Buffy brought me to Mexico City
I waited 25 years to return...
In 1999 Sarah Michelle Gellar (best known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer) was profiled in a multi-page spread in Teen People about her humanitarian work building houses with Habitat for Humanity. (Turns out Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans are still so rabid, you can find the entire spread on Instagram.)
One particular photo—of her smiling at the camera with cement-covered hands—has lived in my brain ever since because it inspired me to organize a Habitat for Humanity trip for my high school.
I wish I could remember how I, an 18-year-old at the time, planned that trip over the fall of 1999 and spring of 2000. Did I get out the phone book and dial up my local Habitat for Humanity chapter from my parents’ landline? Leave a message on the answering machine and wait for them to call me back? Seems likely, given that’s how I remember most things working in the days before email was really a thing (for high schoolers at least).
I distinctly remember having to pitch my school’s parent group to secure a chaperone (something neither of my parents were interested in being). I was extremely nervous about the presentation I had to give to the parents gathered in the staff room, which is funny now that I’m on the parent group at my kids’ school and I understand there would have been no audience more supportive on the entire planet.
About a half-dozen students from my school ended up going on the trip (one of whom is still one of my best friends to this day!), plus one mom (not mine!) who chaperoned. We helped build a cement-block house in a tiny town outside of Cuernavaca, but we flew into and out of Mexico City. It was the first place I’d ever been south of the United States. The first place I’d ever been with giant city squares and cathedrals the size of baseball stadiums and wide leafy boulevards and monuments on every street corner. It was also my first time travelling without my parents.
I fell in love immediately.
I remember the hospitality. How one morning when I wasn’t feeling very well, the owner of a little cafe on a quiet street told me I needed some guava juice. And because he didn’t have any guavas, he ran down the block to a neighbouring grocer to buy some and made me freshly squeezed juice.
I remember taking the subway and exploring the shoe shops that line the streets that extend from the Zocalo.
I remember going to the pyramids of Teotihuacan outside of Mexico City during the Spring Equinox and seeing people meditating with their palms facing the sun to absorb its energy, which seemed wild to me at the time and is now 100% something I would do.
Mexico City has been such a special place to me ever since, I had been dying to go back. And last weekend I finally did.
We visited sites gigantic and tiny, celebrated and just-opened. Had happy hour on a rooftop as the sun went down (a highlight of the entire trip for me). Somehow managed an invitation to a cantina on opening night. Rode the cablebus, a genius extension of Mexico City’s public transit system. (Every city would have one if I were Mayor of Everywhere.)
We shopped, we dined, we did all the things one does on a city vacation when you don’t bring your kids with you.
And then I wrote about my very favourite places for my alma mater VITA Magazine (I was Lifestyle Editor back when it was called Vitamin Daily).
I’m already rallying my girlfriends to go back.
Mexico City is like travelling without ~t r a v e l l i n g~ because it’s close (to those of us in major North American cities, at least!), the time change is minimal (again, for those of us in North America!) and the flights from Vancouver (and Toronto and maybe your city too?) are direct. A huge thank you to Flair Airlines and Tourism Mexico for making this trip possible.
Worth the Wait
Good Call, the just-released song by Montreal’s Geoffroy, is part of a new series he’s calling Field Study, which highlights songs that don’t quite belong on an album, something I, a non-musician, don’t understand but that I, a fan of music, appreciate nonetheless.
Speaking of actors who dominated the late 90s…Claire Danes’s new show The Beast in Me on Netflix isn’t getting nearly enough hype. It’s very, very, very good—whether you’ve watched every single prestige thriller made in every language or not.
Do you also have multiple chats devoted to Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Supreme Zoom of doom and its viral spinoffs or did you not grow up in advertising?
Normally my bookclub chat is filled with links to Nicole Kidman limited series and reality television thinkpieces. But I’m very proud to announce we just finished reading actual *literature*—a piece of metafiction, in fact: Endling by Maria Reva, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and just won the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize.
