Getting passports

Looking back, the last time JE went outside Malaysia was wayyy back in 2011 when she was below 2 years old.  SE was in my tummy then.  As I kept telling her, she did go overseas and why didn't she open her eyes properly to see the sights?  Hahaha.  Well after there were two kids it was just too difficult to travel far.  Hubby would get grumpy if he had to take care of them for long, I felt it wasn't worth paying for the maid to come along and I alone wouldn't have been able to manage.  So we coasted along with local trips.  Hubby went overseas with his friends.  I was fine to wait, having travelled enough for work before the kids came along.

Then the pandemic happened, and subsequently hubby had brain tumour surgery with an aftermath which took a couple of years to stabilise.  After that SE had the bout with anorexia.

Finally the time seemed right to go overseas again.  Hubby felt stable enough to resume and SE was on the way to recovery.

Step one, we had to get passports for myself and the kids.  Apart from a work trip to Brazil, I had been grounded for oh, as long as JE. :)

Woke up 5am one weekday morning (not easy for non-morning people) and made it to the Shah Alam UTC before 6m.  From google, got ourselves to the right place and woohoo, FIRST!

All set!

Erm our delight would be short-lived.  Fast forward to 8am when the place opened. They announced the system was down.  It remained down until 10am when the officers informed that the technician they'd called to look into the issue hadn't even arrived.  Sigh.  What a waste of a day.  I had to take leave and JE declared she was too tired to go to school that afternoon.

Our second attempt was on a Saturday again waking up at 5am. There were MANY people.  Halfway though, the line to process passports went down.  TWICE.  And it was discovered that my IC had to be changed and there were MANY people there too.  Sobs.  And then.... the line to process IC went down as well.  The problem with these things is you just didn't know whether it would be better to persevere since you had already sacrificed your time that day, or to give up and try again another day.  I had pretty much given up but decided to have lunch there first.  Luckily the line went back up after lunch, the officer was nice enough to let me back into queue and we eventually walked out with passports at 3pm.  WHAT A DAY. 
 

At least in future we can just do online (not this time as SE was below 12).  Anothing thing, I'd thought JE was a first-timer and couldn't apply online.  Totally forgot that she had a passport as a toddler sigh.  So firstly she could have done this whole thing online.  And secondly, had to put her old passport as lost or we would have had to return another day with that old passport in order to proceed with getting a new one.  I had no wish to grapple with this a third day.  

Note here that it would cost RM400 if she loses her passport in future 'again'.  Just don't ever lose your passport, JE!