Alien Adventures

I was an illegal alien for eleven days.
Me, little miss follow-all-international-laws. I misunderstood how long my visa was valid for. It expired. Who’d have thunk.
I was told to report to the police by the immigration powers that be. Not a pleasant thing to hear when you have no clue what the laws of the land are for overstaying foreigners. After being assured by a friend that they would probably just slap me with a penalty fine, or worse case scenario, deport me, I went and trudged up to my local police precinct .
I ended up paying a fine. I then reported back to immigration for a visa I technically had no use for, as I was leaving anyway.
Trust me to get into a scrap like this.
Had the immigration dudes given me a hard time, I had planned on telling them that I had Chinese ancestry by playing up my Sino sounding middle name: Cha-lu-yan.
In the end, the officer only asked why Filipinos had such long names. The Chinese don’t have middle names. I told him our middle names were our Mother’s maiden names. I was about to tell him mine, but thought better of prolonging my stay at the Overstaying room.