Fail

Unfortunately today was not a good one for Team Edinburgh :( It started well this morning with class- which I am enjoying more than I thought I would considering it is four hours in a row! There's a quiet contentment around pootling through exercises on the simple directional complement. Then Becka and I managed to get our student cards- which are more little books with our photos and some information in.

But then we tried to Achieve Something in the afternoon... First we went to see about Becka's visa. Currently she is on a L-visa (tourist) but this is due to run out soon and she can't get an X-visa (student) until she has paid her fees and as her purse was stolen she cannot withdraw money as she has no credit card so cannot pay the fees... However eventually we settled on a plan of action-which relied on her replacement card arriving today- which joy of joys it did. So she tried to withdraw money but inevitably and inexorably it wouldn't work... And calling Nationwide to unblock it is harder than it sounds as it seems quite hard to call out of the country. She is using Skype at the moment so hopefully that will work.* However it is all one annoying little setback after another so she's feeling a tad demoralised. And her ice cream had melted before she could eat it.

My little tale of woe thus follows. Having been told by the secretary to go to the Entry/Exit bureau this afternoon to get my residence permit, I duly complied. We queued for around 45 minutes at desk 2 for me to submit my application. 45 minutes is a long time to be standing there doing nothing. However when I'd finally got to the front and feeling a glimmer of hope, they pointed to an obscure sentence at the bottom of the back of one of the several sheets of paper in my collection that said I needed to go to desk 4. A little part of me died inside. So we queued at desk 4. For another 45 minutes. Then the woman told me that "the school hadn't sent her my residence details" so I had to go back to the university and speak to the office. Which, as I had been queueing there forever, meant that the office would be closed by the time I got back. So now I can't sort it out until  Monday. I'd wasted 2 hours of my life for nothing. So that's why I feel demoralised.

Becka and I went to McDonalds for dinner. Street food is fine for lunch but not very satisfying for dinner and we haven't had much luck with the little restaurants. The food is either too spicy, not very tasty or contains far too many chicken feet. There are a lot of dishes on each menu but bizarrely very little variation. It all tends to be unidentified scraps of meat mixed in with onion-like vegetables served with either rice or noodles. Street food is mostly minced meat and chopped onion served in either fried bread or fried pancake. Or 包子. You can have too many 包子 in your life.

On the door at McDonalds they've written 推, which means "push", and then written "pull" above it.


*Apparently "all the PINs Nationwide have sent out have not been able to connect to the server". Which sounds like a complete fuck-up to me. So Becka won't be getting a PIN until Monday.