When you’re a younger architect, starting out, you’re seeking some kind of impossible perfection. You can spend your life thinking about this ephermal building that would be great to do, it would be the capstone of my career. And you realize as you mature that there’s no there. You aren’t gonna get there  

Words of the late Frank Gehry, from an interview with Sydney Pollack, in his film Sketches of Frank Gehry.

(Photos from a visit to the Gehry pavilion at Vitra in 2015.)

When we were in Mexico City last month we wanted to visit the pyramids at Teotihuacan, but we didn’t want to take an organized tour, mostly because we were staying far away from the city centre, in San Ángel, and we didn’t want to face the transit and/or traffic challenges of getting to a central rendezvous point for an early departure. 

So we got ourselves there and back. Here’s how, with hopes that others in the same situation will be emboldened to try the same.

Getting There

We used the DiDi app to arrange for a driver to take us by car to Teotihuacan. It took a few minutes to connect us with a driver, but the app found us José, with a fee of $593 MXN (about $45 Canadian).

José picked us up at 8:55 a.m., and the drive there took just over 90 minutes, through relatively mild traffic by Mexico City standards.

Arranging a Ride Back

During the drive out, Lisa (who speaks journeyman Spanish) and José negotiated an off-app return journey: $100 MXN an hour for waiting and $500 MXN for the return trip, to be paid in cash at the end of the trip home.

This was  helpful: we didn’t need to stress about getting a ride home, and paying José for the waiting meant we didn’t need to rush back for a scheduled return trip.

One thing to note: it seems generally accepted (and reasonable) that passengers cover the cost of road tolls there and back, about $100 MXN each way.

Arriving

José dropped us at Puerta 1 at Teotihuacan at 10:35 a.m. We choose the drop-off location simply because, well, it was the first entrance; it made sense. We paid the parking fee ($60 MXN). The entrance wasn’t busy at all, and there were small shops selling souvenirs and sundries, and clean, spacious washrooms.

Finding a Guide

The single best thing we did is finding a guide to give us an hour-long tour of the site. 

Lisa found Lorenzo inside the entrance gate, and they negotiated a price of $50 CDN. Lorenzo proved a knowledgeable, engaging guide, and he gave us just the right amount of information about the site, its history, its “rediscovery” in modern times, and he sent us off toward the Pirámide del Sol and Pirámide de la Luna on our own.

Food and Water

While many of the organized bus tours include a meal at one of the tourist-focused restaurants that ring the site, just outside the gates, we were on our own.

We were organized enough to have packed a lunch and snacks, and we sat down to eat before we headed out on the tour. Nipping possible grumpiness in the bud really served us well.

The Big Error

The one big logistical error we made is in not arranging for José to meet us at Puerta 3, where we ended up our tour of the site. If we’d thought ahead to get his mobile number we could have asked him to pick us up there, but we forgot to do that. This left us with a 30 minute walk back to where we’d left him.

We opted to walk outside the site proper, on the ring-road Circuito Pirámides, which had well-maintained sidewalks and let us avoid the more challenging ground of retracing our steps inside.

The Ride Home

José was waiting for us back at Puerta 1 when we arrived back.

Traffic on the ride home wasn’t horrible, but it was certainly busier than on the way home. We left Teotihuacan about 2:00 p.m. and we were home before 4:00 p.m.

Final Notes

If you’re in Mexico City, Teotihuacan is definitely worth a visit, especially if, like me, you’ve never had any exposure to pre-Colonial architecture and culture.

We have no regrets about taking a DiDi there and back: it was easy, inexpensive, seamless, especially compared to what we imagine would have been an early morning dash to get to the centre of Mexico City to join an organized tour.

The Edificios Superpuestos, which we likely would have skipped over without Lorenzo our guide, were the most interesting part of the visit: we were able to walk down inside ruins of the housing that was part of the site.

Climbing up the Pirámide de la Luna—you can get about halfway up—is worth the effort: you get a good overview of the entire site, and a visceral sense of the true massiveness of everything.

Bring more water than you think you’ll need.

One of the travel hacks we’d planned on executing on our arrival in Mexico City last month was to almost-immediately head out on a food tour. We reasoned that this would accelerate our familiarity with the local food scene, and get us more comfortable shopping for groceries, especially local ingredients.

