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Monday meant the town was open which meant 2 things: I needed to be registered with the local authority and Maia and James required to apply for their passports ( both my children being dual-nationals)! Off we went in our little Lada 1300SL into town, which in itself was a rollercoaster ride, with only one working seatbelt between us and enough potholes to rattle to back teeth out of a rattlesnake! I spent the journey trying to figure out how I was going to catch my family in the event of a crash as I was the one who had the seatbelt! First to fill in the documents we paid for a local admin assistant to help us complete and type our documentation! This process took 2 hours as the admin person could only type 2 words a minute! Surely the Russians had some trained monkeys from the space race lying around who they could have employed for this menial task!
Customer service is this country really has a lot to be desired! Quite simply it is atrocious! There is no customer service! People are rude! If you enter a store to buy something you are looked at as if you are an annoying distraction that is not worthy of their time and indeed there effort! This woman in the document office was one of these people. I tried my best to help them crack a smile but this could have led to my arrest. Luckily Jamie started to play up and I had to take him out of there before the armed police arrived to find out what had disturbed the peace! 30 minutes later our party left empty handed as it would take "document lady" at least 2 hours to type the information (a total of 100 words).
Off to town to get some passport photos! As we entered, the man with camera smiled and welcomed us into the booth! He was helpful and warm in his approach to us! He waited for Victor to go and get chocolate in order to blackmail Jamie into stopping crying for the 2 seconds it took to achieve a photo! He even offered to email the negatives to Yuliya in case she needed future passport photos! This was really not what we were used to! I think he saw our confusion to his kindness! "I worked in New York City for 5 years, I know what customer service is"! That answered that then!
Back to the farm as upon returning to collect our documents we were told that they would be unlikely be ready for another couple of hours! (Someone had obviously forgotten to get some money to buy peanuts!). The heat was now catching up and we took ourselves back down to the lake in the afternoon. Again packed like the beach at Benidorm with locals. The kids enjoyed their dip into the now quite grimy water! Yuliya, Marina (Yuliya's cousin) and myself decided to swim the 1/2 mile back up to the farm! Away from the noise, the splashing, the rude fat men, the lake is a wonderful oasis of calm! It took 30 minutes to swim back and what a joyous 30 minutes, no children, no noise and no stress!
Jamie had hit a point in the holiday where he was going to be as obstructive to our holiday plans as possible! He would not let Yuliya wander more than a metre away from him! He was not eating and was complaining of "poo poo" the poor lad was obviously constipated. He would not settle at all tonight and kept us all up until he finally gave into his fatigue at 11pm but his night was disturbed throughout.
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