Unrelaxing Break from Projects

Well life at home was far from being called a holiday, I was feeling like shit as usual, the 7 hour jetlag was killing me as bad as ever and I don’t recover for about 5 days, as the body gets older the body clock is getting harder to pull round the levers, I was up at 5.30 as the boy has to be on the school bus for 6.15am, that is ridiculously early I know, I cannot do anything about it but suffer, I was lucky as I got home Friday night and was able to just sleep and eat for the weekend but I felt like crap, we did go to the cinema and see Batman,$2 each, what an entertaining movie I thought, yes we do have cinemas in Costa Rica and we do get the new releases, in fact I went later in the week to see the new War of the Worlds, it was a spectacular film but the film of the book is a bit thin, a weak ending, and we have H.G. Wells the thank for that. So Monday morning and it was off to a flying start, First to the photographer to get my visa pictures taken and it was a painless operation but I was shocked to see how goddam grey I had gone since my last actual passport picture had been taken, I told the wife “I want a flat top and a No3 all over” just to remove as much grey as possible, then straight to the Peruvian Consulate put in my Visa application, very straight forward and no problems, then to the Travel shop for a ticket to Lima and I can say I was robbed as it was summer holiday time for Costa Rica and the prices quadrupled, but as I have just got hold of my brand new company credit card I don’t care, I had a leisurely lunch at a little diner that cost $4 for two of us and afterwards we went to call all doctors that we could to get some vaccinations and blood tests, I was told that I could get all my blood tests done at a local clinic and that all we had to do was show up at a Hospital and take the vaccinations with us and they would administer them for free, but getting hold of them is much harder than you would think in this country, as it is so small Costa Rica has a small demand for things like yellow fever vaccination and things like Hep B vac is even harder, so we tried a few farmacies only to be told they have nothing at all, I am wondering where I can get all my vacs from in future, it may be easier to get them all in Lima which is a laugh rally as I would have expected it to be very hard here. Anyway we settle for the blood tests and I started to collapse with the dreaded jetlag about 3.30pm I managed to keep going as the wife was driving me all over the place and slumped dead into bed at 8.00pm, this doesn’t mean I got a good sleep, I was awake at 1.30 am ready for the working day to start, this is my usual practice, I struggled for at least 2 hours to get back to sleep and managed it eventually but this isn’t a normal sleep, just a horrible catnap that makes you feel dreadful and not like you slept at all. So getting up at 5.30 again feeling like I had a great night out but knowing I didn’t, with another day full of things to do. Tuesday was the day I had to start my residence process, I have prevaricated enough about should I and shouldn’t I do it, I always fly in and out of here pretending to be a tourist, which basically I am, I don’t actually work here and spend more time away than at home, but I want that little document that allows me to enter as a local in the immigration as those queues are much much smaller and I wouldn't get that silly look from the immigration officer while he looks through all my Costa Rican passport stamps and USA stamps for that matter. So armed with all my new passport pictures and passports, 2 we are allowed 2 in the UK as we think we’re important. I was told by the lawyer that I needed a photocopy of all the pages in both passports a letter from the British consul stating that I am not a criminal, which they cannot do for legal reasons and the British do not have a national register of ex criminals anyway, they just provide a letter saying thet have no such register,so I got that letter over 12 months ago and just put it in a bottom drawer, I then had to produce a certificated birth certificate, this takes around 3 months to obtain and that is after my sister sent it to Costa Rica for me which also took a month to get hold of. And I got that about 6 months ago and put it in the same bottom drawer. So now with all this I thought I was fully armed but no, I was then told that I needed to show that I was an financially independent person but I had to have it within Costa Rica and not external as that would put my case through a different legal channel that would cost more and take double the length of time, I have been able to do this as I set up a house building business a couple of years ago and failed miserably to make any decent money from it and even though it is still alive I don’t do anything anymore but I can use it as my claim to be financially stable without having to resort to showing my contract from an American company with its office in Dublin and me being based out of Florence in Italy, I don’t think they would believe me anyhow. So the lawyer had drawn up this huge document stating everything and I had to sign and of course he wanted his money up front before he starts this long drawn out process, $400, they are now just looking at applications from March 2004, so maybe by Christmas 2006 I may get a nice Christmas present. The only fly in the ointment is that I will then be eligible for Costa Rican tax and that is one thing I am not happy about.