Interluding: A Potential Re-Entry Issue/Next Time I'll Be Illegal

***A quick prelude: why all the interludes lately? It comes back to you-can't-keep-all-of-the-people-happy-all-the-time-but-you-can-try. When I do write about the dogs and my work here I get emails asking where all the funny, ridiculous, day in the life of me crap is. When I do write about me, I get emails asking how the dogs are and what the clinic is doing. Since I write constantly anyways, balance is now the name of the game. I'm trying to interlude and clinic at semi-even interludes. Should you be of the where-are-the-dogs camp, rest assured that I just spent two days with four vets, eighteen vet students and a host of barrio animals and that entry is will be up in a few days.***

My visa was set to expire the 28th. Nicaragua only issues you ninety days and then you either have to leave the country and re-enter or you have to go get an extension on your visa. In theory it's cheaper to leave - you pay about $3 to get into the country via overland routes. But that doesn't take into account the cost and hassle of getting out of the country, staying out for 72 hours and then getting home again.

Go to the office in Managua, my roommate tells me. It's easy. In and out, $20, you're done. He's been here forever and keeps pushing his leaving date back so he's a good source for this sort of info. Plus he's also the one that knows every decent chicken lady in this city so he's trustworthy.

In one of those odd, only-in-Nicaragua twists the office is in a mall. In a dirty little American moment I was kind of excited about this - mall. In the states I hate malls. Here the idea was a wee bit intoxicating and exotic. Mall stores. Food courts. Bookstores. Wow.

Me being me I didn't leave for Managua until 10 AM. I thought this would be a fatal error on my part but it turns out the office, in another odd Nica twist, doesn't even open until noon. When I got there my heart sank. It was 10.45 and already there had to be fifty people lined up outside this office, waiting to get in.

Herein lies the bitch about Nicaragua: people here get up early. Really early. Like there was a band with a tuba practicing outside my window at 6.15 this morning early. It makes sense that my roommate, who works in Managua and always went after work, never would have encountered a line. By the time he got there most Nicas would have finished their day's obligations and gone home to sit in front of the house in rocking chairs and shoot the shit.
I, on the other hand, was stone cold screwed. And stuck in the mall for at least an hour.

Contrary to what I anticipated, I had a really visceral reaction to Metrocenter, the mall where the office was located: I wanted out. Malls here are for wealthy people and Metrocenter is for the wealthiest of the wealthy - the top 2% of the population. Most of the people walking around were dressed up in brand name clothes. There was a Benetton, a Radio Shack. And everything was enormously, stupidly, ridiculously expensive. I looked at a Spanish/English dictionary - I need one and this one was pretty basic but it would have worked. Price? $30. Like US. That's what a teacher in this country makes in a month.

I'm not one of those earnest, donate everything to charity, Mother Theresa types. I have some nice stuff. I insisted on bringing my own sheets and towels from the states. My underwear is nice and while a lot of my clothes are goodwill, I have a lot of brand name stuff. Even still something about this seemed obscene. I want this country to prosper. I want people to have access to not only things they need - like electricity - but things they want. But I was incredibly uncomfortable and wanted out. Out out out out. Like immediately.

Had I not been in imminent danger of being an illegal immigrant, I probably would have given in to the urge and bolted. But I was up a stump, really, so for an hour I wandered around, looking and thinking.

Aside from the class issues, I had other discomfort issues with the place. The lights were too bright. Everything was a little too clean, a little too well organized, a little too, well, un-Nicaraguan.

This could present a problem. When I first got back to the States last year we stopped at Costco on the way back so I could get some pictures printed. I hadn't been gone half as long as I have this time. My response to Costco was immediate: get me the hell out of here. It was almost overwhelming - the wealth of products, the size of the packages of everything, the whole experience.*

After over four months - because I am changing my ticket to get back the time I lost to being sick - what will it be like for me to return to the States? Will I immediately start plotting my escape back here, like I did the last two times I was home? I don't know. Maybe I need to spend more time in the Managua mall, begin some sort of gradual readjustment process. Eat some Burger King. Go to Curves. Seek out fluorescent lighting and air conditioning.**

I don't know.

The good thing about the whole experience, though, was that the actual immigration office was a little island of Nicaragua in the middle of fuck-all only knows what. It was hot. It was overcrowded and understaffed. It was full of arcane forms that you had to pay for, prior to even filling them out.

I got in line behind the million other people and was immediately confronted with the form selling guy who came at me with rapid fire Spanish. I didn't get him. At all. After a guy behind me translated, the form selling guy determined what I needed and sold it to me. Seeing as he only had one form he was selling to every single person I'm unsure as to why he needed to ask me what I was doing there.

There was a guy two people behind me in line - a US national. He was in his fifties and had left Nicaragua over thirty years ago. He was just there because he had fathered a son on a return visit a few years back and, with the consent of the kids mother, was trying to bring his son to the states. He helped me with the form which was confusing as hell. The first thing he told me was I didn't have to fill it all out. No one, he explained, has to fill in everything. Just a few things.

