Visas,Flights, and Mice (Oh my!)

This has been a pretty busy week for us. Being that we have been here almost exactly one month that means one thing: our tourist visas are expiring. When we where flying out of LAX we found out that we had to have a residency visa already since we had one way tickets, this meant that we needed flights booked so we could leave the Philippines , just to enable us to enter it to begin with! Brian Lamb and Jordan Martin got us set up (thanks again guys!), and so we had tickets booked for when our tourist visas expired going to Hong Kong and back, which is something a lot of missionaries do here to avoid the expense of a long term visa. So this week I had the responsibility of getting our tourist visas extended while we start working on getting our long term visas done and rebooking our flights. Monday morning I went early(ish) to the airport so that I could get to the airline counter and change the flights, all going like clockwork until he needed the passports to make photocopies of them. Oops, left them at home because (for some stupid reason) I figured that they would have all our passport numbers and info right in front of them when they pulled up our flight. They did have that, but the guy wanted copies of them for some reason or another. So get on a taxi back home, get all five of the buggers and get a taxi back to the airport. Get the process going again and....that counter doesn't take cards, cash only. The rebooking of the flights was about 35 thousand pesos (about $700), and we were just not able to get that much cash on hand quickly. So I had to get on another taxi and go back into town to another airline office. This time no taxis were there, except one guy who knew he had me. I was flustered, getting tired, and just trying to not have to get on a plane on Thursday, and somehow, he saw pesos signs over my eyes because dude got me for a "special trip" into town for 200 pesos, should have been at most, 20 and man I knew that but I just didn't care at that point.

So I finally get to the other office, and there is this older British fellow yelling at the ladies behind the counter about a flight that he had booked that was canceled without him knowing or being told about it a week before the flight was scheduled to happen and he and his brother showed up at the airport to find out that they should have been notified by someone about the cancellation. He was understandably upset about the whole thing, and taking it out on the girls behind the counter about people lying to him. Half an hour later, when he had finally left, I got up there, tried to be as nice and polite as I could, got the flight set up, and when the lady looked at our passports she added some special Philippine something or other blah blah tax (200 bucks). Why? Because our visas were expiring, so we needed to assure the government that we would not be illegal immigrants when we returned to the country. Fine. Whatever. I will trudge over to the Immigration office and see if I can get that taken care of quickly. Luckily the office was not very far. I got there and the lady behind that counter, well her eyes got very big when she saw how many passports I had (obviously not just one, but five) and told me that she needed applications filled out, pictures of all of us and almost 16 thousand pesos. Defeated, I walked out with the feeling that I did not have a whole lot of time to get all this done. So I got on a taxi and on my way home the taxi stopped right in front of a computer store that I needed to go into to see if they could take a look at our computer real quick.

Our teacher Mimi let us out of class early that day so we could go to one of the malls here and get some pictures made. With the cash in hand, the applications more or less filled out, and the pictures we all went over to the Immigration office and it was closed for the day. So we walked on down the street a bit and tried a Chinese chain restaurant here (spoiler: it was delicious).

I was up and out by 8.30 that next morning with Sophia and Rosie with all of the aforementioned paraphernalia in the last ditch attempt to get our visas extended and our flights rebooked. 20 minutes after getting there BOOM all five of us had extended visas! Out on the street and a few minutes later we were back in the airline office trying to get that done. It was a slow process, and Sophia (of course) was best friends with the other lady behind the counter before we were done. Because of when our extended visas expired we could not book the flight for when we wanted unless we payed that blah blah tax, which I had no plans of doing. Ok, so the middle of March? Fine. 3.5% for card use? Fine. BOOM! REBOOKED! Oh what's that a recap? Sure. Then the bomb drops, after being led to believe that we would fly from Butuan to Manila and Manila to Hong Kong all in one day (total I think its like 4 hours in the air) I'm told that oh no, we have a 22 hour layover in Manila.....and oh yeah, it would cost roughly $200 more to move it one day, even though I would never have paid for that otherwise. no refunds, no rebooking "I'm sorry I messed up" coupon, accept it or pay.

We are going to try to use that day in Manila to get our residency visas done...maybe.
But I was able to get it all done. Barely.

Wondering about the "mice" from the title? The other night one of the girls new friends rolled up to our house holding something and it turned out she was holding a little baby mouse. It was so new it's eyes were still closed. Sophia and Aaryn got to hold the mouse, and it was duly passed around to all the kids, multiple times, and it died that night, in front of everyone (the nerve of some mice) and the kids simply through it in the field across the street.

Oh my.