A morning at the police station

Today we took the bus 'downtown' for our appointments at the questura (police station)  for our permesso di soggiorni.  They were very helpful, possibly because our declaration of residence was signed by Luisa, Lisa's mom, who worked at the Chioggia station for 20 years and has a lot of friends there!  We needed an additional proof of income, which we had on the computer but couldn't print and they put it on a flash drive, then printed it for us.  Then they went through a complicated series of pictures, fingerprinting (impronta) and more fingerprinting (in the basement which felt like being in prison--the questura is in a very old building in the center of town).  The officer who did the second set of fingerprints told us the wife of the captain is an American from Florida and asked if we kinew her, then called her and told her 2 Americans were getting a 1 year permesso.  Turns out she is actually from Pittsburgh.  Even though we kept telling the officers that we were born in Tacoma, Washington  and Seattle,Washington  respectively, they clearly thought we meant Washington DC and I am afraid the forms they filled out may have this incorrect information.   I wanted to take a picture of Tom being fingerprinted, but it seemed like that might not be a good idea, so I controlled the impulse.  Since our appointments were on market day, we walked back through the open air market, buying such essentials as a loofah and a bathmat before getting on the bus home, stopping first at the cafe near our apartment to use the internet to figure out how to get the codice fiscale which we have to obtain and return to the questura in a few days.

Tom reading the Seattle Times on the kindle at our cafe