Violet Sky

I’ll open this by saying: this ended up more expensive than I thought it would. I’m not really sure why I thought it would be cheaper, considering the impetus for going on this trip was spending $2000 on plane tickets, but here we are. Nonetheless, once you take out the big categories of airfare and lodging, the rest looks much more reasonable.

Lodging

Pretty simple here, since we stayed in just one spot. I will probably look for a hotel next time, as much as I enjoyed the view from our Airbnb.

Food

Our grocery spending does have some other categories mixed in with it, like alcohol and the fan that we bought at La Comer on the first day, but I think we did pretty well with costs here. The most expensive meal we had was a sit-down meal at the airport on our way back home. We did spend a fair amount at 7-11s, Oxxos, and the like, in large part because every day we required multiple liters of bottled water and tended to pick up little items on the way with them. The $9.15 single alcohol charge came from me hunting down a margarita at my mother’s request – margaritas are not actually common in Mexico City, so it took finding an expensive bar that catered to Americans to get one.

Transportation

I’m realizing that this is missing public transportation, because we could only pay for our metro tickets with cash. We loaded something like MX$50 onto the card, since each ride was a reasonable 5 pesos, and didn’t think much about it until the end of the trip when we were nearly out of money. A great value compared to the $223 in Ubers we paid for, partially out of laziness. As I mentioned in the trip report, next time I’d make sure to book lodging close to a metro station. This also doesn’t include the MX$1000 we paid the Uber drive in cash on the way back from Teotihuacán.

Entertainment

This is another category skewed by cash needs. The $120 deposit for the food tour was paid via card, but we also brought MX$1200 per person to the tour for the rest of the costs.

Miscellaneous

A year or so ago, I learned the trick about pulling cash out in foreign countries. Rather than accepting the conversion when they ask, you can decline it and get whatever the going rate is, rather than the inflated conversion suggested by the ATM. Most of the shopping was book-related, and fully a quarter of it happened at LAX once I realized that I had forgotten to bring a book to read. Finally, all the missing categories attributed to cash in earlier sections show up here in the cash withdrawal category.

Summary

We certainly could have done this trip cheaper, but I’m pretty happy with it, overall. Our Airbnb was in the middle of the price ranges I saw for accommodation, across hotel and Airbnbs, and while we didn’t need to fly first to Mexico City, it was nicer than not doing so. Were we not struck with a series of maladies, I imagine we might have done a few more activities (we had originally talked about doing the night tour also offered by Eat like a Local), but now we can add it to the list of things we do next time.