Join the queue

You would have thought that we were lining up to meet the Dalai Lama or A Bathing Ape t-shirts? But no. I was in a queue lining up with my sister to get her EU residence card (her bag was stolen and she had to replace the contents). Her famous last words when we left the house, "Don't worry, it won't take long we get to jump the queue because we are only collecting." Once we get there, a rotund bureaucrat sent us on our merry way to the back of the line which went around the block. Three hours later we were still in the bloody queue! Anyway, I will never complain about Australian red tape ever again because the Spanish Ministry of the Interior needs to take a good hard look at itself for inefficiency. And do you know what my sister was told after three hours? Come back in 25 days and collect your card! Couldn't they have just sent her the bloody card instead of making her collect it? They only had about 6 counters opened for applications for residence cards for about 300 people and it's only opened from 0830-1430. Unluckily for us, the window of opportunity to grant illegals amnesty to apply for residence in the EU was just opened this week, while at the same time all Romanians living in Spain were also getting their cards (Romania of course having just joined the EU), which may the queue super long.

On a positive note, it was kinda fun people watching. They also had police manning the queues because they can't trust people to act civilised when it comes to lining up.

Cervantes
After the lining up we grabbed some lunch and then headed to a town east of Madrid called Alcala de Henares. It's a university town with really nice churches. Perched on the tops of these churches are storks' nests. How cool is that? We also popped in the home of Miguel de Cervantes. I wouldn't mind a home with a courtyard in the middle of it. There's also a well and really old copies of books that Cervantes had written in different languages.

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