A rat scurries into frame. You don’t see it so much as you lose all your attention to the eruption of noise. As abruptly as changing tracks on Spotify, the background din of shoppers negotiating with traders is replaced by screaming howls. Shopkeepers abandon their stalls. Everybody darts across the frame. Somebody chuckles. The cameraman, unseen and silent, holds his nerve and keeps moving.

One man grabs a plastic milk crate and tries to smash the rat, but we, the viewer, must be rooting for it hard enough that it escapes its death sentence and flees to safety. Pausing neither for the outbreak of chaos nor the peoples’ fading, nervous laughter as the episode ends as briskly as it began, the camera floats onward through the market and out onto the sidewalk. If your Spanish is good enough, you can pick up bits of background conversations. Two people walk past. The camera doesn’t wait for them, but you hear just enough to know they’re talking about a piece of software at work. Like the rat, it’s an endearing moment that couldn’t be scripted.

This video of Mexico City comes thanks to a relatively new group of YouTubers helping folks around the world experience many of our most astonishing cities as though they were casually walking through them. From helping those with disabilities explore to aiding folks like me in planning my travels, channels like these aren’t just for those who need a temporary break from their boring local scenery: They’re a great way to investigate the real world on the cheap.

Back in 2018, when I was considering some major moves in my life but bereft of any real direction they should take, I somehow landed on Mexico City. Like a lot of Americans, I knew Mexico as a place of dusty deserts and tropical tourist traps, but very little about its capital city. As I dug in I got excited. It’s cold there in the winter? It’s got more people than New York City? Whoa, their art and culture and gastronomy game is on par with any world city! What I read was awfully intriguing, but bare words could only tickle my imagination.

Moving somewhere I’d never been sounded like fun, yet I still wanted some grasp of the city before I made the commitment. What’d it look like, street-level? Do people stay out absurdly late into the weeknight, like in Cairo and Istanbul? Do they seem to live every leisure moment outside at parks and sidewalk cafés, like in Prague and Old San Juan? Are the streets as musical as Tbilisi’s, the bars as cozy as Berlin’s, the traffic as chaotic as Hanoi’s?

I could find tons of forum posts, blog stories, and vlogs with annoyingly blabber-mouthed hosts, but those were always presented through somebody else’s filter. I wanted them out of the way. I wanted to be there without physically going there. Money was precious. YouTube was free.

I stumbled onto Wanna Walk, a YouTube series relatively new at the time. There were a few videos, long takes of nothing but walking through the city in one big cut. Some videos lasted 30 to 45 minutes. There was no narration, no plot. It was exactly what I was looking for.