Why we chose the city over the coast
Every single person who hears we live in Mexico asks about the beach.
Not whether we live near one. They assume it, and the only question is which one. There is a pause while they assemble the picture, palm trees and a hammock and me answering emails in shorts, and then I say Mexico City and the whole thing collapses. Nobody has an image ready for that.
So they ask why. It is a fair question, and for a long time I did not have a good answer to it, because the honest answer is that we very nearly did not choose the city at all.
The assumption everyone makes
We looked at the coast seriously, and for longer than I expected to. Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Merida, Banderas bay, because half the people we spoke to before we moved told us that was where families like ours end up.
They were not wrong about that. It is where a lot of families like ours do end up, and the ones I know there are happy. This is not a piece about them getting it wrong.
It is about the fact that we spent weeks comparing the two and got nowhere, and then changed the question and had an answer within a day.
What we actually wanted from a week
The thing that unlocked the decision was not comparing places. It was working out what an ordinary Tuesday needed to look like.
That sounds obvious written down. It was not obvious at the time. We spent weeks comparing climates and costs and neighbourhoods, and got nowhere, because we were comparing holidays rather than lives. A place you would love for two weeks and a place you would love for ten years are not the same place, and almost nothing you read online distinguishes between them.
So we wrote down what a normal week had to contain. Not the big things. The big things are the same everywhere and they are what everyone compares. We wrote down the boring repeating ones.
School runs. Two a day, five days a week, and the coast wins this outright. Less traffic, shorter distances, and in a resort town you are rarely more than fifteen minutes from anywhere. In Mexico City a school run is a real part of your day and you plan your life around it. Worth saying that it stops mattering later, because past a certain age most schools here put the children on the bus whether you like it or not, but it matters enormously in the years when it does.
Then everything after school. Football, ballet, karate, music. Written down like that it looks trivial. It is not trivial, it is four separate commitments a week, each one needing somewhere decent to do it and somebody decent teaching it. In a smaller town you will find one or two of those. You will not find all four, and the ones you do find will have a single option rather than a choice.
Playgroups and seeing schoolfriends at the weekend, which sounds like a children's issue and turns out to be a parents' issue. Your social life is downstream of theirs for the first few years, whether you planned for that or not.
Weekends away. This one surprised me. From the city we can be in Valle de Bravo, Tepoztlán, Puebla or Acapulco in a few hours, from a beach town, a weekend away largely means the beach you already live on.
Climate, and specifically humidity rather than heat. We had spent enough time on the coast in August to know what we were choosing between. The city is temperate all year and the coast is not, and the difference is not a holiday inconvenience, it is what most of your year feels like.
Paediatricians. Not hospitals in general, which is the thing everyone checks. Paediatricians, and the specialists behind them, because with young children that is the appointment you are actually making.
Restaurants, which I include because it is honest rather than because it is important. We like eating out and the city has a range nowhere else in the country can match.
Once that list existed, the decision made itself in about a day.
What the coast does better
I want to be straightforward about this, because I am not making a case against the coast and I would not want anyone reading this to talk themselves out of somewhere that would suit them.
The coast wins on the things it obviously wins on. Light, space, and a pace that genuinely does slow you down. But the one that surprised me was community. In a place like Puerto Vallarta the foreign community is established, organised and open to newcomers. There are clubs and groups and a structure already built for someone arriving with no network. If you are retiring, or arriving without colleagues, that is worth an enormous amount and it is not something you can manufacture.
It also has a coherence the city lacks. Everyone is roughly in the same boat. In Mexico City the foreign population is scattered across a place of nine million people, in different neighbourhoods, doing entirely different things, and no such structure exists.
I still feel the pull of it. We go a few times a year, and every time there is an evening where the light drops and somebody says the obvious thing about how we could have lived here. That is not a decision we got wrong and quietly regret. It is that both answers were reasonable, and choosing one does not stop you seeing the appeal of the other.
What the city does better
Everything that has to do with the rest of your life continuing.
Schools was the biggest of it. There are genuinely good options in other parts of Mexico, but the range in the city is different in kind rather than degree, and the range mattered more to us than any individual school did. We were not choosing one school. We were choosing somewhere with enough options that a wrong first choice would not mean moving city.
Then flights. We go back to the UK a few times a year, and Mexico City flies there direct. Cancun does too, which is a genuine point in the Caribbean coast's favour and one people forget. But the Pacific coast does not, and that would have meant a domestic hop first and sometimes a second connection in Europe on top. On paper that is a couple of extra hours. With young children it is a different kind of day: another set of security queues, another boarding gate, another chance for a delay to take the whole thing apart.
Healthcare, which I did not weight heavily enough at the time and would weight much more heavily now.
Our daughter was born here. There was a complication, and she spent six weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. The doctors saved her life. She is happy and healthy today and you would never know.
That happened twenty minutes from our front door, in a hospital with the specialists already in it. I have thought about that a great deal since. If we had been somewhere with a good regional hospital and a flight to the nearest specialist unit, I do not know how that would have gone, and I am glad I do not have to know.
I used to think of healthcare as a box to tick when choosing a city. Quality, cost, whether they speak English. It is not a box. It is the thing you will one day need at no notice, and where you happen to live decides what is available to you that day.
And work. I run a company that operates across Mexico. Being in the place where the bureaucracy, the lawyers, the banks and the clients are is not a lifestyle preference, it is a working requirement.
The thing that decided it
There was no single moment.
What there was instead is a question we kept coming back to without ever writing it down. Everything we do, day to day, is for the children. Short-term or long-term, that is what the decisions are for.
So: are they happy, are they safe, do they have a support group and friends, and is the education doing something worthwhile to them.
Here, the answer to all four is yes. They are bilingual, which is not something we set out to give them and is probably the most valuable thing they will get from this. They are safe. They have a proper group of friends rather than acquaintances. And the school is not just teaching them subjects, it is teaching them how to treat people, which matters more to me than anything on a report.
Could we have got all of that on the coast? Some of it, certainly. Possibly most of it. But not with the same confidence, and confidence is what you are actually buying when you make a decision this size on behalf of people who do not get a vote. In London I know we could not have got all of it.
That is not a proof. It is a judgement, and I made it five years ago with much less information than I have now. It is the one I would make again.
What I would tell someone choosing now
Three things, and I would say them in this order.
Stop comparing places and start describing your week. The list of what your ordinary Tuesday has to contain will eliminate more options in an afternoon than months of reading.
Visit in the worst month, not the best. We saw the city in July, which is the peak of the rainy season and I am glad we did. Anywhere is pleasant in the good season. What you need to know is whether you can live with the bad one, whether that is the summer humidity on the coast or the rain here.
And do not decide before you arrive if you can possibly avoid it. Almost every family I know who is settled here chose somewhere other than the place they were certain about before they came.
The coast was not the wrong answer. It was the wrong answer for us, and the difference between those two things is most of what I have learned in five years.
