Brace yourself for my Mexico City posts – this was a short trip with a lot of content. As I have mentioned before my family goes hard when it comes to travel and this was our first big trip together in years.

It also took me a while to figure out the best way to organize these posts so they would be valuable to another traveler – I put a lot of research into this trip and I hope others will find this information useful. What I generally do is take a huge list of recommendations and organize it into the areas of a city. Then I input all the stops of an area (like Condesa) into Google maps, I move the stop numbers around until I have a walking tour with no backtracking or overlapping paths.

This is day one in CDMX:

Stop 1: We stayed in the Xoco area, very close to the metro, so hop on your nearest metro to the Chapultepec stop.  I read a lot of reviews saying the metro gets super crowded but we left at 8ish on a weekday and were not overwhelmed. Plus it is so cheap! 4 tickets was 20 pesos, just over a dollar!

Stop 2: Chapultepec Park, grab some fruit or pan dulce at a market for breakfast. It would be a crime to not eat street food in Mexico.

Stop 3: Make your way up the hill to Chapultepec Castle. From the metro stop to here should take about an hour – if you stop constantly to take in the views, take photos, and eat. Exploring the exteriors of the castle alone took over an hour – we didn’t really get a chance to explore the inside much. Bring your student ID (yes I use mine from 4 years ago but hey it works) to get in for free OR if you are a teacher. Only my mom had to pay since my dad is a teacher and my sister and I have held onto our college ids for instances like this.

Stop 4: Leave the Castle, take a slow stroll through the park, savor the atmosphere and people. The park is MASSIVE and we hit a very tiny section.

Stop 5: Museo Nacional de Antropologia, we could have easily spent all day here – we were here for two hours and it wasn’t enough. See more about our adventure through the park here, CDMX – Bosque de Chapultepec.

Stop 6: Head out of the park into the La Condesa neighborhood. Stop in for lunch at El Pescadito, it has a little taste of the beach cities of Mexico in the bustling capital. We arrived at 2pm and still faced a long long line. It was worth the wait, had good prices, cheap beer – what more do you need?

Stop 7: Parque Mexico. Looking back I would not have gone out of my way to come here but it was fun to walk with the locals and see couples on benches having a ‘moment’.

Stop 8: Ending here – stroll around the La Condesa neighborhood. We kept going, you can read about that adventure here: CDMX – Hip Night Out. Already this day was from 8-5, like I said we go hard but you could head home from here.

Ximena.