Monday, August 04, 2008

Sidik Jari... (Fingerprinting)

Yesterday marked exactly one year since we arrived here in Sentani, Papua. Yikes!!! I can't believe it has already been one year! (I know total cliche...) But I really can't!? We love living here and you know what they say about time when you're having fun... (I know another cliche...)
So today we headed out to Jayapura (capital city, also a port city on the ocean) to visit the immigration office. Technically, all foreigners need to get their fingerprints done every year. Don't know why... Anyways, we were given a special excemption last year not to go, and they just used our information from 5 years ago. (Including a photo of myself while pregnant, with long hair, and my eyes half closed making me look like I've just used some illegal substance... ugghh!!) Wow! We were happy about that. Jayapura is a one hour drive from Sentani and that one hour is full of curves and hills and much traffic. It is quite the drive. Beautiful too though as you follow the coast so you have the lake, which is enormous, and then the ocean. Anyways, the immigration office has a new computerized system for fingerprinting etc... They have a little infared fingerprint reader and a Canon PowerShot camera hooked up to a computer. The two ladies doing all this are still learning the system so when something goes wrong they're not really sure what to do. Thankfully, this morning things went really well and we were all done quite quickly. Then we did a little shopping; found some feta cheese!!!! Bonus!!!! The kids all picked out a toy at Gramedia (book store/sports store/music store/toy store/movie store...). Mikah found a real Barbie! She was thrilled! Then we headed off to Abe for some lunch at KFC and a little more shopping. Found some nice Earl Grey tea from Sri Lanka! Very tasty! It's Dilmah brand. I highly recommend it. But maybe there aren't many products from Sri Lanka in Canada...

The first photo is one I forgot to post last week. This is a kiosk in Pyramid. I guess you put your money in through the little hole on the left... The second is the older kids enjoying their OR burgers at KFC today. At KFC here you get to eat off real dinner plates... Swanky eh?

1 comment:

Lisa said...

Maybe I missed something, but what is an OR burger?