Adventures at the Passport Agency

Countdown: two days until I leave. Having rearranged my flight time, oh, 4 or so times, I'm now leaving Thursday morning and flying into La Paz (El Alto) in the evening. Estoy superemocionada. As of now, I have everything that I need for my trip except the most important thing: my passport.

The infamous passport,
creeping out of the shadows.

Having applied roughly 12 weeks ago, which they claim is the maximum time it takes to get your passport, I decided to head over to the office in person. They say that "If you are traveling in two weeks or less, please schedule an appointment with our automated, 24-hour system", but of course you can never get through to make an appointment because "due to the high volume of calls, all of the lines are busy." Beep, hang-up, fin. So on Monday I showed up office at 7:15 (it opens at 8:00), ready to camp out in front until someone would see me, and ended up waiting in a 200 person line for four hours before I saw someone (and it actually wasn't so bad because I had my computer with me.) When I finally saw a "supervisor", she informed me that my application was in New Hampshire and nowhere near to being ready, and that I would need 1) a new set of photos and 2) my birth certificate in order to re-apply at that time...neither of which I had. I went back today at 6:15 in the morning (and only waited 3 hours this time) with all of the necessary documents, and hopefully I can go pick it up in a few hours.

In my short stay in DC, I've been pretty astounded at the number of Spanish speakers here - I'm not sure if there are actually more people that speak the language, or if the city is just more integrated than Chicago - probably the latter, given Chicago's geography of sort of segregated ethnic neighborhoods. But everywhere I go I hear tons of people talking in Spanish in a whole bunch of different dialects. Although I feel a bit bad when I blatantly eves-drop, it's still fun to try to make out what they're saying (and I almost feel like I've been inculcated into a privileged world. ) At the passport agency today I was fortunate enough to be in line with a woman from Peru , and as I started asking her about her travels, we started speaking in Spanish (which was great practice and a lot of fun), and we ended up talking for more than an hour. Turns out she works in a cafeteria at one of the local schools, and her husband (an American) works for the FDA as a maintenance person (and he gets to clean the animal facility, which somehow involves playing with monkeys...) They met when he was putting up shelves in the laundry room of her sister's building, and apparently they hit it off right from the start. Que bueno.

Post edit: I did actually get my passport later that day, after waiting in line for another two hours, bringing the total time spent at the passport agency to somewhere in the vicinity of 10 hours. This system is clearly functioning and awesome.