I’d come to Mexico City with a plan.
I had booked a room in a house, with a Mexican family, for 2 months. In that time I intended to learn Spanish (on my own, using just the internet) and become semi-fluent. I would also, I’d decided, find a rock climbing gym, and climb there multiple times a week. When my arms were sore, I’d go running, or do yoga.
And in between all of that, I would learn to draw (I’d borrowed an ebook from the library) and start writing a fantasy novel.
TL;DR: Things didn’t go according to plan.
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Part 1: In which learning Spanish turns out to be a little harder than I’d anticipated
I’d had this idea that it would be easy to learn Spanish in a Spanish speaking country. I’d paid for a 6 month subscription to SpanishPod101, and I imagined that I’d spend a few hours every day going through online lessons, then practice what I’d learned IRL by visiting museums and galleries, and by talking to the servers and cooks at the cafes that I’d visit.
It took me about three days of trying this to realise that it probably wasn’t going to work, although I persisted for an entire week before accepting defeat.
Learning Spanish on my own, it turned out, was incredibly boring. I could sit down and go through the lessons, but it was so tedious that it just wouldn’t stick. It was slow, too – SpanishPod101 had so many lessons on super basic things that it recommended I go through before even starting on verb conjugations.
As for trying to talk to people….Mexicans – especially the ones in Mexico City – speak so fast that you’d think they were trying to win some sort of verbal race. They also use a tonne of slang, and don’t enunciate properly. I could speak to them in Spanish, but I couldn’t for the life of me decipher what they said to me in response.
Which is why I ended up at Celcum, a language school in Juárez, doing intensive Spanish classes Mon-Fri from 9am-12:30pm.
Intensive Spanish classes, as you might guess from the name, were intense. Way more intense than I’d anticipated. On my first day, I could barely understand anything that my teacher was saying (it was all in Spanish) but I tried to do the exercises anyway. After class, I spent a few hours going over everything we’d learned and looking up anything I wasn’t sure about. Then I practiced speaking and listening by chatting to my housemates in Spanish (constantly imploring them to speak more slowly, and clearly, and tell me what various words meant).
This became my daily ritual. It felt like the class was moving at the velocity of a high speed train, and I was desperately trying to hold on. It was hard. But it was also effective. I went from not even knowing how to conjugate verbs when I started to being able to use the past tense in the first two weeks, all the tenses in the indicative mode in the first month, and imperative and most of subjunctive in the second month.
If those words don’t mean anything to you, here’s a quick run down of the Spanish language. Everything has a gender. There are indirect and direct pronouns that are different based on the number, gender, and points of view of whatever you’re talking about. There are 20 different tenses. There are three ‘moods’ – imperative (for commands and requests), indicative (for factual statements and positive beliefs), and subjunctive (for hypotheticals and desires). Each verb is conjugated differently based on the mode, tense, and the subject that it applies to. And when you combine pronouns with verbs, their spelling sometimes changes (usually they gain an accent).
In short, Spanish is really insanely complex compared to English. The more I learned, the clearer it became that I was not going to be fluent in two months.
But I did become conversational. Sometimes in the evenings I’d watch Las Leyendas, an awesome Mexican kids’ show on Netflix. I was so proud when, a few episodes in, I turned off the English subtitles and watched it all in Spanish. I started having conversations with Mexicans who couldn’t speak any English (although I still had to ask them to speak slower). I visited museums and only read the Spanish signs, ignoring the English translations.
In case this makes me sound too proficient, I want to stress that I still made lots of mistakes, often forgot to include the accents when I wrote things down, and frequently needed to look words up. But I still knew enough Spanish to get around, and to participate in things.
It felt like a whole new world had opened up – one where, instead of sounding like gibberish, I understood (most of) the lyrics to Spanish songs and the meanings behind Spanish adverts and the topics being discussed in the snippets of Spanish conversations that I overheard. It felt amazing.
Part 2: In which I realised that my climbing plans had a fatal flaw
It turns out that Mexico City doesn’t have any indoor top rope or lead climbing gyms. It does have a plethora of bouldering gyms, which just call themselves rock climbing gyms. Many of these gyms have pictures on their websites of people climbing tall cliffs with a harness and rope, which might lead you to believe (mistakenly), like I did, that they also offer either top rope or lead climbing.
