Found this at a produce market, no idea what it is. I know charamoya (sp?) exists here and is a common fruit, perhaps this is that?

Gumby for scale.

Maybe I’d recognize the name if I knew it but I’ve certainly never seen this fruit before. It’s quite heavy and the flesh indents like a half deflated football, I’m going to assume that means it’s ripe.

NOSE – Mild, slightly melony.

TASTE – Weeeeeeeird. Tastes of pumpkin, cantaloupe, carrot, sweet potato. The texture is similar to avocado but more mealy, less creamy. A rather decadent mouthfeel actually.

IS IT GOOD – Yup, it’s good. Will pick up more and learn what it is.

I had planned a bunch of stuff for today but after walking 10km to get home I passed out for a bit, then unpacked, etc.

I could not get my eSIM to work at all, I bought another one from a different provider and had the same issues, I also realized I forgot two cables and my laptop charger. Serves me right for leaving my packing so last minute.

Apparently Radio Shack still exists here, and there’s on on my block, I paid a stupid amount for some cables and a charger and grabbed a physical, old-school, SIM card from OXXO. Got home, finished unpacking, inserted the new SIM, same issue, either nothing or 1mbps and continual dropped connections. Troubleshot for two hours, gave up, had a nap, went for tacos and groceries.

It was amazing, I ate three, oops.

While enjoying the food, the wonderful couple who made it and the super friendly crowd gathered around I was playing on my phone, looking things up, sending pics……. without issue……. at 4/5G speeds…….

Yup, I am THAT dumb, all the SIM cards worked fine, my Airbnb is just in a dead spot. Simply stunning.

The food was awesome though, I’ll go back.

Just take Uber from the airport they said! It’s so much easier they said!

Too easy!

The last time I landed in Mexico City I left the airport on foot and walked a kilometer in the middle of nowhere to the subway station, I ended up in the middle of a morning rush hour unlike anything I had ever seen, it was amazing, but I didn’t feel the need to recreate the experience.

This time I decided to take the bus from the airport to a subway station on the line that goes to my Airbnb.

Probably easiest to relate the rest of the voyage in point form:

• wandered the airport, end to end, looking for signs for the city bus. The wayfinding in Mexico City International is staggeringly bad.
• found signs for bus and followed them out of the airport, nope, realized these are charter buses.
• wandered the airport again, eventually found one tiny sign for the bus stop, followed sign out of airport, into taxi area.
• there is no bus stop, wandered around for ten minutes, found bus stop, 200 yards away, behind a post, with one tiny marker.
• according to Google the #4 bus comes every 5 minutes.
• waited 5 minutes.
• waited 5 minutes.
• waited 5 minutes.
• waited 5 minutes.
• waited 5 minutes.
• sigh, no bus, jumped in taxi.
• told driver to take me to San Lazaro Metro station.
• driver was very nice, practiced my Spanish with him while he got lost and had to ask people for directions, twice.
• get to station, rougher part of town, driver is warning me, making sure I’m ok on the subway.
• entered station, realized I’m in the bus area of the station, I need the subway. My mistake was following the signs with pictures of trains on them…… the rapidbus is nicknamed Trenbus and the logo is… a train….
• walked out of the bus area, found the subway area, can’t find Line 1 – Pink Line anywhere.
• wandered and wandered and wandered, pack is getting very heavy.
• found a train, some signs are in pink, some are in green, I’m tired.
• took train, wrong train, changed trains back to station.
• wandered around, found the entry for Line 1, and found that it’s boarded up.
• hilarious language barrier exchange with security guard, he explained there is construction.
• realized the taxi driver wasn’t worried about my safety, he was trying to make sure I understood the subway isn’t running.
• headed back to the Trenebus… where I was…. funny looks from the guards as I go through the turnstiles again.
• took Trenbus for about an hour until it met another subway station closer to my Airbnb.
• found boarded up subway station, learned Line 1, the main line, the line I got my Airbnb close to on purpose, is totally shut down until March 1.
• tried to get a bus going my general direction, I’m burnt out, cannot figure out the buses, none have standard signage, none give you any useful information.
• requested an Uber.
• arrived at my Airbnb, 4 hours and 10km of walking later.

Oh, you sweet summer child, that bus is never coming.

I wonder if each place you visit leaves an indent like a gravity well, like a bowling ball resting on a trampoline, and the ones that leave the bigger indent are the more likely to pull you back again, drawn back by a now reinforced energy that got you to leave the imprint of it in the first place.

After a couple short hops through Mexico City in the past it because clear it was likely the most underrated city I’ve been to anywhere in the world. Getting to experience it felt like slipping through into some just slightly different reality, seeing a place that you’ve always known about, always known was a single flight away, but that just no one seemed to end up at.

Hanging with the Gumber, waiting for my flight.

I’ve taken this midnight flight to Mexico City before, in the past the plane takes off, the flight attendants disappear, the lights go out and everyone sleeps. This time was similar except that after the lights went out a meal was served… in the dark…. I have never seen that before, eating when you can’t even see your food.

I used my phone’s nightsight mode to let me see my food, without it I had no idea what the meal was, actually being able to see the meal didn’t help much with identifying it. Apparently it was a “hot ham sandwich dinner”. Which I am guessing is only a thing within Aeromexico itself and is unknown outside of their planes.

In any case it was great to be on a flight again, my seatmates were friendly and I managed to sleep, surely a sign of smooth sailing ahead.

So I’m sitting here again, in YVR, back waiting to fly away on the last flight of the day. Be a bit gone again. COVID is over, or over enough to finally allow leaving. The me I am when away from everything seems pretty very unknown now, I’m so eager to go again.

I write what I write here not because I enjoy it, not because I’m good at it, not to show it to anyone really, but because if I don’t I really will forget. A travel day that isn’t reflected here, eventually, just didn’t happen, it’s erased. I’m digging into old pictures and drafts of posts from before the shutdown and I see how many balls I’ve dropped, how many days of travel from 2018 and 2019 I just never ended up writing.

Days and nights in New York, long talks, cocktails and roadside sobriety checks with Jeff in Portland, a week up the Sunshine Coast. I meant to write it down, I swear. So many events, I wish I could dig back through my brain and my notes and finally get them documented but come on, it’s not going to happen.

So if this is going to happen it has to happen now.

Here we go.

I’ve been to Portland a couple times before and didn’t find any sort of toehold either time. I ended up with a ten day break from work so decided to drive down and make one more attempt to put a bird on it.

I’ve been having some rather significant stress related stomach issues in recent weeks, it happens from time to time but it makes it hard to know when I am hungry. About an hour short of Portland I decided this hunger was real and found a lovely old roadside diner where my waitress referred to me as “Love” the entire time.

 

I checked into my two-star and fell asleep for an hour, couldn’t sleep last night so not too surprising. I cleaned up and headed out, stopping first at a shop I like to grab a couple shirts and then stopped for coffee to wake up and borrow wifi to work out a plan. I have a global sim with 3gb of data that has to be used by January but amazingly I forgot it at home.

I knew my bank card was flaky and had been meaning to replace it so it wasn’t surprising that I had trouble paying for coffee, gave up and used credit card and then noticed it is cracked too, could not pay, I have nearly  US cash, left the cashier my phone and went to the car to scrape up enough to pay.

I spent the next two hours finding and  trying different bank machines before finding one that accepted my cards, withdrew my daily max and was officially ready for a drink. really need to replace my cards when I get home.

When I searched for the Portland cocktail bars that I’m not familiar with one name that kept popping up was Interurban, decided to make that my first stop. I’ll post a bar review as a separate post but after a few drinks and snacks I headed back to the motel happy and sleepy.