There’s no better way to relax than to hop on a plane and veg out for a few days. Last night, I got back from Mexico, where I’d spent the holiday weekend hanging out in Acapulco with my GF. This was going to be my only major trip for the summer, so I wanted to make sure that it was somewhere cool. Many of my classmates are taking huge 4-8 week long vacations to places like Europe, Africa, and India that cost as much as $10,000, but there was no way i was going out like that. After having gone to Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil, and Morocco since September, I’ve already had some great vacations and, quite frankly, I couldn’t justify having another budget-buster of a trip when i still have a cross country move to ATL to take care of.
Acapulco seemed like a good option because neither my GF or I had been there before and one of my roomies had told me that it was a good place to kick it for a few days. From the time we touched down in Mexico, I was all about chillin’ as much as I could. I was able to get a deal on a nice package through Orbitz that had us set up at a hotel called Las Brisas Acapulco that was one of the nicest places I’ve stayed in in a while. The rooms were fantastic and even included our own private swimming pool with a great view of the mountains and some of the beaches. In addition to the nice rooms, the hotel had a full beach club with two saltwater pools and a swim-up bar, but y’all know I didn’t get down in either because I don’t really mess around with water like that…The beach club was a nice place to kick back though. The hotel grounds also had a restaurant called Bellavista, which is supposed to be one of the best in the whole city, that had a GORGEOUS view of everything that there was to see in Acapulco. The coolest part of Las Brisas was the excellent service. because the hotel suites are spread out over a wide area, they had a flock of Jeeps that would drive guests to and from their rooms to anywhere on the grounds. They had lightning fast service on everything that one could need 24 hours a day and they even delivered complimentary continental breakfasts to each room every morning. I couldn’t have picked a better place to stay for the weekend.
I’d heard that Acapulco was a major party city, but we were able to have a relatively low-key vacation without any of the craziness that one would see in other Mexican tourist cities like Cabo and Cancun. We mainly hung out by the pool or at the beach club and went out to a couple of nice dinners. We did make a trip to the main shopping district on Monday trying to get some souvenirs, but it was about 100 degrees out there and we spent more time sweating than buying stuff. On the last night, we had dinner at a restaurant called “Su Casa” that was the highlight of the entire trip for me. The food was great and the service was even better. If any of you ever go to Acapulco, ask your hotel concierge about it because it’s worth checking out. Leaving yesterday was tough because I could have stayed for another week or two and been happy, but waking up to a thunderstorm to end all storms made me feel a little better about taking off. We made it out of Acapulco fine, but the trip came to a grinding halt in Houston, where we had to connect to our SFO flight. We were supposed to have about 90 minutes to get through customs and then make our connection, but our flight from Mexico pulled up to the gate late and we had to rush our way through customs and literally ran to get to our connecting flight’s departure gate. When we got to that gate, we were surprised to see that our flight had been delayed by 30 minutes because Houston’s airport had been shut down earlier due to inclement weather. Continental was waiting for a crew to service our flight and that gave us some much welcome time to catch our breathe. Unfortunately, that 30 minute delay grew longer and longer and we ended up having a 3.5 hour delay when it was all said and done. We didn’t get into SFO until 1:30am this morning, but the delay wasn’t enough to lower my spirits too much. It’s always nice to go off somewhere away from the everyday hustle and just chill for a while 🙂
By the way, over the weekend, I had a chance to finish up a couple of books that I would highly recommend. Both of them were given to me as gifts way back when I was starting at Stanford, but I just now am getting time to read them and I really should have knocked them out way back then…they’re both really good:
– “Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives” by Price M. Cobbs and Judith L. Turnock Check it out — As the title indicates, this book presents a set of lessons learned from the experiences of 32 Black business executives who have successfully “Cracked the corporate code”. Many people might not see the significance of this for the interviewed professionals, but the business game is a whole different game for Black folks than it is for others and the game was even more different 20-30 years ago when many of these folks were building their careers. The authors did a wonderful job of making the reader understand the difficulties faced by their subjects, describing how they overcame these challenges, and then coming up with a set of lessons that young professionals should take to heart as they move onward in their own careers. I’d recommend that anyone interested in diversity (both racial and gender) in business, regardless of their race, take a look at this book, but it is a must-read for any Black folks out there who want to pursue a career in business. I would have gotten a lot out of the book if I’d read it before business school, but, with the GSB behind me, the stories of the 32 executives profiled helped me put everything into perspective before I re-enter the Real World.
– “The McKinsey Way” by Ethan M. Rasiel Check it out — This book was written by a Princeton grad who went on to earn an MBA at Wharton and spend three years as an Associate in McKinsey’s NYC office. Rasiel does a great job of describing how McKinsey does business from how it recruits talented candidates, “sells itself” to clients, solves business problems, and gets its suggestions adopted. If you click on the link here, Amazon gives a better summary of what you’ll find in the book, but I can attest that it is one that any person who wants to go into Consulting should buy. The book is only 180 pages long and it reads ridiculously fast…I finished the entire thing from the time I got to the airport in Acapulco yesterday and finished it before I boarded my flight back to SFO in Houston. If I had read this book back in Fall 2004, I would nhave been MUCH more prepared for the summer internship process last year. Trust me, the aspiring and/or current consultants out there will enjoy this one.
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