your mexican tax dollars at work
At the beginning of August I'm headed to the traffic capital of Mexico, Mexico City, for a week of the kind of fun and relaxation that can only come with covering the largest HIV/AIDS conference on the planet. I will be one of tens of thousands of researchers, activists, HIV-positive people and journalists who converge on MC at the height of the summer, and LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I CAN'T WAIT.
I can't wait a whole lot.
This morning, I went to the Mexican Consulate in NYC to get my visa. (Although casual American tourists, I think, can more or less come and go in Mexico as they please, journalists need special permission.) We weren't sure whether I needed to make an appointment or if I could just show up; when you call the consulate, there's an automated menu system, and when you get to the part of the menu where it tells you to press a number to talk with someone, and you press it, the system tells you you've pressed an incorrect key and hangs up on you.
The consulate itself is a five-story building just east of 5th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It's easy to spot, partly because of the largely ornamental four-foot black steel fence in front of the entrance, partly because of the dozens of Mexicans who are randomly standing/sitting around that entrance. At a gate in the fence, there was a congenial security guard, who I told I was here to get a media visa. He gave me a little raffle ticket and told me to go inside, head towards the back and go up to the tenth floor. I walk inside, and am immediately hit with chilling flashbacks of my first ever trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles 15 years ago (when I got the driver's permit that I never did anything with). People waiting everywhere. Standing, sitting, leaning. Waiting. Some in line. Some potentially in line. Everyone chattering. Babies laughing, crying. I start to peel my way through the crowd, looking for an elevator or a staircase I can begin to take up to the tenth floor. Suddenly I see, wading his way towards me, one of the journalists who works for a rival publication (but we're on good terms). He looks extremely harried. He brushes past me quickly and says something like, "Good luck." He departs. I realize I should have asked him where I'm supposed to go.
I worm my way to the back of the building and find a staircase. No elevator. I make my way up, shimmying around people as I go. Second floor, third floor. People everywhere. Waiting. I see at least four different lines, some of which seem to converge with each other, and I wonder if these people are all waiting for the same thing, if they're waiting for what I'm waiting for, if they even know what they're waiting for.
I find an elevator on the third floor. I go in. The buttons only go up to 5, so I push 5, thinking maybe this is like the Macy's in Herald Square where you can only get to certain floors if you're in the right part of the building.
But no. I was being a foolish idealist. There was no tenth floor. There was nothing close to a tenth floor. There was, however, a nice lady on the *fifth* floor who saw me wandering around like I'd lost my puppy, informed me that the visa office was somewhere on either the second or third floor, and then escorted me back to the elevator and waited with me until it came, which at first I thought was extremely kind of her, but now I wonder if maybe there's some Terrible Secret on the fifth floor and she didn't want me snooping around lest I find it.
I returned to the second floor. I got out. I milled about, trying to figure out where lines began and ended, tripping over people, apologizing (in English, though I heard no English spoken), and struggling to find a single other person who was white, since that would probably indicate I was in the right place, since why would someone from Mexico need a visa to get back to their home country? I spent 15 minutes standing on a random line snaking up the staircase between the first and second floor, not moving an inch, while a girl who couldn't have been more than four years old twisted apart mini Oreos on the step above me and then deposited the broken corpses on the step, where her mother spotted them and swept them to the side, chastising the little girl for being so careless. (Well, I assume that's what she was doing; I don't know nearly enough Spanish to know for sure. She may have been telling her to try a little harder next time to make the gringo slip and fall down the stairs.) Eventually I gave up and decided to explore some more. I waded my way back up to the third floor and finally spotted, on a printout posted on a door, an arrow pointing me to the visa office. We're now half an hour into my consular visit.
I stand in the room dumbly. There are desks and cubicles arranged in an oval around the center, which has several rows of plastic chairs, all full. It looks like people are being interviewed. There are a lot of Hispanic families with babies. I go up to the first white folks I see, and they explain that the raffle ticket I had been given at the gate, by the man who thought it'd be a hoot to send me to a floor that didn't exist, had a number written on the back in blue ink, which turned out to be my order in the visa line. It was 22. They were now on 8. All those desks, with people working at computers or interviewing people, and it turns out that for the visa, there was just one office off on the side, staffed by a single woman. Last Thursday, I found out, the woman was out. No visas. On Friday, the computer was down. No visas. Today there was a backlog.
Two and a half hours of sitting, standing, chatting, Web browsing and e-mail writing (thank you, smartphone, for keeping me sane) later, it was my turn. The convo lasted all of 10 minutes. I had to present a whole mess of information, including proof that I worked for my company, proof that my company was sending me to a conference in Mexico, proof that the conference in Mexico had invited me to come, *and* proof that I had actually registered for the conference. And my passport. And a copy of my passport. And extra passport photos. And a promise that I would one day return to give them my first-born child. OK, not so much the last one. But they demanded a lot of stuff, in addition to the form I had to fill out.
Tomorrow I go back to pick up my visa -- and my passport, which I either accidentally left there or which the visa lady kept so she could fill out paperwork and application stuff. Not sure which. I will assume it's the latter b/c otherwise I'll feel like more of a complete moron than usual.
I should note, btw, that I actually consider myself pretty lucky. Three hours of waiting, in total? The people in line to get passports or citizenship were waiting a lot longer; I bet that staircase is completely filled with twisted-apart mini Oreos by now. And it can't be a hoot to work there, outnumbered 200-1 by applicants, with few people in a good mood.
