A very tired Monday

Sunday night was extremely hot, and my room had no air circulation. I slept with the windows wide open, but still had to wake up in the middle of the night to get something to drink I was sweating so badly. To make matters even worse, I had to wake up extremely early to go and apply for a student visa at the migrations office in downtown Buenos Aires. Everyone on my program entered the country on a traveler visa (which only last for 90 days). Since I will be staying longer, I had to officially change my legal status. This was a very stressful procedure. First of all, I needed to make copies of every page of my passport and get headshots before I got there. Since I had forgotten to do this ahead of time, I woke up even earlier than I needed to in order to make sure I could get those two things done before I had to be there at 7:30am. I left my house at 6am and found a photocopy place open near my house. It was still dark outside and the streets were deserted. I asked the man at the photocopiers if he knew of a store to get my headshots taken, and he said that they were generally everywhere on major streets, but that none opened until 8am. This caused a big problem, since I had an appointment for 7:30am. I ended up walking across the city towards the office of migrations, hoping for a store to be open on the way. I walked about an hour down a big street before I stopped and thought about strategy to find an open picture shop. The only place I figured would have human traffic this early in the morning would be the train and bus station, so I headed in that direction. I was right, and the area was packed. After going into a few stores and asking for help finding a picture place, I was finally pointed in the right direction to a Kodak store inside the subway station under the train station. I got there, and was delighted to find him open. I got the pictures taken, and although I was extremely happy to have found the place, the photos look like I am very close to death. I took the pictures and all the other forms I had already filled out and walked from the train station to the Migrations Office. The path was very sketchy, and at one point had to run across the train tracks. I finally arrived to the office of migrations at 7.28am. Our group had gathered outside the office until it started to rain. Perfect. We all moved to stand in line under an overhang, and then the police instructed us we had to move. We finally were able to enter the office, which was set up very similar to a DMV, meaning very disorganized and a very long wait. We had been warned that the workers in this office were very hard to motivate and that the wait could take all morning. We sat in a section of chairs and had to wait until our names were called. I waited until 10:45am when my name was called. I was also a lucky one, since they were going in alphabetical order. After giving all the forms to an officer and paying the processing fee of 200 pesos (about 60 dollars) I only needed to wait another ten minutes for everything to process. I received my temporary visa around 11:15am and was free to leave. Needless to say I felt like crap, and knew that I needed to go back to bed.

I got home, had a quick conversation with my host mom, and I am sure I must have looked like crap, since she seemed worried that I wasn’t feeling good. I told her I just needed to sleep, which is exactly what I did. After waking up from my nap later in the afternoon, I felt like a human being again. I treated myself to a late lunch of cheese and crackers while watching re-runs of The Office on TV. I am looking forward to eating dinner later, and getting a good night sleep so I can start the rest of my normal week without problems. Oh vey.