I hated bouldering when I’d done it in Sydney and San Francisco. Hated it with a passion. So at the start, I didn’t even think of giving it a go in Mexico. ‘This is fine’, I thought. ‘I’ll just run and do yoga instead.’
Except that in the first few days, after 2 months of not running at all, I tried to do some medium-distance runs multiple times a week, and hurt both my knees and ankles. Rookie mistake.
And I could do yoga on my own, but it wasn’t as much fun as doing it in a class. I loved being able to empty my mind and follow someone else’s directions. Putting together my own yoga classes and having to remember sequences wasn’t relaxing.
As luck would have it, Mexico has an app called Fitpass where you pay for a monthly membership and get unlimited access to a lot of different classes (but can only visit the same gym four times a month). I signed up and went to a bunch of yoga and pilates classes and then, because it was free with the app, decided to give one of the bouldering gyms a go.
Turns out, bouldering in Mexico is wonderful and I love it. The gym near my place, RockSolid, was started by 3 Finns (of which I met and climbed with 2) who’d decided to move to Mexico and start their own bouldering gym because life in Finland was too boring (so they said).
The gym was new and pretty and never too busy. A lot of the same people went every time, and even though I only went three times, I recognized climbers from the other times I went, and they remembered me, and we hung out and climbed together. The routes were set by some professional climber who’d won lots of awards, and they were so interesting – the kind of climbs you really have to figure out how to do, rather than just having tiny holds that you can only manage if you’re strong enough. And a lot of the routes weren’t graded, so I’d never know if I could do them or not, and would just try.
If I could go back in time, I’d skip Fitpass and just get a membership to RockSolid. But I can’t really complain, because the thing about Fitpass was that the classes were all in Spanish, and it gave me more opportunities to practice speaking and listening.
The downside of Fitpass was that I couldn’t get to most of the gyms via public transport. Most of the places I visited were a quick bike ride or a decent walk away – which would have been fine except for one key thing that I hadn’t known about Mexico City before arriving: it rains all the time.
It literally rained almost every single day I was in Mexico City. It was hard to predict when exactly it was going to rain, because the weather changed so quickly. Some days it’d be grey all morning, but wouldn’t start raining until late afternoon. Other days it’d be so clear and sunny, and then within 15 minutes the clouds would block out the sun and it would start pouring down.
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I had a rain jacket, but I didn’t have waterproof shoes (I desperately missed my boots) or water resistant pants. I tried cycling in the rain a few times but it was terrifying – there’d be huge puddles that would reach halfway up my wheels, cars couldn’t see me (I could hardly see myself, some times), and I’d get drenched and muddy.
I tried Ubering, but traffic would come to a standstill when it rained. One time I Ubered to a gym that was meant to be a 7 minute drive away, but in the rain it took me over an hour to get home from there. And if I missed or came late to a class that I’d booked on Fitpass, I’d have to pay a penalty fee.
So after a month of fitpass, with only two and a half weeks left before my time in CDMX was up, I decided cycling and walking would be enough to keep me fit.
CDMX has free bikes that you can use. There’s a bike sharing program called Ecobici that unfortunately doesn’t operate in Coyoacan where I was living, but did operate basically everywhere else, so if I got the subway to another part of Mexico City, I could get an ecobici from there. But ecobici bikes are also super heavy, clunky, and unreliable. I found them terrifying and awful to ride.
I love cycling and I’d missed my bike when I was in Nicaragua, so after trying Ecobici and feeling scared for my life, I decided I’d hire a bike. It was much more pleasant than using the crowded subway or buses. But long term bike hire in CDMX is expensive – around 450pesos/day, which works out to upwards of $1500 USD for 2 months. I searched forever before finding a message on some forum that someone sent about Taller de Bicicletas Orozco.
It’s a tiny little hole in the wall bicycle store that doesn’t even have a sign with its name on it, or a website, but does have a Facebook page. I sent them a message, then went over to the store. The bikes that they had for rent were not fancy. They were a little rusty, with broken grips on the handlebars and patched seats. But for all that, they were sturdy and reliable.
I paid $200USD to rent it for 2 months, and named my temporary bike Pancho Ramone. He performed wonderfully until my penultimate full day in Mexico City, when one of the brake cables came loose, and I had to UberXL the bike back to the store. RIP Pancho Ramone.
