I was well enough to accompany Val this morning to the Immigration Office, where we were going to procure HK identity cards, with which we hoped to corroborate our claimed status as students. I had no trouble obtaining mine, but Val ran up against an unexpected obstacle. It was partly of her own making, but she wasn’t to know that at the time. The lady who helped Val fill out her application form copied her name from her new passport, then asked Val to verify that it was correct. Val replied, quite truthfully, that it wasn’t, for the first time realising that the passport recorded her name as Valerie Annie. And because of that small slip, + after a good deal of consultation, Val was informed she couldn’t be issued with an ID card until her passport had been amended, at a different office. She was highly pissed off with the whole thing, but went off grumbling while I returned to the hostel to resume my communion in the toilet.
I spent the rest of the day lying around, recovering from my morning excursion. Val returned at lunch-time, fuming about the bureaucratic tangles she had run into – first she had been kept waiting, then told the amendment would take a week, then told the man who could deal with was at lunch. So she returned in the afternoon to join battle once again, but found things flowing much more her way. Her passport was altered, messily but officially, + she was able to obtain her card. A lot of fuss to get hold of a document of distinctly dubious value.
We ate a light meal in the evening, + Val took the box of goodies we wanted to leave behind to Chungking Mansions, to leave in the care of Jean, a long-time resident there, rather than pay the $2 a day storage fee at the hostel. I wasn’t at all sure she had done the right thing, especially as Jean hadn’t been there, + Val had entrusted it to another guy to pass it on for us. Not that the contents are valuable, but I’d far rather have them than not.
We passed away the evening painlessly watching telly. I managed a final snack of beans on bread, + then we were off catching the ferry across to HK island to take the midnight boat to Macao. A bit of a walk on the other side, on distinctly tottery legs, but we arrived at the Macao terminal eventually, bought our tickets, + passed thro’ immigration smoothly enough, + onto the boat, a clean + comfortable set-up. We both had bunks + blankets. I’m not at all sorry to be leaving HK, but am profoundly disturbed by the prospects offered by China.
And so we managed to comp[ete the necessary formalities, and are now on our way once again. Encountering bureaucracy always seems to cause difficulties, so it is remarkable, despite the hassle and her consequent lack of temper, that Val was able to manage to navigate it at all, let alone got an entirely positive result.
