Miss Gioia

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Going Home


We are booked on a 7:15 am flight to Taipei tomorrow, all because of some recent good news.

1) We got Miss G's Certificate of Citizenship yesterday morning and marched it straight over to the passport office.

2) Today, we picked up her passport, which not only affirms her US citizenship but also makes her a lady going places.

3) We were told by the Taiwan Consulate (my bad, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office because we cannot call it a REAL consulate) that they would not issue her a tourist visa without an authenticated birth certificate. So we have to bring her in on a landing visa instead. This means we have to take her back out of the country again in 30 days. The tourist visa would have given us 60-90 days, with possibilities of extension for up to 6 months. But this also means that we don't have to wait around in Honolulu for a tourist visa. Hopefully in 30 days we will have all of her papers authenticated (please, oh please) so that this next trip out to HK can be a residence visa trip and not just another landing visa trip.*

So home we go, on an 11 hour direct flight, to our own little apartment with non-restaurant food and cloth diapers and my own bed and immeasurable other joys. We have been traveling now for 3.5 weeks doing Gioia's paperwork, and we are DONE.

Now off to get some sleep before our wake-up call at oh-God-thirty tomorrow morning. See y'all in Taiwan.

*The residence visa requires a lots of paperwork to be authenticated by the Taiwan Straits foundation, and it takes a looooong time. So no hopes of applying for a residence visa until all that jazz gets sorted.

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3 Comments:

Blogger Jack said...

Hey !! You're coming back ! We can't wait to meet Baby G.

February 21, 2008 4:06 PM  
Blogger BevS97 said...

good luck with your travelling, and I hope you can get your residence visa sorted out painlessly once you get home.

February 21, 2008 4:44 PM  
Blogger Wendy said...

Have a safe trip...

February 22, 2008 5:56 AM  

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