The whirlwind continues

I arrived back in Paris a Tuesday night from Mexico and Wednesday morning my dad arrived for his Euro Cup adventure. We were heading out on the Friday for our first game and city. We were on the go for 10 days straight!

But before we did this, I headed to the office for a couple of days. Not much happening there for me but there was a big event - the "ALORA Cup". So while most of Europe was enthralled by the Euro Cup my organisation was all about the "ALORA Cup". This is a tournament that is hosted every year where Directorates battle each other in football matches to win the coveted men and women's trophies. I managed to squeeze in 2 games before I left (they are only 25mins!) and my team continued the winning streak so I arrived just in time for the final.

We were undefeated, no goals scored against and we managed to keep it that way!!!

I even managed to win the top scorer trophy, oh if my coaches could see me now!

My dad even came out to cheer! I think he realized his time investment over those years was well worth it given the results ;)

The rest of my time in Mexico

While there were some laughable moments (ok, most of the moments were laughable due to their complete absurdity) over the week, this will not go down as one of my better experiences. Though I will say that I was touched by all the kind words people said about me at the Committee meeting on the Friday. It was nice to know they saw the effort but also the challenges faced.

As a result of the week, I was suffering a little post-traumatic stress for the first couple of days - I woke up from nightmares where I had lost the Malaysian Minister. I never even met the Malaysian Minister and we definitely did not lose him, or did we . . .?

Anyways, the rest of my time in Mexico was very chill, pretty much spent doing this:

The horrible Moon Palace but at least I wasn't working!

Finally - freedom! And a real hotel!!!!

I think you are starting to see the theme :)

A quiet day on the beach

That's all folks!

The big day and beyond

Given the night I had, I was really in no shape to handle anything that morning. Thankfully I had some good peeps looking out for me! 

In a shocking development we started over an hour late - apparently people were confused and didn't know what was going on - weird. I got a lovely phone call from the main hall saying the MC wanted to quit because he wasn't a "tech" person and didn't want to include our social media elements - it's a digital event people! Somehow my "team" convinced him to stay but he forgot his glasses so she had to help him read the screen (smacks forehead). It was just good times all around!

Once the show began though, people were happy and the crazy continued but at a lower rate than it had been.

I have to admit the screen did look pretty epic

The day ended with a dinner where the grand prize winners from the hackathon received their awards. I thought I had pictures of the dinner but apparently not! Though, I do have a pic with Dr. Chung's wife - she was a legend at the event!

The second day of the Ministerial was more of the same with a notable exception - it included a closed session for Ministers. This is the reason we have these things. 

Of course nothing was set up right, I had to negotiate with people where they were sitting as result yadda yadda yadda but the icing on the cake was when the SG asked if everyone had a particular document and, of course, they did not so this resulted in me sprinting to the office. Note this is the ONLY event that did not take place inside the conference centre which wouldn't have mattered until I had to return. . .it had started monsooning outside. Biblical proportions of rain were falling, people were taking shelter and this idiot (finger points to me) goes bolting out the door and gets completely soaked in the process - ah the memories!

And so the event ended - we took the stage, took a photo and celebrated!

 - no, wait there was one more thing. . .

The Friday was our regular Committee meeting which would take place in the same room as the Ministers' closed session (see above). My colleague decided to do some decorating with the gems in the photo.

I offered to go with him to drop off the giant Ms just to make sure everything was ready for the next day. . .

I lost it laughing. I was laughing so hard I was in tears because this pretty much summed it all up! In good news we found Latvia and Mexico - so two less things to print!

And Josie is back to work while everyone else is enjoying drinks in the lobby bar (aside from a few who got suckered into going to another event). Finally, I make it to drinks and the rest of the night was, as they say, n'importe quoi!

I provide only one photo of the night . . .

Tuesday - the night before the big event

Tuesday was actually stakeholder day. We had 4 parallel events running but they were organized by others so our involvement was less. We were spending the day working on all the outstanding issues tent cards that consistently had mis-spelled names, seating plans which in the end were thrown out because - well - Mexico and the million other issues that arose.

This should read CSISAC - not CISSAC

This was also by far the lowest part of my week. I had spent hours working with the my colleague and his besties , the tech guys, making sure every minute was scheduled for the opening ceremony. Sound, lights, transitions of chairs and people on and off stage, MC notes - all of it was planned to the minute. We were ready.

We took a few minutes to even celebrate a bit . . .

But then, all hell broke loose. . . 

We are about to wrap up around 1am and our dear hosts arrive in the office indicating they wanted to change the opening. My response "you mean the opening that is happening in a few hours? That opening?". I will spare you the details but this was the point I cracked. Calls were made to Paris, people were woken up at 2am and we finally walked out of there at 4am. I was awake for 23hrs that day, left, slept one hour and was back at work.

Thankfully there are no photos of this!

Monday - so it begins!

Monday was the first day we had other people than ourselves and organizers on site. This meant registration was open.

Team Sarah was on the case:

Team Maria countered:

But I think it was a clear win!!

To me Monday was the best day. It was the Hackathon. This event was organized mostly by our business stakeholders but I thought it was by far the best part of the week. It was awesome to walk into that room and see all these young people so engaged in what they were doing, having a great time and loving the attention they were getting.

