This morning, L, N, & I went back to Frankfurt to pick up our documents from the embassy. Knowing where to go helped a lot! After another failed try, the lady finally explained that I needed a copy of every page even if they were the same. I guess I'm upset that she told me last week that if there were duplicates I only needed one, but at the same time I wouldn't have had enough money for that many copies anyways. It was quite expensive, but I was armed with a TON of change, so it barely made a dent! The worst part was that since I obviously needed to make a ton of copies, some people who only needed to make a few felt they were justified in rudely cutting in line and using my money to make their copies. Most of them asked politely and a few even offered to pay for their copies, but there was 1 guy in particular who at first asked to make just 2 copies, then came back and jumped into make at least 5 more. He didn't ask the second time and he never bothered to even think that 7 copies are more than just chump change on that machine! But, in the end, I got all the copies I needed and was able to leave with all of our documents properly authenticated!! 420 Euros later, that is. I'm still in shock over how expensive this entire process has been, but it will be worth it.
When we got home, we picked up DJ and wasted no time in going to mail them. (I already had my box labelled and ready to go last night so all I had to do was put the documents in and seal the last side!) Well, ok we wasted a lot of time. Finding a good post office here is surprisingly difficult. I needed it to be fast, insured, and traceable. This meant regular Deutsche Post wouldn't do. I would need to use DHL. There are a few of those scattered around, but the only ones I know of have next to no parking available and I was SO not in the mood to hunt for more parking after driving to Frankfurt again! I used our GPS to try to pick one that seemed like it would have decent parking available. Boy, was I wrong!! When we drove by, I don't even think that was a post office at all! So, I went a different route and decided to try my luck on a tiny little UPS sign that I see on my way to the custom's office, which I visit rather frequently. And what luck we had!! It was a bit of a drive, but we found a huge UPS warehouse/sorting center with a small office for customers and they even had 3 parking spaces! (See how hard parking is to come by?? I was excited by 3 spaces! Sad, huh....) I went in expecting really expensive shipping that probably wouldn't be as quick as I would like. It is guaranteed to get to our agency by 10:30 on Wednesday, which is great!! (Time change really works for us in that instance) It was 58 Euros, but that's still a lot cheaper than the prices I found on DHL's website and I don't know how quickly they were going to get there. All in all, I was incredibly excited!
Everything's moving along and it looks like our documents should make it to Crescent Moon before our deadline on September 13th! Yay!! Though, I did hate having to try to explain to L that we still have to wait a bit more before we can get Z. She was skipping along as we left the embassy thinking we were literally going to go pick her up already. It's going to be a great day when I can finally tell her (& DJ) that we are, in fact, on our way!!
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