an incredible mix of cucumber, parsley, spinach, ginger, nopal (cactus), pineapple, guava, and oranges, it’s quite filling.) We’ve gone out for lunch most days, but much more cheaply than usual: we’ve averaged about $8.50 total per lunch. And then we’ve gone out for dinner normally.

Based on these and other similar experiences, my wife and I going to discuss the cost of food here in a future Eternal Spring video. But you can get by very cheaply here. It’s rather incredible.

Anyway. Onto more pertinent matters.
Home Internet
As I’ve mentioned in the past, the people who built our apartment building were nice enough to set up our apartment’s Internet access with a company called TotalPlay, but they set it up with its slowest 100 Mbps connection tier and a bundled TV and phone that we will never use. And so I checked out the different Internet-only packages they offer, and there are much better options, including 200 Mbps ($35 per month), 500 Mbps ($45 per month), and 1 Gbps ($80 per month). 1 Gbps is overkill, especially given how little we’re there, but with 500 Mbps costing just $10 a month more than 200 Mbps, that seemed like the obvious choice. (Plus, it drops to $40 p...