Boy, is Mexico City (CDMX) not Oaxaca, in a whiplash-inducing sort of way.

In fact, CDMX has more in common with New York City than it does with Oaxaca. It’s as if Jackson Heights was a Mexican neighborhood instead of Indian.

It’s possible that a lot of the differences stem from Oaxaca being the most indigenous city in Mexico while CDMX is one of the most Mexican/Spanish, so the gap between them is huge. They’re at opposite ends of the spectrum in the same way that Guatemala’s indigenous highlands are so vastly different from the Ladino lowlands.

The most immediately obvious difference is the architecture. CDMX has that classic urban mixed use landscape of ground floor retail and upper floor residential so common in New York, while Oaxaca is largely split between business and residential districts. There are similarities, but even those are executed differently.

For example, Oaxaca is full of buildings with a modest face to the street but an expansive interior courtyard, in both residential and commercial buildings. Those are leftovers from the gracious Colonial architecture so endemic to Oaxaca. CDMX has similar commercial structures, but they’ve been built in the context of a dense urban environment, and feel more like public facing self storage facilities than graceful courtyards.

CDMX, or at least our chunk of it in Historic Centro, is also like New York in the way that businesses have clustered in districts, although that arrangement is a little Old New York. Many of those commercial districts have faded as just about every neighborhood in New York has gentrified, but there are still echoes.

Ultimately, it’s the density here that is both the farthest distance from Oaxaca and the closest analog to New York. We’re staying in Cuauhtémoc in the Historic Centro, and I’m sure there are neighborhoods of vastly different configurations amongst CDMX’s 9+ million people and 570 square miles (and that’s just the city proper – Greater Mexico City is almost 22 million people and over 3,000 square miles!). We’re in the equivalent of Midtown Manhattan, and that’s exactly how it feels.

Also like New York, the area around our apartment is a fascinating mix of architectural styles. There are wonders dating back to the 1700s, a smattering of Art Nouveau from the late 1800s/early 1900s, a burst of breathtaking Art Deco from the 30s, and a surge of midcentury Brutalism. Oaxaca, on the other hand, was built out in the Colonial era and hasn’t changed much since then. When a building starts to go it’s not replaced with something of the current time period, it’s shored up and re-adobed. CDMX is a time machine, allowing you to move through every era of its history. Oaxaca is a time capsule, taking you all the way back to its origins.

L’Ancien Régime

Art Nouveau

While there’s some choice examples of Nouveau, there’s quite a bit more Deco. I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that the history of the The Palacio de Bellas Artes, above, might hold the answer.

Construction started on The Palacio in 1904, but was halted by the Mexican Revolution. Construction was restarted in 1932, so the exterior is Nouveau while the interior is Deco.

I think the Revolution halted a lot of construction during its run from 1910 – 1920, which would have been the prime years for the design and execution of classic Art Nouveau buildings. By the time the Mexican government was back on its feet and stable enough to encourage construction, Nouveau was in the rear view mirror and Art Deco was the design vanguard.

It sounds plausible, so it must be true.

Art Deco

Sure, Why Not? Have Some Midcentury Brutalism

Beyond the architecture, there are other key differences. First is just the category error of mistaking Oaxaca for Mexico. It’s the place we’re most familiar with here, so it’s what we think of when we think of Mexico. But the CDMX experience is completely different, as will be Chetumal and then Guanajuato after that. It’s clear that if we chose to stay close to the States, we could spend several years just traveling in Mexico, each experience different enough from the others to keep it fresh. We’re not doing that, but we could.

I wrote a post about Oaxaca that was ostensibly about food, but was actually about Oaxaca’s lack of diversity. We both felt very other in Oaxaca, as the two classes of white people were tourists or, if you were a white woman of a certain age, expats. That is decidedly not the case in CDMX, which has, again, like New York, rich and varied communities from all over the world. The street is definitely less monolithically Mexican (or Mexican and indigenous, to be more precise) than Oaxaca. We even found the Jewish community, and enjoyed first rate lox and pastrami.

Then there’s the altitude. We just spent almost four months nearly a mile high in Oaxaca, so we’re all we-got-this. Unfortunately, Mexico City is over 7,300′, almost another half mile in altitude, and we’re feeling every one of those additional feet. Our next stop is Cuba, and when we hit sea level we’ll probably feel like Kal-El landing on Earth.

One of the things that surprised us about Oaxaca was how little English was spoken. As a major tourist center, we thought it would be more common, but it was really unusual to find English speakers. One of the things that’s surprised us about CDMX is just how much English is spoken. We’re often spoken to in English even before we open our mouths and betray our iffy Spanish. Sadly, our landlady and her staff are not English speakers (which made troubleshooting a hot water problem extra fun), but it’s still surprisingly common.

