The week in Guadalajara I’d planned ended after just two days. A fifteen-hour battle with Expedia’s support call center and a poor choice in hotels didn’t help, but the TL;DR on the fundamentals was clear: nice place to visit, don’t want to live there, I’d rather be (and am now) in Philadelphia.
The Gory Details
As large as GDL actually is, it doesn’t feel it. For me that’s a downside. The dominance of cars and streets designed for them makes for an almost-suburban sprawl in the places I explored. Mass transit wasn’t bad–one true metro line similar to the Market Frankford and two light rail systems running underground could probably be upgraded to full metro cars in the future. There were also bus rapid transit lines, similar but smaller than in Mexico City.
The climate also has a stronger tropical vibe than Mexico City, and again that’s a downside for me. It does allow for more interesting bird watching, but even the relatively mild temperatures while I was there were getting to me. The air quality–driven by all those cars–also wasn’t that much better than CDMX. Both suffer seismic activity, although GDL lacks some of the historical reasons that make CDMX prone to more significant damage–and sinking. Even so, my calculation by the time I went home was that I’d rather take the increased risks of CDMX to get all the metropolitan pluses its scale serves up.
The reason I left so early was the strong odor of the water–like sulphur to me but apparently of “organic” origins made even showering unbearable. I knew all the usual caveats about water in Mexico, but CDMX was nothing like this. Online advice is to use bottled water even for brushing teeth. The problem can vary, so the Internet told me, so I went to a variety of other hotels and restaurants to “use the restroom” more to run the spigots and smell the water. True, it varied a little. Also true, it’s not something I could stand at any of the levels I experienced. There are plans to improve it, rolling out in 2027 but probably taking much longer. Finally, filed under “know thyself”, whenever somebody tells me “oh you’ll get used to it eventually” about things like this, I *never* get used to it.
At Least It’s Not New Jersey
Even in that short time, I met some interesting people that I wanted to get to know better, and I smelled all kinds of dishes that demanded tasting. If I were living in CDMX, visiting GDL after the water issues get resolved to explore the *real Mexico experience* the region promises would be great. It’s the home of Mariachi and Tequila, but it just cannot be *my* home.
Apples to Apples
Where does this leave CDMX? It’s not off the list, and my first impressions post will be out of quarantine soon, very soon. Without GDL as the Philly to CDMX’s New York City, that makes it a bake-off between Mexico City and Madrid. And that made a decision by the end of September unworkable, so it’s back to the spreadsheets for one last round.
There’s already a tie: both cities have deep-fried McDonald’s apple pies. The revelation that CDMX Popeyes neither deep-fries nor smothers their apple pies with cinnamon sugar was a disturbing discovery that the blueberry-lemon option, while delish, isn’t enough to forgive. So I’m missing a key piece of data that hopefully a fellow fast food explorer can confirm: Do Madrid Popeyes deep-fry and cinnamon-sugar-coat their apple pies–if they have them at all?!