My recent, first trip to London presented me with two surprises: the reach, convenience, and frequency of the tube, and the volume of Londoners’ complaints about the reach, convenience, and frequency of the tube. English friends had explained to me, not without pride, the importance of grumbling to the national character, but I still want […]
Colin Marshall sits down in Mexico City’s Colonia Condesa with Gabriela Jauregui, writer, poet, and co-founder of the publishing collective sur+. They discuss her childhood in Coyoacán and at what point during it she realized she lived in a place with a rich literary history; her coming up reading and speaking Spanish, English, and French; the […]
This week on The Marketplace of Ideas, recorded live on location in Mexico City, I talk to David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World, Las llaves de la ciudad, Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico, and the blog Mostly Mexico City. A native New Yorker, Lida moved to Mexico City in 1990 — […]
Of all the Mexico City books I brought there, John Ross wrote the biggest, heaviest, and most ambitious. Just as I recorded a Marketplace of Ideas interview with David Lida during the trip, so I would have recorded one with Ross, had he not died in January. Ross’ lifespan, 1938-2011, nearly matches that of my […]
The end of my first stay in Mexico City brought to mind what I’ve come to call the Momus Test: When I visit a place, fantasies of living there start to tug at the edges of my imagination. How would I survive economically here? Which area would I pick to live in? How would I […]
I came to Mexico City with many priorities, and Cuban ice cream without the promise to buy ranked high among them. We showed up to Mercado Medellín looking for it, but I nearly broke into a flop sweat upon seeing that that, for whatever reason — too late? Some sort of holiday? — most of […]
As luck would have it, the camote man turned up on my birthday. We’d put away beer after beer and pizza after pizza, I had a birthday brownie (fully equipped with ice cream) comin’ my way, and there came a whistle so plaintive it could have only one source. While indeed plaintive, the whistle also […]
Mexico City has three major department stores, each of which began as an importer from a different region: Liverpool, Sanborns, and El Palacio de Hierro. Some of the latter two feel truly-old school, like how I imagine the American department stores circa 1960. They’ve got doormen, they’ve got fine chocolate sections, they’ve got restaurants, and […]
I’ve talked to Peruvians, Germans, Frenchmen, Australians, and Japanese on this trip, and they’ve all told me that the unwarranted fear of Mexico City in their home country matches or exceeds the level I saw and heard in the United States. Turns out that most of el D.F. actually feels safer than major metropolitan areas […]
became aware of myself pretending i had been asked to choose two countries to remain in existence and me choosing ‘mexico and japan’ – Tao Lin Much of the Mexico City exploration we’ve done in the past week, we’ve done in the company of three Japanese ladies: two D.F. residents, one visitor. Our group […]