Oh, the horror...

OK, time for a bit of a rant - bear with me. Please help me to understand why, when you are building a country from scratch, you wouldn't give addresses to all the buildings? And also why you wouldn't think to perhaps provide a service whereby people could get their mail delivered to their doorstep - what a novel idea! But they didn't, so we end up having no address to give to anyone which makes ordering things online almost impossible and giving people directions to our house based on the insanely decorated roundabouts (plastic jumping horses, large ceramic coffee pots, something that looks like a glass enclosed mausoleum, a fake mountain with a water fall...etc) and end up having to pay for a post box nowhere near our house.

We finally were able to get our own, private post box yesterday, but the reason it took so damn long is that we didn't have a car till now and the post office is in the middle of town so going to check our mail would be a $20 round-trip cab ride which does add up. And when we finally went to pay for the privilege of getting our mail, we also had to to take a copy of Matthew's passport, a copy of his residence visa and two passport photos which the guy promptly all stapled together and filed, so what they needed them for I have no damn idea. The guy also tried to get me to re-fill in another copy of the already completed form that I had handed him which I had downloaded from the post office website when he heard that I had got it from the 'internet' (please imagine this being said with the suspicion as if I had got the form from an evil troll witch under a dark bridge in a transaction taking place at midnight amidst billowing fog and involving a blood sacrifice). It took a minute or two of showing him his form from the drawer and my already filled in form from the internet side by side to convince him that they were in fact the same thing. Argh.

But at least we have a mailbox now and don't have to rely on the completely unreliable 'public' mailbox. Thank you. Rant over.

And I leave you with a photo of Nero presiding over his dominion from the staircase as sweet kitties are supposed to make everything better, right?