Dan's Episode with Immigration

When Daniel arrived he mentioned some incident with the Immigration officer at the terminal right before he came out of the airport. When we checked out his passport he was given a visa of 21 days. His stay was from Dec 12 through the Jan 16 so that’s a bit longer than 21 days. It turned out, that was standard procedure for US passport holders not born in the Philippines. My sister-in-law Leda mentioned she knows someone who knows someone who has some ‘influence’ so we can get Dan's visa extended. His 21st day would have been Jan 2nd and that’s the only day we can go to Manila to have it taken care of. So Leda stayed the night New Year’s Day and bright and early Tuesday morning, she made her phone calls and we packed everyone into the van and headed on south towards Manila. On the way, we dropped off Eph and the girls at his Ninang Didi’s place in Valenzuela so her son can drive them around town. I think they were taken to, among others, the Mall of Asia which is supposed to be the biggest mall in Asia when it opened last year. Gen actually said when they got home that night, "I never want to see another mall for a while!"

I’ve mentioned in previous blogs about my problem about coding on Tuesdays. So we took our time and when we left Valenzuela to go to Manila, it was already past 10 so I should be ok. With Leda navigating, (for the life of me, I can never find my way around Manila!) and we only had to stop a couple of times to ask for directions, we finally got to the Intramuros area where the Department of Immigration is located. But by the time we got there it was already lunch time. Around here, time stops during lunch at government offices. So we looked for a restaurant, had lunch then went back. By that time, our contact was already waiting for us. By the time we finished our thing, with Dan’s passport stamped and his stay extended till February, it was already around 2 pm and we only have till 3 to get out of Manila or else I’ll get a ticket for driving around ‘against coding’. We dropped off Leda on her way home to Alabang and the three of us, after Donna getting some directions, headed on home. It was not too bad, we got lost a couple of times but it was around 2:40 when we hit NLEx and we’re scot free!

I took a couple of pictures around Intramuros of some old buildings, some of them ruins really. I thought Starbucks sticks out. Dan took some pictures of the seamy side of Manila. We saw a streamer with Eph's namesake on it, of a restaurant in SM.