This is also the first day the big guy arrived. I, with no voice, took the Secretary General on a tour of the venue. I had also done one the day before for colleagues which you can bore yourself with here.

I think for the first time since this Ministerial was decided on, the SG finally realized how much work was involved. It was nice to have it realized! We were even able to get him additional security which is a whole other tale I won't go into the details, but the person they sent is worth sharing:

 I think I could beat this guy up!

Getting ready for the "Big Show"

The weekend was spent running around crisis managing erm, I mean "getting ready" for the big event. I could write pages and pages of what happened over the course of 2 days but for everyone's sanity I will stick to the highlights.

Set up

When we arrived at the venue there were people everywhere busily setting up stages, booths, registration etc. Things looked like they were well in hand until you got a little closer. 

Note the two dudes working on this sign: 

They are doing this because the sign which was supposed to look like this:

It literally had smoke coming out of it!! Me, trying to keep it together, asked politely if it was supposed to be doing that - I don't know, maybe it was a special effect? Dude responds, no but continues to stand there. I then respond "well, maybe we should turn it off because it might be on fire!". My lovely colleague who spent her days hanging out at the registration desk kept me posted on its status - mostly, not on fire.

Because now all the service providers were on site Mexico had lots of folks for me to "talk to". All these super keen folks would show up at the office wanting to know this and that - I would start responding and then *blank stare*. I would pause, and ask "habla Inglés" to which the response was inevitably - no. Great!

In good news, half of "the team" spoke Spanish but she couldn't be everywhere all the time so I was constantly borrowing other colleagues. Case in point, my one colleague (who later would be known as the knight in shining armour) ended up being the tech go to guy. He became besties with all the sounds guys and was awesomely cheered on during his panel.

In all his glory:

Documentation

At any event, even digital ones, there are always documents to be printed e.g. agendas, backgrounders etc. This had been an ongoing debate/issue for me but in the end Mexico agreed to print the docs. As we are touring around I see that they have arrived - perfect. I go over, open the box and a dark cloud emerges. They looked like garbage, logos were wrong "The Internet Openess" anyone? Well, thankfully this problem was solved quite quickly! Apparently the dark cloud had rained on them so they were also wet and destroyed so ended up in the garbage. 

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Of course this caused a whole other issue - what do we do now?!?!? In 48hrs we had new documents produced and printed thanks to an awesome colleague in Paris! But alas, Mexico did not want us to benefit too much from these new versions. On the last day when we were looking for the extra copies, I was informed they had been thrown out. My superstar "team" member was once again on the case - she had her new hotel besties going through the garbage to find them. A few were recovered but the rest sadly, made up more of the tree carnage we had caused earlier that week.

This gives you a flavour of what our week shaped up to be. . .up at 5am and out of the conference at around midnight or so. . .and problems, problems and more problems!

Next up . . .Monday!

And then there was Mexico . . .

Many of you have already heard about my time in Mexico nauseam, so deal with it, you get to re-live it with me again :)

Starting at the beginning. . . in super fun news I woke up the day before I left sick with a fever so I already knew I was going to have a great week. The fever broke before I had to get on a 12hr flight to Mexico City but because of the schedule I was keeping, I never got better and was sick all week. I had no voice for the first few days which made the adventure even more fun!

My colleague (and onsite lifesaver!) and I (aka "the team") were the first to depart on Friday, 17 June. We arrived with of course no one to pick us up at the airport but at least with our luggage and box!

This is what others arrived to, well the lucky ones, because transport was hit and miss all week:

Oh and this is the "the team":

The hotel was the nightmare I remembered it to be and our rooms were on the other side of the earth. Task number one, get the rooms moved closer to the venue. Little did we know that task number one would become one of the ongoing tasks of the week - getting hotel rooms changed #nightmare.

Saturday morning, thanks to jetlag, we were up early and ready to take on the world. With breakfast done we went to tackle dinner reservations - start off easy we thought. This is far more detail than you want I am sure but this illustrates what we dealt with for the whole week.

Guest Services: How can I help you?

Us: We would like to book 2 sets of dinner reservations for X date and X people

Guest Services: You can't make dinner reservations, it's all inclusive.

Us: We are here with the Ministerial (points to totem beside person with event logo) so could there be an exception?

Guest Services: *blank stare*

Us: Ok, then how do we book the private rooms in the restaurants?

Guest Services: There are no private rooms.

Us: What about the one in the restaurant to the left that has glass walls and surrounded by wine bottles?

Guest Services: Oh, that is for Ambassador Club Members.

Us: Ok, what about the one in the restaurant behind you - the room at the back behind the buffet, with the curtain, seats about 12?

Guest Services: There is no private room in that restaurant, I have never seen it.

Us: *speechless.*

We then get referred to Public Relations which results in a similar conversation and then move on to the events manager who I had met in February - problem gets solved.

Next up the rooms, yep - no problem - shows us where our new rooms will be and that we come back around 5pm to get them. 

Fast forward to 8pm - they don't have any record of this request but manage to find us rooms that are only mildly closer. We give up, take new rooms. They can't find luggage - including the box!!! Phew, they finally locate said luggage. 

In even worse news - they have moved the Secretary General's room. This launches a 2 (or was it 3) hour long effort to get it changed back before he and his security arrive the next day. Following the SG room switch and locating our new rooms, we headed off the conference centre - the place where we would spend the next week of our lives. . .