28 Jan

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We’ve just moved into our new apartment, rented for a month, on Caye Caulker. As fun and fantastic as it is meeting new people every day, it is great to have our own space again, our own bathroom, kitchen (with a fridge!) and our own constant supply of hot water.
We are now at the other end of the island near the airport, not that it really makes any noise. We are paying $US 450 for the month that also includes our hot water, gas, electricity, cable (though it’s been great not watching tv and we’re yet to turn it on), and internet once it gets sorted. Our landlords are above us, a lovely couple with two little kids. Albert owns a scuba tour company and Giselle has an incredibly good ice cream palour. We’ve got ourselves some bikes to get around the island a bit quicker, even though its small and everyone is on ‘go slow’ time. It makes do shopping and laundry a bit easier. The bikes are old and pretty run down, but we got a good deal on them, and can hopefully sell them off again at the same price before we leave.
We got our first visas renewed last Friday. We headed off early morning to San Pedro (on the next island) to the immigration office. We had been told that the immigration office likes doing the visa extensions early, so to get in and out as soon as possible. We arrived at about 9am and there was already a queue of about 10 people ahead of us. Fortunately the sign on the door with time allocations for each department requirement (ie. Passport, extensions, residency etc) said that visa extensions were done all through the day, so we patiently waited our turn. About 40 minutes later we were told to come back at 1.15 and that today the extensions were only being done in the afternoon, despite 3 people sitting in the office, and only 1 person actually doing any work.
At least we had a couple of other tasks to do, which unfortuantley took no time at all. So we spent an incredibly hot and windless day wandering around San Pedro trying to spend no money at all and seeking shelter in every air conditioned store possible. By the time 12.30 had come around we decided to head back to the immigration office to be first in line, though knowing that the office was not going to be open at 1.15 like the man said it would be. Around 12.30 it opened, the man opened our passports, wrote down some info, gave us a piece of paper, told us to go to the treasury to pay $BZ 50 each and come back so he can stamp the passport. All in all it took 5 minutes total and could have easily been done in the morning with no real effort, but hey, TIB (This Is Belize).
A couple of beers later and after almost missing the water taxi, we were back in good paced Caye Caulker with renewed visas. We may head to Belmopan for the next one so we can talk to the actual immigration office about residency/work permits as the San Pedro office did not seem too keen to reveal too much info.

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