Taboo Places (18PL)

The other day I was searching for a photoshop to make a biometric picture of me for my visa extension. I have some pictures of myself but they are not biometric pictures. Biometric pictures are used by the law enforcement agencies and in immigration documents to allow face recognition to be possible. This is done by taking measurements such as the distance between the eyes and the length of the mouth. This data is stored in a database for future reference. So each time your face is scanned, say, in an airport, the computer will compare your face with the face measurements in the database. Basically the picture must be with a light background (usually light gray) and the face must be at a certain measurement from the border of the photo. Oh ya, did i mention that you are not allowed to smile in the picture? You must maintain a natural expression for the photo. But it is advised for you to put on your most innocent face to avoid being misidentified as a terrorist or an international drug dealer.

Anyway searching for a photoshop was not as easy as i expected it to be. I searched along the shopping district on the way back from work but there were non to be found. I even asked my neighbor about it, but for some reason the shop was not at the place mention by him. I think i took over an hour walking around Mannheim to search for the photoshop to no avail. Then i started to realize i was doing something not quite the standard of an intelligent mammal. I remembered that there was an automatic photo machine in the foreign registers office. What the heck am i doing walking around like a lost kid searching for a photoshop...

But what really puzzled me was, while it was so hard to find a photoshop around Mannheim, there were more than 5 erotic shops within a 500 meter radius of my office and im not joking! everywhere i go,there is an erotic store. Apparently these people put no effort on making their business as discreet as possible when their signboard was as big as an elephant. In case you don't know what an erotic shop is, it is a shop where many different mysterious and absurd items of sexual nature are sold. But dont for a moment think that i have entered it. Im better off at the children section of H&M stores. But it does trouble me sometimes because it doesn't seem that Germans are the type of people that can make these kind of business prosper, but i guess the number of erotic shops suggests otherwise. There are more erotic shops per square KM here than the number of Bumiputera Commerce outlets per square KM in KL. I guess we wont be using the phrase "BCB dekat aje" here, instead.......(You can guess).

Anyway, I finally got to take a picture at the automatic photo machine in the foreign registers office. It was quite cool. u put in 6 euro, follow the instructions on the screen. There will be like a video camera and your face will be displayed on the screen in front of you, where you can adjust the position of your face so that it is in the circle. the circle is to ensure that your face is at the correct position in the picture. If ur not satisfied with ur picture u can take it again. But u can only do this 3 times so that there wont be a riot in front of the photo machine. So everything went well and i lost 15 euros to make the visa extension, which sucks since i already had to pay 119euros for the insurance for this month.

And I have another 2 to go....