Hi everyone! Here’s another day of my visit to the Department Foreign Affairs (DFA) in Davao City on Tuesday, August 27, 2024.
The first part of my article did not talk about the DFA’s exact location. So, I thought maybe it will help foreigners who are here or planning to come here in case they have a transaction with DFA if I share how to get there.
The office is located on the 3rd floor inside the building of SM City Ecoland. SM City Ecoland is a mall with 2 buildings: the Main Building and the Annex Building. The DFA is inside the Main Building. The Main building has 4 entry points: PETCO entrance, grocery entrance, Chowking entrance and National Bookstore entrance. You may choose any entrance, but I got in the Chowking entrance. If you take the same entrance, you will immediately see a Rotunda terrace on the 2nd floor.
The Main Building also has 4 escalators. Take the one where Bo’s Coffee is located because it will lead you all the way up to the DFA on the 3rd floor.
As mentioned in my previous article, we had a smooth transaction during the application stage. After the online application, we did not have to line up for a long time because there were not many people outside the DFA.
My children and I were supposed to claim our passports last August 23, but because it was a holiday, it was moved yesterday. Monday was also a holiday here, so there were 2 holidays that passed.
Yesterday, I was not lucky enough though. While still on the escalator, I noticed that 3rd floor was crowded. From where I stood on the escalator, I saw that seats in front of Door 1 of the DFA were all taken.
There were people seated in front of the 2 doors of the DFA.
Those who were seated fronting Door 1 were waiting to be called to process their online application (interview, payment and encoding/photo-taking). Those seated fronting Door 2 was waiting for their turns to claim their passports. Therefore, I had to sit with a bunch of people waiting for their passport to be released.
A regular day in DFA Davao does not look like this. It just happened that there were 2 holidays (August 23 and 26) that passed so applications and releases piled up and got pending.
Hhhhmmmm…what to do?
I went around the mall first to kill boredom then ate! I was alone because my kids had their classes, so I felt sad. So many thoughts came to my mind again. sigh Part of aging maybe. Haha!
After a while I went to 3rd floor and hoped my turn was nearing, but still had to wait for more than an hour. Data connection was good, so I watched the news while waiting for our names to be called. When called, I just had to check the entry of our information on the passport. If they were all correct, then I’m good to go. Otherwise, it had to be redone. Good thing, our details were accurate and properly encoded, so I had to surrender our old passports. The DFA employee got them then when he came back, I finally got our new passports while our old passports were punched with holes to indicate they cannot be used anymore.
Voila!
The eagles of Davao will soon travel the world!
