After our visit to the immigration office yesterday, which required additional paperwork, most of today was spent running around trying to satisfy that requirement. Fortunately our agent has been extremely helpful in getting various members of his family or friends to ferry us around and act as our interpreters; today was a very lovely lady, his sister, who took us to the local tax office to pay the “one-off visa payment”, which we subsequently learnt was required specifically because of our citizenship. Once that was completed, with receipts in hand, our agent tackled the next hurdle; getting local medical insurance coverage for us. The kink in this requirement was that the immigration officer had clearly indicated that the coverage had to be backdated to coincide with our application date, but no insurance company permits backdated coverage. We’ve asked for a letter to explain this to the immigration officer, but who knows if that will suffice. You’d swear we were the first people ever to go through this process! Sooooo frustrating, not to mention the additional expense, all of which has cost us the equivalent of $512.75USD to date. Roy was shelling out 100TL bills today as if we’d found a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow! By then we needed a nice walk and stopped in at Café de Valencia for a late morning coffee.
However, by the time we’d returned to the marina, the wind was absolutely howling again and the temperature had dropped sharply. That was our cue to remain onboard for the rest of the afternoon. So much for Spring; we’ve clearly forgotten what the weather is like in this neck of the woods, but we’d somehow expected the Mediterranean to be a lot warmer by now, compared to our experience of the UK at this time of the year.
Elaine passed her afternoon catching up with the family in Ireland; first a nice long chat with her sister, then with her folks.
Roy, on the other hand, re-engineered our “passerelle”, indicating that it was of process of “continuous improvements”. Well, let’s hope the contraption works a little better and doesn’t keep us up at night, now that it’s moved to the starboard side of the transom and on a pulley system.
