When you picture LA, what comes to mind?
I’m guessing that most of you didn’t say “mountains.” Or maybe all of you did and I’m the one who wasn’t “hip”. But the following was actually news to me: LA is actually surrounded by some formidable topography! And a lot of it is a lot closer to the city than you might think. The map below shows the terrain in 3D, and you’ll see that there are a number of different mountainous areas to be considered here, but today we’re going to be in the one highlighted in blue. Those are the Santa Monica Mountains.
I’ve gotten to the point with these street art features that I plan my trips around them. If I can get a day to myself, I’m gonna wander around with my camera all day until I find 100 murals I love. And I’m not just doing it “for the ‘gram” anymore! Seriously, these days of wandering are often what makes me feel like I have gotten to know a city at all. That is especially true for a place like Los Angeles.
In a city where most of the time spent between two points is in the back of an Uber, staring at your phone, walking the streets isn’t exactly “normal.” This is a car city. So going through the exercise of walking 10 miles in day, exploring this city street by street, looking in nooks and crannies for murals, poking around small businesses—this can really give you a feel for the DNA of Los Angeles. Of course, whatever I’ve managed to see so far is just a drop in the bucket! But it’s exposed me to a lot. And it helped me internalize the map of this city, so that I started to be able to find my way around without a map.
The observatory was/is equipped with a 12-inch Zeiss refractor telescope that you can actually go look through. Since 1935, an estimated 7 million people have looked through it to catch a glimpse of the stars, which makes it the most used telescope in history by far. In WWII the planetarium was used to train pilots in celestial navigation. Later, in the 1960s, it would be used for that same purpose as a part of the NASA space program. In 2002 this place underwent a major renovation mostly focused on its visitor-facing amenities. Now there’s a café, a gift shop, and a movie theater. I’m sorry to tell you we’re not going into much of this stuff today though. We’re here to catch the sunset!
Before I left for this trip, I asked my friend Melanie (hey girl!) if she had any dark-horse recommendations for off-the-beaten path things that I should do in Mexico City. She told me that when she visited, she had taken a lot of her cues from an Instagram account called @thecuriousmexican. The girl who runs this apparently speaks very highly of a large marketplace called Mercado Jamaica (Jamaica Market). It was supposed to be very authentic, and very off-the-beaten path, so when she (Melanie) was in Mexico City, she decided to try visiting it. Apparently when she told the cab driver where she was trying to go, the driver cautioned her that this was a very dangerous area, but she went anyway. Clearly she lived to tell the tale, so I’m following in her footsteps today.
We received no such words of caution when we stepped into our Uber, but we were also two large men. A single white female would need to be careful pretty much anywhere, whereas being male, 6-4, and ~230lb pretty much ends all of my fights before they even start. However, I will admit to a small amount of anxiety about the neighborhood. It was definitely sketchy, but once I threw myself into it, I felt totally fine. All of the interactions I had with people were extremely positive.
It was our first full day in Mexico City, and we were sitting in a coffee shop somewhere along the boundary line between Condesa and Roma trying to figure out what we should do with the rest of the time we had. I’m not great at planning my travels in advance, so these sorts of on-the-go brainstorms happen in just about every new city I visit. I wondered aloud if there was any Lucha Libre wrestling to be found here. “I mean, this is the literal center of everything Mexican, so it’s gotta be here somewhere, right?”
At that exact moment, we heard somebody say “Excuse me.” It was the man sitting next to us. He had overheard us talking. In perfect English, he proceeded to tell us everything we could have ever wanted to know about Lucha Libre wrestling in Mexico City. “It’s so fun! I go like every week!” he said emphatically.
Anyway, on the morning of my first day in Mexico City, a friend and I were taking an Uber across the city to get to the bus station, when I started to see bits and pieces of murals tucked away down alleyways, behind cars, over fences, etc. We were clearly passing through some sort of cluster, so I quickly grabbed my phone and dropped a pin on the map. Come hell or high water, I was going to come back to this spot with my camera.
The gallery that follows contains murals from all over Mexico City that we walked past as some point the week we spent there, but probably 50% of them come from that dropped pin on the map. And probably 75% of what are my favorites in this lot come from that dropped pin on the map.
Just 2-ish hours southeast of the Mexican capital, Puebla is dwarfed by Mexico City. But don’t let that fool you! It’s actually got a population of about 3.25 million people (metro), so it’s no small place. It’s actually the 4th largest city in Mexico. And remember how I said that Mexico City sits at a higher elevation than Denver? Puebla is up here as well! It sits at an elevation of 7,217.85 ft (1.37 miles) above sea level. In fact, this area is so mountainous that you actually have to drive past snow-capped volcanoes to get here from Mexico City.
Teotihuacán is one of the most historically, culturally, and architecturally significant cities in the pre-Columbian Americas. At its height, it was the largest city in both North and South America, with a population of 125,000 people (estimated). That might not seem like much today, but by Mesoamerican standards, that’s like Tokyo or New York. This wasn’t just a place—it was THE place. But here’s what makes it so fascinating…
The origins of Teotihuacán are utterly mysterious. The backstory behind its founders is totally unknown. And it’s not just unknown to us now, in 2020. Apparently the Aztecs discovered the ruins of this city and also didn’t know exactly where it came from or what the story was. Isn’t that INSANE? The AZTECS discovered this when it was already ruins!
In Mexico City, I knew that neighborhood we stayed in was going to be key. I had lots of recommendations given to me, and the areas that separated themselves as the clear choices were Condesa and Roma. Prior to my arrival, although the two areas are right next to each other, I understood these neighborhoods to be more distinct from one another than they turned out to be. Once I actually got there, I found that they were essentially just extensions of each other, with only minor differences. So I’m just going to treat it as one body. And oh my gosh you guys—I LOVE THIS AREA.
Let’s start with size. Mexico City is really, really big. In fact, Mexico City proper has almost 9 million people and Mexico City metro is home to a whopping 21 million people, which just a few million less than Beijing. This makes it the largest population center on the entire continent of North America—bigger even than New York, LA, Chicago, Toronto, etc. It also puts Mexico City comfortably in the top 10 largest cities in the world.
