Yesterday, all of us headed out on a Santiago adventure, with Tito, a man who works for the school. It took us way back to when we first arrived here. We applied for permanencia, which is a permanent resident visa. There are a few benefits. One is that we don’t have to go through the annual renewal process. And the other big one is that we can apply for a Lider Presto card, which gives us big discount on our groceries. That’ll be golden when we can get it.
So we left the school bright and early, around 7:45 and headed downtown to the International Police station. It’s located near the Central Market here so we drove past the vendors getting ready for the day – pretty neat to see. We hardly had to wait at the police station, maybe 15 minutes. We got our files processed, our pictures taken with a web camera and got our printouts. Then off we went to the City Hall in Vitacura to get a new ID card. That was where we waited for a while. Normally, it’s not too long of a wait – they have three people working and not that many people are there on a Tuesday morning. But yesterday, it was packed. Tito said that it was because people were back from holidays and need a bunch of documents and their new ID cards now. Lovely. Thankfully, the City Hall backs onto a beautiful big green space/park so Der took the kids and played outside with them until it was our turn. We got our new pictures – and mine sucks but oh well – and now all we need to do is pick up the new cards at the end of the month. Then we’ll be permanent residents – woo hoo!
The next thing to do is get all the paperwork and pictures done for Kirsi’s new passport. Her current passport has a picture of her when she was 3 weeks old. A little out of date, eh?
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