One thing led to another, led to another, led to another, and we ended up not doing this (instead we figured things out on our own, which mostly worked, albeit anchored in more expensive full-on grocery stores like Walmart Express, where prices were as high as—or even higher than—we were used to at home).

Two weeks in, as our time in the city was drawing to a close, we pivoted to taking a cooking class instead.

We did a lot of hunting around websites like Airbnb, Viator and other tour aggregators, eventually opting for Modern Mexican Cooking Class with Authors Mariana and Geraldine, which had the advantages of being held an easy 15 minute walk from our home, well-reviewed, and and private (if not inexpensive).

It turned out to be a wonderful experience: Mariana and Geraldine were engaging hosts; Geraldine’s home in San Angel was an lovely oasis; the lunch we cooked together had just the right mix of hands-on and demonstration.

The highlight for me was learning to make Arroz Mexicano (Mexican Rice), the basics of which I captured in my sketch book:

I made this at home last night for the first time, and I was very, very happy with the result: the rice was perfectly tender, and had a nice kick.

I was aided greatly in preparing both the rice, and the tortillas I made to accompany it, by the opening of Tienda Latina Los Abuelos in Charlottetown while we were away, in Kirkwood Mews: I picked up a tortilla press, corn flour, and some morita chipotles there.

The magic elements of the process are:

• soaking the rice in boiling water first, then rinsing,
• frying the rice before adding liquid,
• being very patient (twice as patient as you think you should be) for the liquid to boil down.

Lisa and I enjoyed a tasty meal of tortillas, rice, beans, and guacamole last night for supper.

One of the things Lisa really wanted us to do in Mexico was to see a professional fútbol (soccer) game. Almost as soon as we landed in Mexico City, she started to survey the landscape to see where and how we might do this. Early signs weren’t good: the professional Liga MX was on hiatus, between the regular season and the playoffs, and big stadiums were empty.

Two weeks in, though, we relocated to Guadalajara, and it seemed like there might be a possibility of seeing the homegrown Chivas play Mexico City’s Cruz Azul in the quarter finals.

We weren’t sure of the date—various sources (AI, local friends, Uber drivers) told us different things—but Wednesday, November 26 emerged as a clear front runner.

With this in mind, we found our way to the ‎Boletomóvil app, where we found official tickets were being sold, and, after a lot of to and fro, we secured three, on the first level, row Y.

We were chuffed.

Until we noticed that the date for the game was still shown as “TBA.” 

Apparently some things had to be sorted in the league before the date was set, and, for a time—indeed almost until the last moment—the game could have been the Wednesday or Thursday we were in Guadalajara, or it could have been in December.

Fortunately, the fates tilted toward us, and the game was eventually set for Thursday: not ideal, as we needed to leave for the airport for our flight home the next morning at 4:45 a.m. But better than December.

With tickets in hand, and a date for the game confirmed, we were left with the question of how we were going to get to the Akron Stadium and back. 

We’d been relying on Uber and DiDi to get around the city, and that had been working well; I was afraid that they would fail us on game day,  though, as thousands of people flooded into, and out of, the stadium. I needed to get us some backup plans, so on the Monday before game day I took the afternoon to run some simulations.

The Recon Run

Akron Stadium was about 4 km from our home in the Guadalajara suburb of Zapopan, about 10 km by car:

I was fairly sure that we could get to the stadium by car, so I ordered up an Uber, and Victor had me there in 15 minutes flat, in mid-afternoon traffic, for 100 pesos (about $7.50 Canadian). This was my best-case baseline.

What happened next was a study in what my friend Edward writes about in Wayfinding without a smartphone, describing the plight of The Amazing Race contestants making their was through Bucharest:

We may think of smartphone apps as “route finding” tools, but the problems we saw in this episode were less of route finding than of route following. The racers mostly did use smartphones to find routes: Their first instinct was not to ask a passer-by for directions but to ask a passer-by to use their phone to look up a route. But then they tried to follow those smartphone directions without a phone in hand, which is a different problem.

In my case, Google Maps showed a 40 minute walk from the stadium to the Ciudad Granja bus stop. Before just assuming that was the best way, I stopped at the security gate and asked the very helpful guard what the best way to the bus was, and he pointed me to a much shorter route, to the Estadio Chivas bus stop.

I set out on foot, and was at the bus in 15 minutes.

I did some scouting of the local area, and found an OXXO convenience store where we could recharge our transit cards, and pick up water or snacks, if we needed to.

