Little by Little

I continue to make progress here, little by little. Poco a poco. Last week I went into San Jose to complete my filing for my Residency. The last step was to get my head shot for my residency card and finger prints. I expected to go to a city hall type building for this. It is the official identification and final important step. I went to Roberto's office, my CR attorney, where he had all the papers translated into Spanish for me to deliver to the official immigration location. I thought he would be going with me, but he had his helper who spoke no English at all accompany me. He was very sweet, and we mostly communicated by him pointing to where I was to stand or go next.

We pulled up in front of a building that was nothing like I had imagined these offices would be like. First of all, we walked up to a man set up at an outside table with a chair next to it. This was where I was having my head shot made for my license! He had me sit in the chair, took my picture, ran if off on a printer, cut it out and handed it to me. I was almost laughing at how crazy this appeared. We continued next door to a tin building that was completely open. There was a gate around it and a metal door to shut it off at night. This was the finger printing location. Roberto's helper told the people I was a "senior" over 65, and they took me straight to the front of the line! It would have been a 2 hours process instead of the 35 minutes it took. He pointed to a chair for me to sit in and instructed me to (pointing to his ear) listen for Claudia Sullins. Luckily the lady that came and got me spoke some English. We sat at her old metal desk as you took the papers Roberto had sent me there with and put everything into the computer. Her last questions to me were, "Is you house wood or cement, and what color is it?" In CR there are no real street addresses. Addresses are actually location by directions. The very last line of my address is, Casa de amarillo (yellow house). After that she walked me over to the line to get my finger prints. They still use the stinky black ink here.

I wanted so badly to take pictures getting my finger prints done, but there were signs everywhere with pictures of phones with lines through them. It all went so smoothly I did not want to rock the boat by pulling my phone out to take a picture. I did take a couple of the outside photographer given the important job of taking everyone's photos for their licenses.

I love it here. There is no pretense whatsoever! Nothing was in a fancy office or building, and it all worked just fine. Now I just wait for the papers to make their way through immigration then to me.

Pura Vida