no more jailbait

i'm legal. it's official. i even have the paperwork to prove it... now i'll feel much better about wandering around outside my apartment because if i get randomly stopped by the cops i'll have something to show them.

so today maggie (the admin here) and i finally went to get this issue resolved. this was after two weeks of "tomorrow" we'll take care of it. (and if it's wasn't tomorrow it was always today until i never heard anything back and it became tomorrow by default.)
we first went to a management building at my apartment where we met some guy working there (let's call him bob) that had been authorized by the landlord to handle this issue. he took us to a second management office where we filled out a bunch of paperwork and i had to sign some forms. then we went back to the first office to pick up more paperwork. at this point bob realized that he didn't have his "official" chinese id card. this was a problem since he needed that card to do the registration on behalf of the landlord. so began the unfruitful quest for the landlord. after an hour we gave up on finding the landlord and decided to head to the police station to give it a try anyway.
unlike the last time when we were there (when the police station was deserted) the police station was a mob scene. there was a huge number of people there, all chinese, and they all seemed to be registering. this was lucky for us because the extremely unfriendly woman that refused to help us last time was there but she was busy yelling at other people so we managed to get a more friendly officer. (bob actually told maggie that he'd had lots of problems with the unfriendly woman before.) after about half an hour of talking with the friendlier cop it was determined that i actually could register. this took another half hour and i finally left the police office with a small sheet of paper the size of a check that indicated that i was officially registered. i quickly took this piece of paper to work and photocopied it so that i could carry the copy with me at all times.
i'm glad that's over.