Reality Check & Fun With Passports

As per the instructions that the German speaking Bolivian employee at the Bolivian Embassy in Canada, I needed to go to the Bolivian Passport Office today, to advise that we were staying longer than 30 days.  According to the embassy in Canada, all we had to do was go in and advise them.  After speaking with Jorge and Ken, I was a little bit nervous about it.  Both of them told me horror stories about having to shell out large sums of money to get the extension thanks to corrupt workers, or having to leave the country for 8 hours and then return and get another 30 day extension.  Ken in fact had to do that with one of his last groups that came down.  They ended up driving to Peru for the day and then coming back.

Roberto and Eduardo needed to apply for passports so Ken took the three of us down to the passport office and Jorge showed up to help me out since his Spanish is much better than Ken's.  First of all, the place was packed, and the protocol is as follows:
1. Go to the welcoming desk and tell them what you want.
2. The welcoming desk gives you a piece of paper and tells you which really long line you need to get in.
3. Wait.
4. Wait some more.
5. Finally talk to someone.

When I got to the front of the line, the gentleman behind the counter did not speak any English (which is fair, because I didn't speak any Spanish).  Jorge was nice enough to tell him that we needed to advise that we were extending our stay for another 3 weeks as instructed.  The interesting thing is that you could see his gears turning trying to decide how he wanted to handle this one.  Apparently, he had options as to how he wanted to enforce the rules as I had been warned.  He leafed through the passports and luckily saw the kids passports and just started stamping away with the 90 day visa stamp and didn't ask for any cash.  I did notice the "Gringo" in front of me shell out fifty dollars for the same stamp for some reason.  Maybe it was his "I'm a free spirit backpacker who doesn't trim his beard or comb his hair" look.

The boys had to come back again in the afternoon to finish off their passport applications which are completed in two days.  Yup, in Canada you wait for 3 weeks or more.  In Bolivia, you get your passport in two days.

Eduardo is just moving into Ken's place so on the way back from the passport office, we had to go pick up his stuff from his old place.   His old place was right next to a cemetery, had a linen curtain for a door and no furniture other than two beds.  That's two beds for the 6 people who had paid for floor space in the room.  There were a few dirty dishes etc on the floor but not much else.  Eduardo had already packed up his two boxes of stuff, so we just threw his life in the back of the truck and we were off.

This afternoon was supposed to be an educational session for the kids since we had planned to go to the Noell Kampff Natural History Museum.  We took a taxi downtown to the Plaza 24 de Septembre and walked the 7 blocks down to the museum.  ahem.  I mean to the Noell Kampff Natural History room.  Yup, the museum that has a pretty decent website, is made up of a single room with some nice insect displays, fossils and some preserved animals in formaldehyde.  I guess we shouldn't complain since it cost us all of 40 cents for the whole family to get in and we did get to see some really big bug specimens.

So, since the museum took all of 20 minutes to go through, we had some time to kill so we decided to try to finish the souvenir list that the kids had made up.  Lukas has already bought his Bolivian guitar, rain stick and necklace with Bolivianite, so it was more of a shopping list for Jordan and Logan and a couple of gifts we were planning on bringing back.  Logan has been begging for a chess set since we got down here so we managed to find a pretty nice on with Incas on one side and Spanish soldiers on the other and we managed to negotiate a fair price.  Jordan of course wanted one of the Bolivian dolls holding a baby in traditional dress, so we picked up one of those as well and a gift for Grandma.

We finished the day with a long hike looking for a restaurant because it was getting too late to get back and start cooking.  We ended up a fair ways from the main Plaza but found a restaurant that wasn't scary.  Then we finished the day with the now traditional scary taxi ride at mach 4 through busy side streets.  We are all pretty beat from walking so much and will no doubt be out when we hit the pillow.