3 more months!

Tuesday Leah and I had to go renew our tourist visa down at the immigration office. It was definitely one of the more insane mornings I've ever had. We got up around 8 am and took a bus over toward the general direction of the office, having no real idea where we are going besides our bus driver's vague gesture towards a cluster of buildings. We chose to enter a random blue building and entered a huge courtyard and proceeded to get halfway across it before 3 men in uniform chased us down. Apparently we were trying to enter the high security coast guard building. Oops.

We found the right building and wow, was it crowded. We forced our way through people and asked a woman handing out numbers what we needed for our visa. Money, passports, and copies of our passports, which we could make on the second floor. We headed that way and asked a security guard where the stairs were and he just laughed at us and told us we had to walk 6 blocks to the nearest kiosk because the copier was broken and probably never going to be fixed.

30 minutes later we were back and had our numbers, 25 and 26. At this point it's around 10:30 and the sign says you can't take numbers past 11, so we were glad we made it in good time. We waited about 45 minutes and Leah went first. The delightful woman behind the counter took one look at what Leah had and was like "NO, you need copy of when you ENTERED country, not your picture!" Holy crap. We made copies of the wrong thing because the sign and number lady weren't specific enough and now we were basically being called idiots because we didn't understand it. We left the building pretty pissed off, planning on returning the next day.

Leah was literally in a rage. We walked away from the building and were in the middle of the street when she stopped, screamed, "No way, I'm not coming back tomorrow, these bitches are dealing with us today!" and turned around, heading back towards the immigration building. Turns out we could take numbers until 2:30 because all we wanted were tourist visas. The sign didn't explain that because apparently that would just be too difficult to mention. We each got a number, 43 and 44, and I stayed in the office while Leah ran to get copies of when we ENTERED the country. I also feel it's important to mention that as Leah was leaving she was on a rampage and was shoving people out of her way, including some old man who's glasses she smashed into and made him drop. I was left to apologize to everyone as she was already out of the building.

So my number was 43, they were on 27, there was plenty of time. OR WAS THERE? Suddenly, the woman started calling numbers. 37, 38, 39, 40...no one was showing up. I panicked, because Leah wasn't back yet and she had our passports and the copies and we were NOT getting new numbers again. 41, 42, 43. By the time they called my number, I was frantically calling Leah, who told me to stall because she was almost there. 44, 45, 46...51. They got up to 51 before someone else finally had a ticket. I ran up to the woman before 51 and waved my numbers around and kept saying un momento un momento, and she just stared at me like I was deranged, which at this point I probably was. Finally I saw Leah running from the other side of this giant room and I just stood in front of the woman waving my ticket until Leah arrived. She finally understood, renewed our passports, and 30 minutes later we were out of there.