So one of the things we have to do to stay over here is have a visa. There are lots of ways to get them, but right now Matt is a student on a college campus.
Every 6 months you have to reapply for the visa, take your passports (and your whole family) down to the Visa Office. You must do this before your current visa expires. Sounds simple right?
Well, Matt had to get a letter from the college inviting him to go to school there. In order to get this you have to request the letter, pay the tuition for the year, and wait 2-3 weeks while they process the letter. Then you have to have a copy of every person's passport, authenticated and translated birth certificate, marriage certificate, and our registration with the local police. Some of these have to have an official red stamps on them and some of them can NOT have a red stamp. These rules seem to change every time.
Then when you get there you have to fill out a form for each person in the family and attach a picture of each person to each form. Pictures must be a very specific size and have a specific background color. Again, rules seem to change daily.
This time they threw a new kink in the system and we had to go to Room 102 to get a red stamp put on the papers we filled out there. And Room 102 is of course located exactly where you would think--though a room on the second floor, down a long hallway, down the stairs, through the workers cafeteria, down another hallway. Definitely the first place we looked :)
So, the process is always so fun, and this morning it was raining. Pouring actually--we had to walk through sections of sidewalk that were covered in water up to our calves.
So we had no choice but to put our umbrellas up, put a smile on, and have fun!!
Dancing in the rain!!!
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