This is our 4th meeting with them. All we are trying to do is improve their website by getting them a wordpress site and including the pictures and wording that they are going to send us. Easy. Or so we thought...
It takes us 30 minutes to walk to the hotel from our apartment and 10 more minutes to stop sweating once we get there. The earliest anyone else has shown up to the meetings is 20 minutes late. The longest they will sit in a chair talking to us during the meeting without getting up and doing something else is about 5-10 minutes. Have they agreed at every meeting to get pictures taken and emailed to us before the next meeting? Yes. Has a single picture been taken yet? No.
After this last meeting where we were hoping to have the pictures uploaded and be able to go over some of the wording, the only thing we accomplished was to establish a username and password for their site. When the payment page popped up, the manager said he didn't have the credit card on him - it was at home. He asked if we could come back the next morning to take care of the payment for the site. Joe explained that it took up a lot of our time coming back and forth for such little things, so Juan asked if we could wait 30 minutes. We said yes and assumed it was going to take him 30 minutes to drive home, get the card and be back, but we saw instead that he had another meeting to go to. So we sat and waited for it to finish. After 30 or 40 minutes Juan came back, said we could go get the card, and then walked us 30 feet away to his front door, opened the door, got the card, and gave it to us. 2 minutes max. No way. We waited 40 minutes for that 2 minutes. Haha, awesome.
But - we got to see his house. And it was gorgeous! I've heard Granada referred to as the city of doors, because that's all you see from the street. And most of the doors look the same - but you never know if behind that door is a dirt-floor shack quartered off for multiple families, or a beautiful courtyard with tropical plants, pool, and hammocks.
This blue door was his door, so we weren't expecting much...
...But we walked into this beautiful sitting room!
With sitting areas lining their garden courtyard. In the back room on the left I could see 3 maids in their starched white dresses going about their work, but didn't manage to get a picture of them.
There were probably 7 or 8 different sitting rooms off the main garden area.
They let us walk through to their other garden area as well in the back where all of the bedrooms are located. Amazing. This is a picture of Gabriel and Joe. Gabriel is the president of the hotel. This house was his parents' house and he was born here, but now his brother Juan (hotel manager) lives here with his family.
I probably won't get over how incredibly beautiful some of these old colonial Granada houses are. Joe and I have already decided that someday we're going to own a house with an indoor courtyard in it. Must include tropical plants and pool :)
Always when Joe and I walk back from these extremely unproductive meetings we verbally write up a case that would be read in business school. We've decided that any team's conclusion would have long ago been to drop the client - but it's providing way too much entertainment for us to do that :)
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