A day in the life of me

Normally when we host people from other countries, we take them to Tijuana where no Visa's are required. The Russia group was going to Monterrey and that requires a Visa for them. To make everyone's life easy, we decided to drop off the passports and paperwork ourselves. This day started off bad as we got to their hotel at 9:00 am and the paperwork wasn't ready and someone was late. We were supposed to be at the consultate by 10 but so much for that. We left the hotel at 9:45 and had to drop one of the Russians off at work and do a quick orientation there. Because we had skipped breakfast thinking we'd have plenty of time to eat, we were starving. Arrival at the consulate is like arriving anyplace in Mexico. Street vendors were selling the exact same crap that you'll see as you return across the border in San Diego. The only thing missing was music and that was probably because the consulate workers didn't want to have to listen to it all day.
Arrival inside after a purse and body pat-down shows several sections where you can go. The Visa section was up the stairwell. At the other end of the stairwell was an x-ray machine where the purse went through again. Once in line for the Visas, the lady looks at us and tells us that the cut-off was 10:00 am. I think it's 11ish at this point. Then she tells us that we need invitation letters from the Mexico business on letterhead plus invitation letters from the US company on letterhead and we had until 1:00 pm to get them to her. If we did this, she would process the Visas. We made a couple of calls and headed off to the nearest Kinkos to use the computers to retrieve and print the letters.
Damn! We were lucky enough to get parking but in a twist of irony, all the coins in my purse were pesos! I leave for Mexico on Monday and had changed out US coins for pesos. I had one nickel and we used that to buy us 5 minutes.
There was subway next to the car so we went in and decided to eat really fast and get change. I went back to the car, bought us the hour and we scarfed down our food and walked over to Kinkos, only to be told that it was a shipping only Kinkos and they had no computers or printers at all.
So it's off to the next Kinko's where we're able to retrieve and print documents and somehow, we're still okay on time.

Documents in hand we return to the consulate. Now we're late again and our person is at lunch. We wait. We wait some more. Other people wait. When our person returns from lunch we're not first in the priority so we wait and wait. Eventually we are called and everything is reviewed and we're told to return the next day with the Russians to pick up their passports and Visas.
Below is the view from the parking lot as we collapse in the car. From here we had to go to a meeting in another part of LA and due to traffic the 30 minute drive was 60. Late again. After the meeting which ended at 4:00, we had to go pick up one of the Russians at work and return her to her hotel in Santa Monica. Because our hotel was LAX and we were taking them to dinner in Santa Monica, we had to wait around another hour for everyone to change and be ready for dinner at Houston's. At Houstons, the Russians wanted to try something California to drink. I ordered them Cosmo's which they liked so I drank with them. I don't drink martini's often and I was soon to remember the reason why.

One of our guests. Dinner ended somewhere around 10:30 pm, early for us!

Driving from Santa Monica to LAX at 11:00 pm is a quick trip. But not quick enough when you suddenly realize that you are about to be sick because you have zero tolerance for cosmopolitans! I'm actually carsick and cosmo sick at this point. I can't even believe that I though of blogging the moment but I did! Sign language told the driver to pull over quick and I think everyone in the car was surprised but when you're gonna hurl, you don't want to do it in the car. I can't even believe that there was a deserted alley around and I ran around the corner so no one could watch. Yes, I did. It was quite projectile and disgusting. I remember thinking that the people who had to open their business in the morning were going to be pissed off. Then I looked around and considered how amazing it was that there were no bums going through the dumpster to witness this. Then I looked at my shoes and was bummed. So to the poor people in the car who had to deal with my mess for the drive back, I really am sorry. If I could have ditched the shoes and gone barefoot that probably would have been the best for everyone considering that I discarded those the next day.

Back at the hotel I passed out at 11:30 pm and was up at 5:30 am for a series of conference calls which I led and amazingly enough, did well. So there you go - 9:00 am to 11:30 pm. It's all in a days work in the life of me!