Part 3: In which I came to accept that I couldn’t do everything and needed to prioritise
Except for my first few days in Mexico City (which I spent at a different AirBnB), I was living in Coyoacán, at a wonderful house that I think was previously owned by some famous Cubans.
I lived with a family (Victoria, the mom, and her three kids: Olmo, Azul, and David), and two other long term renters (Azucena, who worked for the UN, and Ileana, a ballerina). Luz, who helped look after the kids and manage the house, was also there most days, as was Mari Carmen, the administrator of the ballet school that was attached to the house. Various ballerinas and baillerins (the Spanish term for male ballerinas) were also constantly running through the house. And there were 7 cats, of which 3 were kittens.
I loved it. Coyoacán is basically a little pueblo (village or town) inside CDMX. It was full of charm, with wide open spaces and cobblestone streets and cute cafes and so many trees. It felt a bit magical, and was so much more tranquil than the rest of CDMX, which could be incredibly loud and hectic.
But Coyo was almost an hour away, cycling, from Celcum, my Spanish school. So I’d spend almost two hours a day cycling to and from my school, 2-3 hours doing my homework and practicing Spanish, another hour or so listening to Spanish podcasts, reading Spanish children’s books, or watching Spanish TV shows, and another hour or two practicing speaking Spanish.
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And because I got an upset stomach fairly frequently from eating street food, I also started to grocery shop and cook. And occassionally I’d do touristy things like visit Teotihuacán or Casa Azul. Which left me no time to draw or write my novel.
At first I felt terrible about this. I’d said I was going to learn to draw. Why was it so hard to find just 30 minutes to draw every day? Why couldn’t I find an hour to sit at my laptop and work on writing my novel every day? Or even every second day? It felt like I was failing. Like I wasn’t being disciplined enough. Like I couldn’t keep the promises I’d made myself.
But one of the best lessons I’d learned in Nicaragua was to let go of my expectations. There weren’t any external reasons that I needed to do any of those things. It was just that I wanted to do them. And I wasn’t avoiding them because I was lazy or undisciplined. I didn’t have time for them because I needed more time than I’d expected to learn Spanish. And in the free time outside of Spanish, I wanted to explore Mexico City and play with the kittens and work on my blog. I couldn’t do everything at once, so I was going to have to prioritize, and some things were going to have to wait.
At my last job, we’d use OKRs to prioritize our work. OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results, and the idea is that you pick three things to focus on and say no to (or at least, de-prioritise) everything that falls outside of that. I don’t think they’re always that effective in a work environment, for reasons that I don’t need to get into here, but embarrassingly enough, I actually love them for my personal life.
These were my OKRs:
Objective 1: Learn Spanish so I can fully experience everything that Mexico has to offer – talking to the locals, watching plays, learning about local stories and recipes.
Key Results: Be able to hold a full conversation with Luz (who didn’t speak English), and understand an entire episode of Casa de las Flores without subtitles.
Objective 2: Continue to practice mindfulness, like I’d been doing in Nicaragua.
Key Results: I’ll have meditated every morning and written in my diary every night. I’ll have maintained a routine which included writing and reading, but not too much passive social media consumption.
Objective 3: Maintained my travel blog because it’s nice to have a record of what I’ve done that I can look back on, and because writing about my trip helps me sort through my own memories and reflect back on what I’ve learned. Plus, as my friend David told me, reading my blog lets my family and close friends know what I’ve been up to.
Key Results: I’ll have blogged about each leg of my trip in a way that’s genuine and honest and adequately conveys what the experience was like. I’ll have enjoyed writing each blog post, and be proud of the finished results.
So drawing and writing my book would have to wait.
As it happened, I did really enjoy drawing and sometimes managed to find time for it. It was therapeutic. But I didn’t feel too bad when I didn’t find time for it. I mean, I did feel bad sometimes, but I’d keep reminding myself that it wasn’t one of my OKRs, and that this was the price I paid to become better at Spanish.
And whenever I had a good dream, I’d scribble down what I could remember as material for when I’d eventually get around to writing my own book. When I read or watched something and hated the characters or the plot, I’d write down what I’d do differently. So it wasn’t like I was totally ignoring the book either.
