Bit nervous as my passport is in one of the bags I left at the hotel. But I am assuming it's safer there than in my hidden belt given all the stuff I read about muggings here. Normally I always have the thing in my hidden belt on me or in the hotel self but for some reason I have the idea the muggers here are more likely to search me for hidden valuables.
Flight is at 18:55, even for an internal flight I guess I want to try to be there by 16:55 so I am probably looking at collecting my bags and asking the hotel to call me a cab about 16:00. So I have a few hours just to wander but I am not going to try to do anything specifically 'touristy'.
I could go over to those net cafes near Insurgentes metro and see if I can get a DVD burned but I can't quite face it. We'll see. I have managed to repurpose a 1GB card from my phone to give me a bit of breathing space, though once that's full I am just about out of resources until I can get some burning done. So maybe I should wander over there and try. Sod it, we'll have to see how I feel once I've eaten.
13:40. What a fucking joke. Just went to net cafe under Saturday night's bar. The foppish young idiot at the desk put me on a machine and despite me asking twice to buy a blank DVD he just completely ignored me. So I surfed for a few minutes and paid up. Useless twat.
I left my photos on the Windows built in CD burning bit (on the offchance he would remember that I wanted to buy a disc when I paid, of course he didn't). Not a problem, there is nothing personal on there.
There even advertise that they sell blank discs FFS.
13:50. OK, down at some superficially more helpful place down the road. I think I can test the disc so I have asked for two copies just to get the thing resolved.
Oh, if I haven't already waffled, the plug on the USB key I wear round my neck is enormously corroded. I would have assumed it was made of something like aluminium which couldn't, but there you go. The guy here looked a bit dubiously at it and scratched it with his finger before using it.
FUCK. He just showe me and it contains no files now. Well, a couple. I dragged from the USB drive exporer window to the Windows DVD recorder window. I wonder if the fucking thing decided to *move* the files instead of copying them.
This is not actually a case of data loss (unless my luggage gets stolen etc) as of course I don't delete off the cards until I have the DVDs burned. But FFS, I had a chance to get the job done and now I no longer have my data.
I normally CTRL-C files when using Windows Explorer because I never trust myself to know if it will move or copy but this time I dragged. I could swear I didn't expect it to move them. Maybe they are still on the pen drive but you could see one or two other files on there so it's not like the guy at this net cafe was being an idiot.
Oh well. I haven't lost anything except time. But man, I am so sick to fucking death of this DVD burning shit.
I could maybe go back to the other place and see if I could get the files I left on that PC, but I can't be arsed to deal with fop boy any more and I wouldn't trust the files to be intact anyway. Last thing I want is to burn a disc and then it turns out the files are corrupt once it's too late and I've deleted the originals from the memory cards.
14:00. Man, I am more hacked off about that than I can believe. So close to getting it resolved and then bang.
I have nothing else to do now. I have come to some small coffee shop in Genova, I will pass a bit of time with a coffee.
My phone fell out of my pocket on the way down the stairs from Fop@Net. Battery cover fell off and the damn thing took a couple of reboots before I would accept the battery had any charge. Let me just cross check the time with my camera as I don't trust it not to lose or gain time over a reboot.
Yep, it's really 14:40. How the fuck phone can lose 30-40 minutes when the battery is removed for 10 seconds, yet not completely lose the time, I don't know.
15:30. Finished the coffee and come to Konditori for a beer.
17:05. At the airport having cleared security. I felt vulnerable as hell goin through security. People keep saying two word phrases to me which make no sense. My hand luggage is probably too big and too heavy but no one has said anything yet so unless I am grabbed as I get on the plane I've got away with it. At the very least, I would hope a last minute conversion of my hand luggage to checked baggage won't incur a charge. I actually got the suitcase down to 21 point something kg if my surreptitious glance at the electronic readout was correct.
The departure boards seem to show flights as far as ten or twenty minutes into the future, so I have no idea what gate I need to go to, but I have an hour until we even hit the nominal boarding time.
I really do hate all this baggage hassle even though there is a vague satisfaction in engaging in mild subterfuge. (Not that I have definitely got away with it this time, but I do hope to at least get away without paying extra.) I am definitely going to try to go a bit more minimal on any future trips, be they for a weekend or six months. But I am also including a portable DVD writer unless I am going super-minimal.
This may be my last flight until I fly back to the UK, but Mexico seems big enough that I may find myself tempted to take further flights.
Oh, the rack rate for the hotel is MXN1462, I assume per night. Although I didn't do anything particularly clever, I got five nights for AUD345.70. At least, I think that's cheapish, but since I don't know the AUD exchange rate with GBP or MXN I can't be sure.
Just bought a copy of The Economist from an adjacent stall (not just because of this! - I tried Sanborn's earlier but they still had last week's, which I'd already bought from them) and I calculated there are AUD1.67 to the GBP or AUD0.090 to the MXN. So the rack rate would be AUD132 a night. I paid AUD69.5 a night, a saving of 47%.
I cannot believe I am sitting here working this out, especially when I have a fresh copy of The Economist I could read.
18:40. Just got on plane. I get the middle seat, joy, fortunately it's only 2 hours. Some officious stewardess near the back of the plane (I am in the last row) had to ask me my seat number, forcing me to grovel mentally for the Spanish for '28E'. Oh well.
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