Gabriel was a wonderfully helpful host, as was his sister, but the apartment is in a housing project with 88 almost identical buildings, each housing about a thousand people. I despaired of ever finding my way through to the apartment unaided. Granted, I arrived at night and had a hard time finding my host’s sister. But my overall discomfort with the situation led me to find another place, closer to the Centro Historico— a building with a number on an easily identifiable street.
Gabriel could not have been nicer, helping me get an Uber the next day to my new digs (I hadn’t gotten a Mexican SIM card yet). So the combination of geography, my iffy sense of direction and the somewhat sketchy neighborhood at night prompted my move.