Part 4: In which I discover that some anxiety is unavoidable
I wish I could say that everything went perfectly after that and that I was so content and calm and didn’t struggle with anxiety at all.
But that’s not true.
It did start off true. I was so content. I was so excited about learning Spanish, and although writing each blog post took me forever and I didn’t have time to blog that regularly, I felt so fulfilled whenever I would do it.
But then two things happened. One was that I had to contact my old company about some pay stuff. The other was that I got really bad food poisoning for almost a week.
People keep asking me what I do for work, and I have to respond, numerous times a day, that I’m taking a break from work. That I don’t know what I want to do next. I don’t know where I should live – whether I should settle down in Mexico or go back to Australia or move to Amsterdam. I don’t know whether I should keep working in tech or find a completely different job in a completely different industry, or if I should freelance, or if I should start my own business.
There’s a lot of questions that I need to answer. It’s stressful. I worry sometimes that I’ve made a mistake – that I should have stayed living in San Francisco and working at a tech company there. But then I remember how I isolating and lonely I found the Bay Area, how guilty I felt when I’d see all the homeless people, how powerless I’d feel when I’d hear about Trump, and how sad it made me when I’d meet people who’d tell me about how they’d been abused by the local police.
I’m scared that I’ll end up in a job that pays well but that’s utterly exhausting and leaves me feeling drained. Or that I’ll end up in a job that I believe in, but where I’ll have to dress conservatively and act professional and get rid of my blue hair and piercings and won’t get to be authentic. Or that I’ll end up at a job that’s boring and that I hate, where I’ll feel terrible ab out myself.
And when I was sick, I was in so much pain and felt so awful and lonely and all the weight of all these questions just pressed down on me and I felt caught up in these conflicting desires – the desire to find work that’s fulfilling, while also being able to act in a way that’s genuine, while also having enough money and time to be able to live near my friends and bike around and do the things that I love.
That probably sounds ridiculous. I’m not working at the moment, what do I really have to complain about? But anxiety is anxiety.
I did make a wonderful friend, Amy, who was also dealing with a lot of the same questions, which helped. We talked through ideas like starting a program to help refugees better integrate into the local community, or creating a space in which we could foster the arts, have HR policies that are parent/carer-friendly, and also offer assistance to the homeless. I don’t know if I could do any of those things right now, or on my own, but it was exciting to realise that there are things that I really want to do, and that I care about.
I also tried to focus more on the little things. I loved baking with the kids – we made banana bread and chocolate chip cookies and crepes with Nutella and sweetened condensed milk. I spent a lot of time playing with the cats, and trying to get the kittens to stop being scared of me. I’d sit and watch the ballet dancers practicing, and be awed by how graceful they were.
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And I read a bit. I mostly read fantasy books, but on my bike to school I also listened to Mark Manson’s audiobook ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck‘. These were my favourite takeaways, and the ones I used to comfort myself:
- Nobody’s problems are unique, although we all think they are. Whatever you’re dealing with, there are other people out there who are struggling with the exact same thing.
- Your worth is not based on what you achieve, but on how well you live your values. To drive this home, he pointed out that only judging people by what they’ve achieved would make Hitler seem like an incredibly successful person.
- Happiness comes from solving problems. Unhappiness comes from not having any problems to solve, or from having problems that you aren’t able to solve.
So I’m trying to look at my anxiety as a growth opportunity. And all of the problems I run into are just opportunities for me to gain happiness and satisfaction by solving them. And if things don’t work out, well, it’s for a reason – there’s probably something I’m learning or experiencing that’s going to help me with something else in my life. And like I’d learned from reading The Happiness Trap while I was in Nicaragua, anxiety, stress, and sadness are an unavoidable part of life. Sometimes you just have to accept them and sit with them and recognise that they’re just feelings, but they’re not who you are.
This is why I wanted to do this trip – well, apart from learning Spanish and how to draw and writing a book. I wanted to feel more comfortable with myself. I wanted to get better at dealing with anxiety and stress and feeling overwhelmed. I wanted to take some time to really think about what I want to do with my life, and to separate my values – my actual values – from the things that everyone cared about in the San Francisco tech scene, which it’s impossible not to get swept up in. Even though things have been hard sometimes, it’s definitely working.
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The Way of the Potato 
Great post!
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Thanks Sara!
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