I went to Mexico City for a few days. I came back inspired, grateful, and with a phone full of photos I keep going back to. The kind of full feeling you get when a place gives you more than you expected.
Let me walk you through it.
A CITY BUILT ON CONTRAST
Every street had trees down the middle. Every corner had someone walking a dog, sometimes three at once. And then, out of nowhere, a wall would stop you cold. Cobalt blue. Bright pink. Marigold yellow. Concrete and color, side by side, like the city knew exactly what it was doing.
That contrast followed me everywhere I went. It turns out, it is the whole story.
HOTEL DAMA, CONDESA
Walking into Casa Dama felt like walking into someone's apartment, not a hotel lobby. It is a preserved 1950s building, and every one of the three floors has its own personality, all the way down to a sunken mid-century library lounge. There was a white tea scent in the air the second the door opened, and I wanted to bottle it. It turned out to be a room spray from Laguna Cyprien, "Soliflor and Té Blanco." Black and white floors, mid-century furniture, and a rooftop with no walls, just trees and sky, draped in jacarandas, and the kind of quiet you don't expect above a city this size. Almost forest-like.
My welcome drink was a hibiscus cooler, and I was so dehydrated from the flight I chugged it in about two minutes and ordered a second. I have naturally low blood pressure, and hibiscus lowers it further, so that was a mistake I paid for all night. Dizzy, lightheaded, up every hour. Worth it. Drink it slowly and have just one, unlike me.
Breakfast on that rooftop every morning set the tone for the whole day, and gave me a quiet moment to catch up with my husband and kids before things got busy.
hoteldama.mx
THE TABLE
Cursi, in Roma Norte, is not one room. It is many rooms inside a real art nouveau house from 1916, the kind with impossibly tall windows and an entrance that stops you before you're even seated. The house wraps around a central courtyard, two floors, and every wall is hand-painted, hearts and lyrics and playing cards, like walking through a friend's very talented sketchbook. Folding chairs sit next to curtains that pool on the floor. There is music playing that you actually want to listen to.
It should not work. A house this ornamental, this over-the-top, could tip straight into kitsch. And the name knows it, "cursi" means cheesy in Spanish. But somehow it lands as the opposite of cheesy. It is romantic and a little theatrical and completely sincere about it, which is what makes it work. Underneath all of it is an extraordinary steakhouse, built around a porterhouse big enough for the table and, somehow, a beef hot dog on the same menu. Dinner does not really end there either. Upstairs the whole thing turns into a late-night lounge with karaoke, and the night just keeps going without ever breaking the mood you walked in on.
The steak frites were exactly as good as the walls promised, and the wedge salad was delicious. Do not skip the hot sweet roll with butter and honey.
@cursi.cdmx
El Parnita gave me the best rib eye tacos of my life. Just meat, onion, cilantro, a squeeze of lime, served on homemade blue corn tortillas. No extra salsas pushed on you. I asked for more and realized halfway through that I did not need them. The flavor was already doing the work.
The place was packed and loud, cumbia and old Mexican pop blaring, and almost nobody around me looked like a tourist. I found out later the people who run it call it more of a life project than a restaurant, built around family and community first, tacos second. You can feel that the second you walk in.
elparnita.com
XINÜ, POLANCO
This is a perfume boutique the way a cathedral is a building. You ring a bell to get in. Someone buzzes you up, and once you are inside, they walk you through the scents one by one, like a private guide through a world built entirely around smell, not a shop clerk pointing at shelves.
Black walls, low light, scent tested on wood and paper and stone so you could feel the difference before you could name it. Every fragrance is built from botanicals native to the Americas, which is exactly why nothing there smelled like anything I had tried before. Then, out of nowhere, a green patio opened up in the middle of it all. That contrast again. Each scent had its own section, tested on wood, cloth, paper, air, and finally your skin. Every scent transported you, some more than others. It was absolutely lovely.
xinuperfumes.com
CASA AZUL
Frida's father built La Casa Azul in 1904. She was born there, lived there with Diego Rivera, and died there in 1954. It became a museum a few years later, and walking through it does not feel like touring a museum. It feels like meeting her, room by room.
You start with photographs and letters, her handwriting right there under glass. Then a room of her clothes, the corsets she had to wear, the jewelry, the traditional dresses that became her signature. Then the kitchen, yellow and blue tile everywhere, still set up exactly like she left it, like she just stepped out. Then Diego's room, his painting jacket and hat still hanging on the wall. And finally her studio, her actual wheelchair, an easel, a bed with a mirror mounted above it so she could paint herself while lying down, because for so much of her life lying down was the only option she had.
By the time you have moved through all of it, you are not looking at objects anymore. You are feeling her pain, the adversity she lived with every single day, and underneath all of it, the willpower it took to keep making work that unflinching from a bed she could barely leave. You leave grateful, grateful for your own health, your own ease, your own life. And you leave admiring her, genuinely, for a kind of strength most of us never have to find.
Walking out, I felt like I had spent time with her, in her home.
fridakahlo.org.mx
THE RING I HAD TO BRING HOME
Somewhere in the middle of it all, I found a ring. Sterling silver, a sacred heart radiating out like a sunburst, the kind of piece that makes you say: I have to have this.
I could not stop thinking about it once I got home. So I reached out to the woman who made it, a local artisan working on her own, the same way I do, and placed an order for a small batch.
They are on their way to me now, cast in the same 925 sterling silver, the same design that stopped me in my tracks the first time I saw it. It felt right to support her work directly rather than just admire it from afar, and I think you will understand why the moment you see it on your hand.
