What I Use: Mexico City (March 2023) (Premium)

On Thursday, we fly home from Mexico City after a three-week stay in which my wife and I experimented with just living here normally, as locals.

This is, of course, something to which we’ve aspired for years. And that phrase---live like a local---is, of course, something we picked up over 20 years ago from Rick Steves, the European travel expert. But it always rang hollow to us in the context of a couple or family spending a week or two in Europe: grabbing some snacks from a store and having a picnic in a park in Paris or whatever---most of which don’t even allow you to sit on the grass, incidentally---doesn’t in any way give you the experience of living like a local.

And that’s why we latched onto home swaps: this gave us the ability to not just spend three or more weeks at a time in Europe with worries about hotel bills, but it also basically forced us to live like locals, by living in a normal home, shopping at local markets, and cooking most meals. You know, like a local.

Of course, our future changed in early 2022 when we bought this apartment in Mexico City. And in doing so, we’ve been looking forward to not just visiting. But living like a local, here.

And on that note, I can’t claim that that’s what we’re doing. The issue is that food is so cheap in Mexico that we can afford to eat out every single meal, especially when we stick to local cocina economicas, sometimes called comida corridas, that serve incredibly inexpensive food that, yes, is aimed at locals, not tourists. So we’ve taken that step, at least. (We also made a video about it, if you want to learn more.)

What we have accomplished on this trip---if anything, over-accomplished---is experiencing what it’s like to just live here, to just be here, if you will. That is, instead of sightseeing or exploring the city, we’ve simply lived, worked, and slept in the apartment each day, leaving only to walk (in an incredible park just a block away) and eat. In doing so, we’ve had a nice glimpse at what living here for longer periods of time will be like when we can (hopefully) do that in the future.

And it’s worked out very well. In fact, I’ve been unusually productive. If you followed the drama around me trying, failing, and then finally succeeding at getting Windows Everywhere out the door, you may know that one of my goals for this trip was to get this tome published on Leanpub in some fashion. And that my expectations for that first publication shifted pretty dramatically as time went on. That is, I originally figured that I would have maybe the first “half” of the book, really the first third, the part that deals with the pre-.NET (1985 to 2000) era, done by the end of the trip. “Done” meaning fully edited and with all images in place. But I was able to make such incredible progress that it finally seemed like I’d get much more done. Maybe even all of it.

So it was very gratifying to me to get it all ...