5 hours

Corbett | December 5, 2003 10:50 PM

What a lousy way to spend the entire day. First the tax office boogaloo, then five hours waiting around for a piece of paper in a police station just in order to rush to another police station to pay some money and get a little stamp in Tiff's passport, so that she can leave the country. This is common practice here in Taiwan, a country with no immigration service, which is dumped on the tax bureau and foreign affairs police to deal with. I shouldn't complain because it is a million times better than 15 years ago when we had to fake attendance to some language school which didn't exist, so we could stay here as "students", then take our NT dollars to a dubious guy with a green visor sitting in a cage behind some dimly lit jewelry store front in order to exchange to greenbacks before we left the country.

It was nice chatting with the cops. It turns out that I played at the police academy graduation ceremony for one of them, and the others all liked my music. One of them raises cats, another bakes biscuits and muffins and dabbles in sleight of hand, and another of them is a budding jazz guitarist, and is eager to attend the next week's jam session at the Living Room. I couldn't imagine how long I'd be sitting there if we didn't at least have music, cats, and magic to blab about.

Category: Moblog