My first trip to Mexico City as an adult was in November 2019 for a cryptocurrency conference. I won’t say I “fell in love” with the city or anything so dramatic, but I did have the distinct feeling of “this has been here this whole time? How didn’t I realize?”
The elements that make CDMX a desirous travel destination for me are too many to contain in paragraph form and thus must be broken out into a tacky, inelegant list:
- A major, global city with all the attendant variety
- Plentiful artistic and cultural attractions
- Direct flights from major Texas cities on the order of 1hr 45min
- Amazing–and varied–food
- Cheap cost of living
- The amazing food
- Temperate weather
- Food
- A language that, despite my not being quite fluent, I can read and understand well enough to make things go smoothly
It took a pandemic
In the middle of 2020 I was a bit… restless. I had big plans for traveling around Europe that Summer which were canned for obvious reasons. One country was open to Americans though: Mexico. I decided to visit my old friend CDMX for a week.
Crises can have a way of really focusing the mind. That summer with the lockdowns and, ah, protests, I was already evaluating buying property somewhere outside the major cities with the goal of living and lifting in peace. In the end I decided against this plan, but my mind made a short lateral jump to a more fanciful and ambitious goal I’ve always had of owning several properties in different countries to split time between them.
I decided to roll my CDMX trip into this larger plan and spend some of the time touring properties. Mexico City would become Stage 1 of Whatever The Hell I Was Doing, aka the Spanish Expansion, aka The Expanishon (say it out loud) Project.
