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I flew eleven hours to watch ninety minutes of football, which my wife pointed out was a poor ratio even by my standards.
I’d also, in a fit of preparation, learned to say soy vegetariano from a video, repeating it on the plane until the man beside me asked, gently, whether I was praying. I am a vegetarian. I was going to Mexico, a country I understood to run on roast meat. I had filed the whole trip under Problems to Be Managed, packed accordingly, and braced for a week of polite hunger.
What nobody tells you is that Mexico City sits at hill-station altitude, well over two thousand metres, so my first act in this great metropolis was to walk up one gentle slope in Roma Norte and arrive at the top genuinely winded, hands on my knees, like a man fleeing a crime. A boy of about nine watched me with clinical interest. “¿Estás bien?” I gave him a thumbs-up I did not feel. He did not look convinced, and frankly neither was I.
The match I won’t describe in detail — partly a promise to my editor, partly because the football is not what I remember. What I remember is the sound. Eighty-odd thousand people, six continents of them, in the great bowl in the south of the city that the world has renamed for the tournament and that nobody on the street calls anything but the Azteca. When the home crowd rose, it was not a noise you heard so much as a weather you stood inside. I felt it in my sternum. The man to my left — Brazilian, in a jersey two sizes too small for his joy — seized my shoulder and roared something into my face, and I roared it back, and for that second we were the same person, fluent in nothing but volume.
Then the match ended and the city took over, which is the part nobody warns you about either.
The taquería was forty steps from my hotel, and I found it the way you find the good ones, by following people who looked like they knew. Past midnight. Two Argentinians, a German couple, a woman in a Morocco shirt, somebody asleep on his feet. I deployed my single sentence. “Soy vegetariano.” The man at the comal — Lalo, because the whole stand kept shouting it — did not blink. He simply began to build. Nopales, the grilled cactus, squeaking faintly against the teeth. Mushrooms slippery with garlic. And then a quesadilla folded around flor de calabaza, squash blossom, orange petals collapsing into melted cheese, a thing so good I made an involuntary noise that the German misheard as a toast and answered with his beer.
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This became the pattern. I had braced for negotiation and instead the city kept handing me things I’d never heard of and would now cross an ocean for. Huitlacoche — a corn fungus the colour of a thundercloud, which I’ll describe no further except to say: order it before you Google it. Order it, in fact, before you read this sentence again.
At a mezcal bar in Condesa, no sign, a door you simply had to know about, a man named Octavio took my education personally. “Tequila,” he said, holding the glass to the light like a jeweller, “is mezcal that went to business school.” He let it land. “Mezcal is the grandfather. Slower. Smokier. He remembers things.” We drank three. He would not let me pay for the last one, because, he said, I had actually listened, and most visitors don’t.
I couldn’t sleep the next morning — altitude, mezcal, and an excess of happiness, which I’ve decided is a genuine medical condition — so I walked out into the Sunday city while it was still soft. Markets unfolding their awnings. A man arguing tenderly with a shutter he was painting. The murals, which in this city skip the galleries and climb the sides of buildings, talking to you as you pass. By noon the heat had won, and I ducked into the Museo Nacional de Antropología the way you duck into a doorway out of rain. To cool off. For twenty minutes.
I stayed three hours. There is a stone in there — the Sun Stone, the Aztec calendar, the size of a small car and twice as serious — and I stood before it longer than I have stood before anything. I had crossed the planet to watch men kick a ball, and here was a people who had charted the heavens to the day, raised a city on a lake, run their astronomy while continents away my own ancestors ran theirs, neither half of the world suspecting the other existed. I thought of my father, who would have read every placard aloud, slowly, to my teenage agony. I would give a great deal to be that embarrassed again, here, now.
I have written for World Travel Magazine long enough to hold a theory, and Mexico City signed it in ink: the best trips are the ones where the reason you went turns out to be the least interesting thing that happened. You buy a ticket to a football match. You come home carrying a whole country.
Someone asked me last week who won that match. I genuinely couldn’t say. I thought hard, invented a scoreline, then confessed I’d invented it. But ask me about the taco — the second nopales one, the one Lalo pressed into my hand before I’d ordered it, char and lime and a green salsa that landed a half-second before the heat and made the heat worth every tear — and I can taste it now, at my own kitchen table eleven hours away, as plainly as if he’d just shouted my order across the comal. ◼
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© This article was first published online in June 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
