The Hospital Privado let us out again on Wednesday morning. Luckily mummy had managed to dash into town between feeds and more or less put the cot together. So now Joni has a proper bed, complete with orange Teddy, who was hand-made by David, one of the guys whom Martin visits in prison. 
Latest addition to the list of complaints… being put in his cot. O perverse boy-child of your father… Yesterday we had one of those “Argentina days”. We need to register Joni and begin the process of obtaining his birth certificates, ID documents, and eventually passports. We also had a parcel to collect from the post-office. So we thought we’d go to the registry office and make a start. First problem, we weren’t sure which of the several registry offices we needed. So we went to the one that is already handling our own paperwork as foreigners. Wrong answer. But they told us which one we should go to.
So we took a taxi across town. Right place, wrong time. “You need to take a ticket, and we start giving out tickets at seven in the morning, and if you want a ticket for today then you need to arrive before they are all gone, which is usually around nine o’ clock”. But of course. We did manage to find out what we would need to bring to increase that chances of making progress on our next visit. Passports, and a certificate of place of residence which apparently can be obtained from the police. So on to the central police station.
The butch looking police-women in scary uniforms cooed and gurgled over our baby; one of them actually took him off into the back office to show to the other staff. They even directed us to the correct department of the police station. Right place, right time. In order to obtain a certificate of place of residence you need to bring: passports, got those; residency papers, got those; and two witnesses who are Argentinian nationals, with valid Argentinian DNI documents, darn, dead end. There’s one to organise. So we thought we’d take advantage of being in the right area of town and walk to the main post-office to collect the parcel.
Wrong post-office. Please excuse us for not guessing that “CBB 4” printed on a piece of card referred to some back-street sub-post-office in some random part of the city that we hadn’t thought to go and visit. So we took another taxi across town and lo and behold there was our parcel. Hooray! It’s all a treasure hunt.
Monday’s job… back to that registry office.