Oh the joys of international living.

I frequently say here, "Oh the joys of international living." (Most of time being sarcastic of course.) Usually it is when trying to do paperwork for our stays here or trying to understand cultural differences.

Today was one of those days.

We spent at least an hour in the administrative center trying to sort through the necessary paperwork to complete the requirements to finalize our stay here.

Usually most of the dialouge is directed to the man responsible for coordinating between us and the government officials to ensure we are filing everything correctly. While he is a sweet old man he certainly isn't one you would expect to be helping us with such important paperwork. When we first met him, we decided the team sent him to help us because we certainly couldn't get mad at him. Who gets mad at an old man?

We walked around for ten minutes trying to find a door to ask of yet another document for our stay here. The problem was that John and I didn't really know what we were looking for, so we just followed him around like little puppy dogs following their owner. He walked around pulling at doors and looking into areas remarking, "Impossible."

We finally found builidng "B" which had a large entrance and was clearly marked, apparently we were just looking on the wrong side of the building.

At one point he made a joke in which he couldn't stop laughing about. At that point John asked him if he had anything to drink this morning. His response was, "No, just tea."

We finally met with the lady we were searching for. I still don't know exactly what was said because most of the conversation was in Flemish. But, I do know that now we must wait for someone to come inspect our apartment to deem it large enough for two of us to.

And that, my friends, is when I respond with "Oh the joys of international living."