Thursday 12/11/14 Balance

Today was Visa day. Two other volunteers and myself had to travel into Colombo to get our visa renewed at the immigration center. The whole process is incredibly long and causes quite a headache. You start by having to pay to get your picture taken which was stupid cuz they didn't even glance at the picture or really the form we filled out in general. Then you have to give them your passport which scared me a bit. You end up having to "take a ticket" wait 1 hr, "take a ticket" wait an hr, and the process continues until you get to the end where you have to pay..... and the clerk tells you your request doesn't exist and you have to start the process over. So that was fun. While waiting all of this time we chatted with our projects abroad visa rep and the topic of tattoos came up. After a long discussion the other night with my host sister about the Sinhala language, I had her write out "Balance" in Sinhala symbols in the thought of potentially getting that as a tattoo before I left. So during this period of waiting, I decide that today would be the day... just gonna do it. So after the visa process was completed we headed to a tattoo place (don't worry mom and dad, the place was recommended to us by a projects abroad staff and everything was sterile and went well). haha with that said, I never would have walked into this place otherwise. There were two places that we were to check out. One was super ritzy and with that, super expensive, so that was out. We walked down to the next one and from the outside it looks kinda like a tailor or small clothing store and then you walk behind a curtain and there was a one-seat tattoo parlor. cute family-run place with a little 1-2 year old boy running around and a movie playing in the background... it was actually a nice distraction during the inking. Overall, love the tattoo, it's on the inside of my left ankle and is totally awesome :)