The bus in this area travels on a separated “busway,” with a dedicated lane on the highway. The bus got me to the San Juan De Ocotán bus stop in 8 minutes.

My original plan at San Juan De Ocotán was to call another car, but I realized it was only a 40 minute walk from there to our house, so I decided to survey that route on foot, just in case all else failed and we needed to make a late night walk home (not my preference, but it’s always good to have a backup to the backup). 

The walk proved pleasant, and looked well-travelled and well-lit for all but a sketchier 500 foot section, midway through. I made it home for supper.

The Game Day Run

Kickoff time on November 27 was 8:07 p.m., and we decided to leave home at 6:00 p.m. to give ourselves plenty of buffer. 

I looked for a DiDi starting just after 6, and came up dry—the first time in 3 weeks that the service hadn’t almost-instantly offered up a ride. There was nothing. 

I tried Uber: same thing.

I started to formulate Plan Bs: walk, or take a car, to the San Juan De Ocotán station, and get the bus from there. Just as I was starting to look into how that might work, Lisa (essentially competing with me, but for our common goal) scored us a DiDi ride directly to the stadium for 249 pesos (about $20 Canadian; more than double my test run, but understandable, and welcome, given supply). 

Traffic to the stadium was very heavy, and what had been a quick 15 minute test run ended up taking more than an hour on game day. By the time we got dropped at the stadium entrance, made our way through the Fan ID verification, security screening, and ticket validation, and then made our way halfway around the stadium to our seats, it was 8:10 p.m. We sat down just about 3 minutes after kickoff, happy that we’d made it at all.

The Game

The game itself was an all-consuming experience, the likes of which I’d never experienced. Here’s a small taste, which doesn’t really convey the true feeling of being in the presence of so many people and so much aural and visual stimulation:

Lisa, much more well-versed in the ways of soccer, was disappointed by the 0-0 score at game’s end: she would have preferred a nail-biting contest to an evenly matched journeyman match. I was content to just bath in the experience: it was epic.

The Run Home

The game was over by 10:00 p.m. Our first plan was to see if we could call an Uber or DiDi to pick us up; my research had suggested this might be difficult or impossible, but we decided to give it a go. We need not have bothered: competing with the thousands of other mobile phone users in the stadium meant that neither of us could get a data connection at all: even if a car was there to be called, we couldn’t connect with it.

So we set off to follow my practiced walk-transit-car plan.

The exit from the stadium was calm and orderly, despite the crowds, and we followed a steady stream of other transit-takers toward the bus stop. 

As we passed through the parking lot we heard a lot of “taxi, taxi,” whispered carefully under the breath, sent our way; while it would have been wonderful to have simply hopped in a car at that point and motored home, this was a line I wasn’t willing to cross, my head filled with “avoid unlicensed taxis at all cost” advice from multiple sources, and visions of all manner of bad endings filling my head (my mantra in Mexico, generally, was “most people, most of the time, in most places, are kind and helpful”; in this case I wasn’t willing to suspend my disbelief enough).

We got to the bus stop in about 20 minutes, stopped at the OXXO to recharge our transit cards, get some water and chocolate (amazingly well-organized process where customers were titrated in and out of the store by a security guard). We crossed over the pedway to the bus stop, and joined about 50 others waiting for the bus.

While we were waiting, Lisa was chatted up by a devoted Chivas fan who’d travelled all the way from Monterrey, with his father, to see the game. He was excited enough by our coming from Canada that, when we all squeezed into the bus 10 minutes later, he led a chant of “CA-NA-DA” that filled the bus.

Some things, no matter how much you plan, you can’t possibly imagine.

We were at San Juan De Ocotán 10 minutes later, squeezed from the bus claustrophobia, energized by the chanting, happy closer to home.

We had a couple of false starts with securing a car home from the bus stop, but Lisa sweetened the pot—DiDi allows you to optionally set your own price—and we got a ride home in short order for 200 pesos (about $15 Canadian).

We walked off the elevator and into our apartment at 11:56 p.m., almost two hours after the game ended.

Doing Things That Are Hard

Kevin Dahlstrom turned 55 last week, and posted 55 pieces of advice, among which was this:

24. Do hard things. Choose courage over comfort. Everything you want is on the other side of fear and hard work. As Jerzy Gregorik said, “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”

Going to a football game in Guadalajara was hard. It was also a little scary. And involved a lot of moving parts. 

