El DF que extrañamos is a series of texts originally published in dF con Historia ( 2010), from the collection Guías dF por Travesías, which is now Local.mx. In the series 11 writers from the capital - born here or adopted with affection and merit - answered the same question: What do you remember most fondly about Mexico City that no longer exists?

Eduardo Casar remembers all the colonias he walked and lived in.

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Iam asked to write something about my favorite place in Mexico City, where I have lived all my life. I reflect, I reflect, I reflect on the knees that have carried me, meshing and disengaging in different directions, and I realize that I do not have a favorite place, a little corner that I have left abandoned and to which I return to lick my wounds. Upon further reflection, I realize that the place I like the most is where I am living, not where I am living now -although that is also true-, but where I have lived every time I have lived. I spent my first four years in the heights of a house on Calzada de Tlalpan, exactly at the height of the Ermita subway, where today there is a Holiday Inn hotel that used to be called Cibeles. I remember myself leaning out on the balcony and playing with my siblings to guess how many cars my uncle's car would come, when he accompanied us on vacation to Acapulco. In other words, there were so few cars that four-year-olds could count them. I remember how carefully we used to cross the wide curb that divided the avenue so that we wouldn't get our feet stuck on the streetcar tracks to Xochimilco.

Then we moved to the Sinatel neighborhood, famous because the cab drivers did not know it; its name comes from Sindicato Nacional de Telefonistas. The street was Sur 73. I wanted the house to have stairs, my brothers wanted it to have a patio, and it had stairs and a patio. The buzzards would fly over the patio, and I would lie down to play dead, with a sword in my hand, waiting to kill the buzzard that would come down to eat my corpse. Many years later, when I became literary, and avid, and the object of a tremendous thirst, I went to live in the rooftop room, to which I returned at least twice. There my own library was slowly forming. Then I lived in the El Retoño neighborhood for a few months. And then in Escuadrón 201. I took advantage of the market on 200, which was close by. I got to know the stores, the cracks in the pavement, the oil store that was in front of my house. My daughter learned to walk on those sidewalks. Then I moved to the Unidad Modelo neighborhood, where I became - they made me - a plumber and carpenter under the guidance of a wise teacher. Then I went to Colinas del Sur, next to the ravine. I felt I had come a long way: the city was below and at the bottom of the ravine a stream ran through it. To this colony, to these hills, I returned on another occasion, without a car and without a telephone, but always very attentive. I took my life with me to many other places, but I am not going to recount them -although they were Torres de Mixcoac, Sonora Street and Pablo Ucello, near Plaza Mexico-, but to situate myself in the present.

I currently live in La Condesa. When people ask me why, I answer that it was too cold in La Marquesa. As in the other neighborhoods, the best thing about this one is to walk it. The best thing about books is reading them. To walk a city is to read it, to meet known and unknown characters. To see oneself in others, to be amazed by an aquarium that appears on a corner, by the turtles that are brought out to sunbathe in front of a beauty salon. To read is to read oneself. When I travel what surprises me most is that people live in remote places, that someone falls in love in Riga, Madurai or Villaflores, and lives there, wakes up and yawns and goes out for bread, and gets sick and falls asleep. And to return to my place, to see the street, the view, the desk, my pens or the shirt I love so much gives me such a sense of strength, beauty and coherence.

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More Df we miss:

The DF we miss: Pedro Friedeberg recalls a city of streetcars.

The Mexico City we miss: the Roma neighborhood according to Vicente Quirarte

The DF we miss: Elena Poniatowska remembers a small city

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