Guadalajara seems to be the hipster, tech capital of Mexico, and I seem to have found digs in the middle of that, based on the number of bars and tattoo parlors and wood-fired pizza places in the area. I’m a little embarrassed to admit I hadn’t thought that Mexico would have something resembling a hipster, tech capital¹ but of course it does; the steady advance of global culture and the increasing importance of technology means local tech hubs are cropping up all over, and the sorts of things they engender are startlingly similar, with coffee shops and art galleries and fusion restaurants.²

I arrived on a Friday, and for the first time in forever I didn’t have anything to do. I mean, I control my own schedule; I can almost always find time if I want to. But that usually means rescheduling a meeting or postponing some project I’m working on. I often have the nagging sensation that I should be working on something.³ For the first time in I don’t know how long I didn’t have that. Everything was squared away. So I just had fun.

Saturday I wandered around downtown. Guadalajara has some amazing architecture, and a lot of it is centered around the cathedral. I spent some time reading in the parks around there, saw the Teatro Degollado and the Rotunda de Los Hombres Ilustres,⁴ and explored the cathedral.

On Sunday I took a tequila tour, so at 10am I was sitting on a bus heading out to the Sauza Distillery in the heart of Tequila.⁵ Much like the miles of corn you see if you drive through Iowa, or the sunflower fields you pass in Provence, you’ll pass thousands and thousands of agave plants on your way through Jalisco.⁶ We stopped by one of the nurseries, then headed to tour the distillery.

The last 150 years have been pretty good to the Sauza family, and the original distillery has grown to include, these days, an estate in the middle of Tequila with gardens, banquet areas, a gift shop, as well as a modern, industrial distilling operation. There’s a couple of murals, one of which is utterly bizarre — featuring revelers drunk off their asses on tequila, in various stages of ecstasy or sorrow or undress.⁷ After the tour there was a buffet lunch, followed by dancers, and then a mariachi band, then the dancers with the mariachi band, then a couple of mariachi singers, and while it was all pretty good at this point you’ve been out in the heat for a couple hours and knocking back samples of tequila and tumblers of Palomas since midmorning and it’s frankly just kind of a relief just to get back on the bus and head back to the city.

I had decided to try spending a few nights at a hostel, kind of as a karmic carbon offset for all the swanky places I’ve been staying. And I can’t say it wasn’t nice, after three nights, to be packing and leaving. I can stand the lack of an in-suite bathroom, and I endured the cheap mattress and the concrete floor. But the walls were flimsy, and the lock was sufficiently crap that I was immensely uncomfortable leaving my computer in my room. Those guys who spent the entire night from 2am to 6am drunkenly discussing philosophy three feet from my door in the courtyard were just the final straw.

All this experience sorting through available rooms is paying off, slowly. I’m getting better at finding places, figuring out what weight to give pictures of rooms or user reviews or map locations.⁸ AirBnB and hostels are variable in a way hotels aren’t, so you need to be more careful. But I’m learning a lot, and I’ll know the next time I’m in Guadalajara.

But that assumes there is a next time. Lots of places I visit — London, Copenhagen, Berlin — I’m certain I’ll be back to eventually. But as I make an effort to visit places harder to get to, places I’ve never been before — Ouagadougou, Dubai, Guadalajara — I find myself still wanting to go back, sometime, eventually. It’s just harder, and that makes it less likely. Some places I will. And some places … I just won’t. And I don’t know which is which.

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Footnotes

¹ We’re all constrained by our preconceptions; most everything I know about Mexico is filtered through American television, which at the moment seems to mean border crime and violent drug cartels. The worst crime I’ve experienced in Mexico has been being grievously overcharged for the occasional cab ride.

But while it was clear even without visiting you can more-or-less ignore those portrayals — it was pretty obvious that Scarface and Miami Vice were never actually going to tell you what living in Miami was like — the problem is there’s nothing beyond that. You can tell the media is misleading you, but there’s no alternatives to fall back on. You have to go and see for yourself.

Of course, this goes both ways. I had a tour guide tell me she always wanted to visit New York, but was worried about all the muggings and street crime. I got to tell her, no, New York is one of the safest cities in America now. Although she was also worried about how expensive it was, and I couldn’t help her there.

² Richard Florida has a lot to say about this.

³ A week ago, the Sunday I had booked for Chichen Itza got eaten up by a feature for a website I was trying to finish which always felt about 45 minutes from being wrapped up. I booked the tour to see both Chichen Itza and Coba the following day.

⁴ They’re leaning in on that “hombres” part, too. 31 men, 2 women.

⁵ Tequila is named from the place it comes from. In this case, the city of Tequila. I’d almost said “like Bourbon” but there’s some question over whether the drink is named after the county in Kentucky or the street in New Orleans. So, like Champagne, then.

⁶ And not just out in the fields. There’s a famous fountain in Guadalajara of Minerva and it’s planted all around the edges with agave.

⁷ I am not kidding. I mean, look at this thing.

It’s at least more honest than those beer commercials where everyone’s sedately chilling or hanging out, and nobody looks like they’re on the verge of alcohol poisoning.

⁸ For example — and yes maybe some of this should have been obvious to me rather than learning from experience — but it turns out the sorts of people who stay at resorts are not the sorts of people who stay in hostels, and so even though they might both get a 4.8 out of 5, those mean vastly different things. I’m not even comparing a theoretically perfect hostel experience with a theoretically perfect resort experience. I’m saying many people’s rating of, say, a hostel include such things like “they didn’t lock me out after 2am” and “they were totally cool with smoking in the courtyard” which are completely irrelevant for whether I’m going to be happy spending the night there. Especially since, no matter how the management feels about it, I am totally not cool with you smoking in the courtyard.