Of course, I do have to go back tomorrow, so maybe I shouldn't count my pollos just yet.
I can't wait a whole lot.
This morning, I went to the Mexican Consulate in NYC to get my visa. (Although casual American tourists, I think, can more or less come and go in Mexico as they please, journalists need special permission.) We weren't sure whether I needed to make an appointment or if I could just show up; when you call the consulate, there's an automated menu system, and when you get to the part of the menu where it tells you to press a number to talk with someone, and you press it, the system tells you you've pressed an incorrect key and hangs up on you.
The consulate itself is a five-story building just east of 5th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It's easy to spot, partly because of the largely ornamental four-foot black steel fence in front of the entrance, partly because of the dozens of Mexicans who are randomly standing/sitting around that entrance. At a gate in the fence, there was a congenial security guard, who I told I was here to get a media visa. He gave me a little raffle ticket and told me to go inside, head towards the back and go up to the tenth floor. I walk inside, and am immediately hit with chilling flashbacks of my first ever trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles 15 years ago (when I got the driver's permit that I never did anything with). People waiting everywhere. Standing, sitting, leaning. Waiting. Some in line. Some potentially in line. Everyone chattering. Babies laughing, crying. I start to peel my way through the crowd, looking for an elevator or a staircase I can begin to take up to the tenth floor. Suddenly I see, wading his way towards me, one of the journalists who works for a rival publication (but we're on good terms). He looks extremely harried. He brushes past me quickly and says something like, "Good luck." He departs. I realize I should have asked him where I'm supposed to go.
I worm my way to the back of the building and find a staircase. No elevator. I make my way up, shimmying around people as I go. Second floor, third floor. People everywhere. Waiting. I see at least four different lines, some of which seem to converge with each other, and I wonder if these people are all waiting for the same thing, if they're waiting for what I'm waiting for, if they even know what they're waiting for.
I find an elevator on the third floor. I go in. The buttons only go up to 5, so I push 5, thinking maybe this is like the Macy's in Herald Square where you can only get to certain floors if you're in the right part of the building.
But no. I was being a foolish idealist. There was no tenth floor. There was nothing close to a tenth floor. There was, however, a nice lady on the *fifth* floor who saw me wandering around like I'd lost my puppy, informed me that the visa office was somewhere on either the second or third floor, and then escorted me back to the elevator and waited with me until it came, which at first I thought was extremely kind of her, but now I wonder if maybe there's some Terrible Secret on the fifth floor and she didn't want me snooping around lest I find it.
I returned to the second floor. I got out. I milled about, trying to figure out where lines began and ended, tripping over people, apologizing (in English, though I heard no English spoken), and struggling to find a single other person who was white, since that would probably indicate I was in the right place, since why would someone from Mexico need a visa to get back to their home country? I spent 15 minutes standing on a random line snaking up the staircase between the first and second floor, not moving an inch, while a girl who couldn't have been more than four years old twisted apart mini Oreos on the step above me and then deposited the broken corpses on the step, where her mother spotted them and swept them to the side, chastising the little girl for being so careless. (Well, I assume that's what she was doing; I don't know nearly enough Spanish to know for sure. She may have been telling her to try a little harder next time to make the gringo slip and fall down the stairs.) Eventually I gave up and decided to explore some more. I waded my way back up to the third floor and finally spotted, on a printout posted on a door, an arrow pointing me to the visa office. We're now half an hour into my consular visit.
I stand in the room dumbly. There are desks and cubicles arranged in an oval around the center, which has several rows of plastic chairs, all full. It looks like people are being interviewed. There are a lot of Hispanic families with babies. I go up to the first white folks I see, and they explain that the raffle ticket I had been given at the gate, by the man who thought it'd be a hoot to send me to a floor that didn't exist, had a number written on the back in blue ink, which turned out to be my order in the visa line. It was 22. They were now on 8. All those desks, with people working at computers or interviewing people, and it turns out that for the visa, there was just one office off on the side, staffed by a single woman. Last Thursday, I found out, the woman was out. No visas. On Friday, the computer was down. No visas. Today there was a backlog.
Two and a half hours of sitting, standing, chatting, Web browsing and e-mail writing (thank you, smartphone, for keeping me sane) later, it was my turn. The convo lasted all of 10 minutes. I had to present a whole mess of information, including proof that I worked for my company, proof that my company was sending me to a conference in Mexico, proof that the conference in Mexico had invited me to come, *and* proof that I had actually registered for the conference. And my passport. And a copy of my passport. And extra passport photos. And a promise that I would one day return to give them my first-born child. OK, not so much the last one. But they demanded a lot of stuff, in addition to the form I had to fill out.
Tomorrow I go back to pick up my visa -- and my passport, which I either accidentally left there or which the visa lady kept so she could fill out paperwork and application stuff. Not sure which. I will assume it's the latter b/c otherwise I'll feel like more of a complete moron than usual.
I should note, btw, that I actually consider myself pretty lucky. Three hours of waiting, in total? The people in line to get passports or citizenship were waiting a lot longer; I bet that staircase is completely filled with twisted-apart mini Oreos by now. And it can't be a hoot to work there, outnumbered 200-1 by applicants, with few people in a good mood.
Of course, I do have to go back tomorrow, so maybe I shouldn't count my pollos just yet.