One of the things we noticed in Oaxaca was that the primary identifier of the Gringa was the aggressively toned thighs. You could tell the Gringas from a block away. The Jewish neighborhood we went to for lox and pastrami was in Polanco, the poshest, Beverly Hills-est part of CDMX. It turns out that the aggressively toned thighs weren’t a geographic marker, as we’d thought, but a class marker. We were in a veritable forest of Crossfit thighs (interesting historical fact: Polanco used to be called Bosque de Muslos), and nary a Gringa in sight.

Oh, and every pair of Polanco thighs seems to have been issued a fluffy white dog, probably along with their parking permits. Culture is deep, man.

And no. No pictures. Perv.

The other thing that stood out was about the move to CDMX itself. The move to Oaxaca had felt incredibly disruptive. It was the transition from one very specific way of living to another that had, other than eating and sleeping, almost nothing to do with the previous lifestyle.

We expected the move to CDMX to feel less disruptive, more just packing our bags for the next stop. Instead, it felt like we’d moved from Oaxaca in the same sense that Oaxaca felt like we’d moved from St. Louis. We were both a little colicky our first few days here, as we hadn’t yet worked out the cause of the disconnect. We’d expected a smoother emotional transition than occurred, and once we figured out that our first week everywhere was going to be about settling in and figuring out how to perform simple tasks (where’s the best bread, the closest supermercado, what are we missing and how do we get it…?) we were fine.

Now that we know we’ll be facing that transition every time we move we’ll be prepared for it. But it surprised us this time, and threw us off our game for a few days.

The Apartment

This apartment is… special. It’s this weird combination of newly renovated and granny-just-died. The kitchen and bathroom are new Ikea renovations (not a slam on the style, there are still Ikea stickers on some stuff), which is great. The living area is dominated by a gothic horror of a credenza so big (almost 9′ wide) that there’s no room for a sofa. We’re sure it’s there because there was no way to remove it.

There are two bedrooms. One of them has a deliciously over-designed bureau and two twin beds we’ve moved together to approximate a married lifestyle. The other bedroom has… nothing. It’s an actual empty room, completely bereft of furniture. It has a closet. It’s the room we use to store our empty suitcases. That’s odd, don’t you think?

But the absolute most special thing is the access to the building itself. The ground floor is a housewares store, and the entrance to the building goes right through the middle of it. At night they drop gates on either side to make a corridor, but otherwise we enter and exit the building through the store. We’ve never seen the like.

Ultimately, the move-in was easier than Oaxaca, only because our choices were so constrained. In Oaxaca, we moved literally every piece of furniture except for a large chiffarobe. Here, there isn’t enough furniture to rearrange, so moving in mostly just meant calibrating what was missing (large skillet, sheet pan, large drinking glasses, mattress pads, hand towels, ant traps…) and figuring out where to get it.

The Neighborhood

Being in the Historic Centro puts us in, well, the middle of things. There’s museums and parks and ancient churches and archeological digs all within easy walking distance. It’s not posh, like Polanco, but we don’t really roll posh. This area suits us perfectly.

Plus, we’re a block from CDMX’s Chinatown!

Other than wandering and marveling, we’re primarily engaged in the neighborhood through grocery shopping. There again, we’re in the thick of it. In Oaxaca we were less than a block from the Soriana supermercado. Here we’re two blocks from the other large chain, Chedraui. We’re also about the same distance from a pair of traditional mercados. Inexplicably, they appear to have the same name. One is the the Mercado San Juan Arcos de Belén, and the other is the Mercado de San Juan. No possibility for confusion there.

The Mercado San Juan Arcos de Belén is the more traditional of the pair, and has the same range of offerings we grew to expect in the Oaxaca mercados. This one is an excellent size with a great range. It’s our primary source for fresh ingredients.

The Mercado de San Juan is actually pretty different, and not what we expected. It’s about the same size, but it’s a more upscale version of the local mercado, based on the product mix. And the prices. Everything is more expensive than Mercado San Juan Arcos de Belén.

One of the things we missed in Oaxaca was cured meats. We thought every culture cured meat, one way or another, but there was none to be found in Oaxaca. Well, we found it in Mercado de San Juan, but primarily as imports. Out of our budget.

Same with the cheese. There were so many vendors at Mercado de San Juan with amazing cheese. We tasted a fantastic deep orange cheddar that might have been a Mimolette, and were ready to bring a tasty piece home as a treat until we got the price: 920 pesos/kilo. About $23/pound. Nope.

When we wrote about eating in Oaxaca, one of our complaints was about how difficult it was to eat anything except the típico. Now we have the bounty of the world available, and at those prices… the típico looks just fine.