But, yes, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear and hard work.” 

I’m very happy we put in the work, got to experience something epic (and to show young L. what experiencing epic things is like), and emerged out the other end.

🇨🇦 CA-NA-DA!

I’m posting from my iPhone SE while travelling—it’s the only device I have with me. It works, albeit in a fiddly way. The tiny screen means I don’t get a real sense of what photos I post look like in the wild.

Fortunately, the home exchange we’re staying at here in Guadalajara has a refrigerator with an Internet-connected display in the door.

So I write on the phone, preview on the fridge. 

This morning’s experience in Guadalajara: immersion in a huge crowd for Les Girafes, opérette animalière, a spectacle from Compagnie Off in France.

Giraffes. Opera. Fire. Explosions. Truly spectacular.

There are places I go that seem just right, like the gods took an MRI of my brain, sorted it all out, and spit out a custom-tailored place.

Impronta, in central Guadalajara, Mexico, is the best the gods have ever done: it’s a print shop–publishing house–coffee shop–bookstore.

There is a tree growing through the middle of it.

There are dogs.

Linotype machines and letterpresses.

A rooftop fire pit.

A gallery.

Friendly people.

Great coffee.

Where do I sign up?

The Tree

We sat in front of it, on a metal park bench, eating brownies and drinking coffee. The tree rises through the building, and out above the roof.

The Print Shop

Impronta makes books. Makes them. They set hot metal type, print the pages and the covers, sew the bindings.

The means of production are at their fingertips.

The Riso Room

Impronta also uses more recent printing technology: on the second floor there is a Risograph room, complete with a flask of that lovely Risograph pink.

The Gallery

One floor up from Riso is a gallery and multipurpose room. Today it appeared that an exhibition of Linotype ephemera was going up or coming down.

Lisa’s comment: “This is the room I’d like for our studio.”

The Rooftop

The rooftop is delightful.

The Coffee Shop

We started our visit in the coffee shop. It’s long been my pipe dream to combine coffee and print shops: this was it, in living colour.

Excellent cortado; perfect service.

The Bookstore

At the front of the building is the most delightful bookstore, selling a mix of house-made books and those from others.

There is something so special about picking up a book made from scratch in the same building.

I could not leave empty-handed, so choose a copy of Alti Plano Subtropical by Kimberly Kruge.

The book is stunning.

The Best Place There Is

David Lynch wrote this in Catching the Big Fish:

Some mornings, in a perfect world, you might wake up, have a coffee, finish meditation, and say,“Okay, today I’m going into the shop to work on a lamp.” This idea comes to you, you can see it, but to accomplish it you need what I call a “setup.”

For example, you may need a working shop or a working painting studio. You may need a working music studio. Or a computer room where you can write something. It’s crucial to have a setup, so that, at any given moment, when you get an idea, you have the place and the tools to make it happen.

If you don’t have a setup, there are many times when you get the inspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put it together. And the idea just sits there and festers. Over time, it will go away. You didn’t fulfill it—and that’s just a heartache.

That’s what went through my mind today, walking through Impronta: it is a lovingly-resourced setup for making printed things. The setup includes not only the machines and tools, but the creative and literal food to fuel it all.

I left inspired not only to hone my setup, but inspired to dive into creation following their spirit.

What a place. 

We are nearing the end of our stay in Mexico City’s San Angel neighbourhood, and it’s taken me almost two weeks but I’ve found my favourite coffee shop: Padre Café.

It’s a 20 minute walk, over cobblestoned streets, from the home exchange we’re staying in, just steps from chaotic Av. Revolución, but a quiet oasis nonetheless.

The coffee is excellent, so much so that I had much too much of it.

I started with a simple espresso:

I liked the espresso so much that, when I realized I had another 30 minutes before my rendezvous with Lisa and L., I ordered a Monte Alban: two espresso shots, steamed milk, local chocolate.

It was delicious. And. Too. Much. Coffee.

Beyond the coffee, the space is beautiful, the staff warm and friendly, and the prices reasonable.

We head to Guadalajara on Thursday; I’m hoping to find my way back to Padre one more time before we leave.

Let’s say the wise elders got together, tasked with creating a museum perfectly suited to me: Museo del Objeto del Objeto in Mexico City might be what they come up with.

The museum asks, in its name and in its exhibitions, “what is the object of the object?” And it does so with pitch-perfect curation and design.

See also The Museum of Norm.