Going Downhill

Crap has officially hit the fan.

The day started off pretty normally. The night before I went to the International Food Fest the university puts on and I brought Bunuelos. The United States students had signed up to make Tex-Mex. I walked over with Ariail and some of her friends and stayed about an hour and a half. There were a lot of foods to try and it was a little overwhelming, but it was really interesting what people chose to make to represent their culture. When I got back to my room I was planning on finishing up the last of the paperwork for my residence permit because my tutor was picking me and Shay up to go to the police station in the morning. While I was filling out the paperwork, I realized I didn't have one of the pages. Commence major stress eating. However, Laura messaged me to let me know the multi media center (the place we have been using to print stuff out) opened at eight in the morning. This made me relax a lot because my tutor was picking us up at nine thirty. With that taken care of, I went to bed.

I woke up at seven thirty so I could be at the multi media center at exactly eight. I got there at eight ten and the doors were still locked. Commence minor melt down. I waited on a bench across the street for a few minutes until they opened the door. Once I got it printed out, I headed back and finished printing everything out. Then I went to the ATM next to my dorm to get money out to pay the fee for the residence permit. My tutor picked us up (can't explain what a major convince it was to be driven to the police station and not have to take the bus) and we got there in about ten minutes. The process to get the residence permit was pretty simple. You take a picture in this booth that gets saved into their computer system and then you take a number. We got called up to be helped by two officers pretty quickly. The officer who was helping me spoke a little English, but I was very glad my tutor was there to translate a few times where things were unclear. The only time I panicked a little was when she pointed out I forgot to put my parents birthdates and asked me to fill it out. It wasn't my best moment but I started repeating "oh crap, oh crap", and I'm really hoping the officer doesn't know that word in English. I know the the day and month of my parents birthdays of course but I can never remember the year. However, I remembered my dad is turning fifty this year. The officer handed me a calculator when she saw I was trying to do math on a scratch piece of paper. As far as my mom, I subtracted forty seven from 2014 and the year I got looked right. I'm pretty sure it is right. I should probably ask my mom. Once that was done I payed my fee but then I got called back by the original officer to sign a part of the paperwork I forgot. I was relieved to get it all done with and I hope everything gets approved as soon as possible.

It was only about ten thirty when we finished, so my tutor suggested we go to a large mall nearby. We have a few malls nearby the dorm but this one is known for being the biggest. We just walked around to see what they had and walked into a pet store to see what kind of animals they had. There were normal animals, like bunnies and fish. Things did get a little weird when we saw the raccoons and porcupines for sale. I can't imagine picking those two animals as pets. My tutor then wanted to go into a grocery store in the mall (every mall here has a grocery store inside it) and we grabbed some slices of pizza. We headed back when I needed to get to my one class for the day. The class was fine, a little heavy on statistics for my taste, but she said we wouldn't be going over that again.

I was walking back to my dorm when I ran into Ariail who reminded me that we had planned to meet with Laura in the town square to go the bank. We are leaving for Lithuania in the morning (2:10 am) so we needed to exchange currency since they aren't on the Euro. We decided to go this weekend since we have Monday off for Estonian Independence Day. The process at the bank was pretty simple, Laura and I were helped by the same woman together, and the only tricky part was the teller didn't speak much English and couldn't tell if we were saying Latvia or Lithuania. We got that cleared up and got our Lithuanian money.

Ariail needed to get her University ID card so Laura and I headed back to the dorm. This is when the crap hitting the fan started. I went to the ATM to get more cash since I had used it all to pay my permit fee and to pay Ariail back for our room in Lithuania. I went to get my debit card out of my wallet and it hit me. The ATM I used in the morning doesn't have you insert the card and then take it out but instead holds the card inside the machine the entire process. I realized I had forgotten to take back my debit card when I had finished before. Commence completely losing my crap. I went back to my room and made the decision to cancel my card. I don't have a phone here so I asked Laura if I could use hers, but then I realized I could report it lost online so I didn't need to call the bank. So I canceled the card and messaged my mom about doing a wire transfer to my Estonian bank account so I could have money to eat/pay for a Russia trip/have spending money for my Finland trip next month. However, we realized I don't have the right information to do the transfer so I have to go the bank on Tuesday. I'm trying to not freak out but it's stressful and it doesn't help this situation is my fault. I have two emergency credit cards I can use for stuff like food in restaurants and grocery stores but it's annoying to not have access to my own money.

I did some laundry and I'm all packed for our trip. There is KGB museum I would like to go to but there are also some really nice churches to look at. Also, forget everything I said about it being warm again. Everything is covered in snow once again.