I´ve been living in Mexico for 5 years now, so this isn´t really a travel blog, but I have been, and will be travelling a lot while I´m here. Over the time I´ve spent here, there are a LOT of things that are really frustrating - having to pay a 10% tip for terrible waiter service, standing for 10 minutes in the supermarket waiting to pay becuase the cashier is on the phone, not being able to use my credit card to pay for my phone because the proof of address I brought "isn´t valid in DF". I could go on.....
Yesterdays fiasco came in the form of immigration. Because I´ve been living here for more than 4 years, I had to change my temporary residence visa to a permanent one. I applied in January, and was rejected, becuase I was misisng a form that they never asked for. I applied again. I was rejected becasue the form they asked for was not the correct one. I was rejected a further 2 times until last week I was given the golden news! I could go to immigration, between 4 -6 to give my fingerprints. Fantastic.
I turned up at 3 to make sure I was one of the first in line. There was already a small queue but I figured I´d be in and out in no time. They allowed us to enter at around 3.30 and made sure we all sat in seats according to the order we arrived in. They then took our forms, and numbered them. I was 24. This was going to be a breeze!!!!
But......it´s Mexico. Those lovely ordered, numbered forms, the people, waiting patiently in line.....complete waste of time. They literally took any old form and called the name in the quietest of voices. With over 100 people talking, children running around, and babies crying, I couldn´t hear myself, let alone the guy at the other end of the hall shouting my name in with the strangest pronunciation ever. So an hour passed. Then another. An another. By this point I was getting well annoyed. The people who had been sitting around me, slowly but surely were seen to, until there were a handful of us left. Finally, they called me. Well, they called a variation of my name. I was ready to be rude, to tell them that I was angry, to point out that I´d been waiting for 3 1/2 hours and what was the point of all the numbering etc..... but the security guard asked how to pronounce my name. Then took money from the immigration guy as they´d seeimingly had a bet on how to say it. Then they told me I looked like the ladies from Downton Abbey, and proceded to call me Lady Mary for the duration of my 5 minute interview. I walked away with a large smile on my face and suddenly the long wait wasn´t so bad. Even the taxi driver on the way home hitting the car in front didn´t bother me.
How on earth could such a small thing make me smile? In Mexico if anything to do with paperwork WORKS, it is truly a miracle. To have it work with a smiling officer is about at rare as a Galapagos Tortoise.
Whenever anything goes wrong in this country, my friends and I exlpain it in two simple words.
Because......Mexico.