Bienvenidos a Nicaragua! The useless form! Of course!

The line was incredibly long, incredibly slow and completely Nicaraguan. Personal space? Who needs it? The woman behind me was literally standing on the backs of my feet, her substantial stomach brushing my back. She was very unhappy that I had allowed a good six inches between me and the woman in front of me and kept poking me in the back with a pen and telling me to move up, even when the line hadn't moved. I am not making this up - she kept digging a pen between my shoulder blades, into my back, into my kidneys, telling me to move. For two hours I stood in line and the whole time I kept getting the damn pen dug into me.

My American friend, who has spent two years and infinite hours in this office trying to get his son home, told me cheerfully "I know this is my country but I really hate some of these people.". I told him that while I always tried to be polite here I was really glad I didn't know the Spanish for 'Lady, stick that pen….".

When we finally got to the front of the line I noticed another desk and another line to the side. Shit. I hope, I told my new friend, this is a one-desk ordeal. He assured me it probably was.

He was wrong.

I gave the immigration guy my passport, copies of everything, the form. He looked everything over and asked how I afforded to be here six months a year. He also asked me what I was doing here. The minute I said 'soy voluntaria' it was over. He smiled at me, told me it wasn't a problem.. Then he worked out something on the calculator. 89 c. - about $4.50. Fantastic. I pulled the money out of my pocket and handed it to him. Oh no, that's without the office fee. He took the calculator back, typed some more and handed it back to me again - 420 c. - about $21.

I would have paid any amount of money at that point in time to get out of that office and out of that mall. I would have offered up a finger. $21? Still cheaper and less hassle than a few days in Costa Rica. Whatever. I paid him. He wrote up the obligatory Nicaraguan receipt, stamped, it handed to me and……didn't give me my passport back. He then pointed to the other desk. You need to go there, he tells me. She does the stamping.

This is quintessential Nica. It would have taken him thirty seconds to stamp the new visa in, write the date on it, hand me my passport. He knows how to use a stamp - he just stamped my receipt. But this is Nicaragua. They need to have a different stampy lady.

He took my passport over and stuck it on a pile of other passports and then indicated the other line. Once again I wound up next to pokey-pen-lady. The universe hates me.

Because this line was substantially shorter than the other one and this is the country where line-cutting is an art form, the stampy desk was besieged with people trying to dodge the big line.

Time and time again people would walk past everyone up to the stamp desk and ask a question. This would cause stamp lady to stop stamping, answer the question, and point them to the main line - a few minutes each person. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

Pen Lady, meanwhile, was remarkably mellow. I wanted to ask her where the damn pen was now or if she only busted that out for extranjeros who refused to ride piggy back on the stranger in front of them.

Finally after another god-knows-how-long I saw the stamp lady pick up my passport, look at it slowly, pick up the stamp. I started to walk toward the desk. She put both down and picked up the next one on the pile.

As I have said before, I try to be polite but after 2 ½ hours it was game over for me. I went up to the desk and pointed at my passport. Stamp. Please. She looked surprised but pulled it back out, stamped it and handed it to. Time required for actual stamping? Literally under ten seconds.

There were about ten other errands I had planned to run in Managua that day. Go to the big grocery store and try to find something resembling clif bars - I had found them in Costa Rica. Get a piece of pizza. Go to a really clean, really good tattoo shop there run by a guy who had trained in the states and just check it out.

Instead I ran out of Managua like the city was burning. I got out of the mall and jumped the first bus back to Granada that passed by. I didn't even wait for the good La UCA one - I piled into one of the little mini-van things that aren't any cheaper, are overcrowded and are miserable. I wound up sitting in the luggage area behind the drivers seat for 45 minutes, stuffed into this thing with eighteen of my closest friends. These are maybe made to hold ten people, eleven tops. I've never been so damn glad to sit on a luggage rack in my life. In all honesty I would have sat on the top of a chicken and goat express to get the hell out of there.***

* Everything in Nicaragua - and most of Central America - is sold in very small sizes. You don't buy a jar of spaghetti sauce, you buy a small bag of it. Milk comes in small bags. Granola comes in a what would be a single-serving size bag here. On the few items that do come in bigger sizes there's no price break for buying the bigger size. It's actually usually more. Buying eight ounces of cream cheese costs way more than twice what buying two four ounce containers would cost. Not only does this make no sense, in a country with a huge litter issue you would think they want to cut down on packaging.

** I actually hate Burger King. And I've never been in a Curves in my life. But both of these - as well as Quiznos, TGI Fridays. McDonalds - are available in Managua in the rich area. Very odd.

*** I've actually seen them do this - put people on top of chicken buses. On the Sunday after Semana Santa the packed buses leaving San Juan Del Sur were lurching down this unpaved road with people perched on the top of them, next to the bicycles and wooden baskets of plantains.