Fun Times at immigration

So I (Jason) had a long day as it started at 6 am when we left to get into metro manila at a good time to get our visa's stamped for another month. I asked a neighbor to help me with getting there and all the ins and outs of it. So off we went to the wrong building, the kind guard said, "oh no you have to go to the canadian embassy for that." I told him I thought that filipino immigration had to stamp my passport not the canadian! But with his insistence off we went to Makati, about a twenty minute taxi in rush hour. We finally found our way to the building and into the Canadian embassy. They kindly informed us that we had been misinformed and that we needed to go to the Immigration office of the Philippines. So back we went past the first building to go to a new building. When we arrived there they then said, not this building but one down the block. We finally made it!!! The officer there said sorry sir this is a government building you can't come in here, with shorts on!! I thought no problem that is why I brought my neighbor she can go in and get them stamped. But no dice she needed to get certified by a notary, or I needed pants! So I decided that since she needed to be certified to do this stuff in the future we should just embark on her adventure now. We got the paper work and met a kind gentlemen from the immigration office who offered to do the work for us and teach her how to do it in the future. He took his 25 dollars but in the end this too was a waste as she needed five notary signed papers and five days to do one passport per day.!!??? In the end my passports disappeared behind the counter to some lady who was going to charge us 13 dollars per passport. Because of the holidays(easter) we could not renew our visa's on the day before they expired, as they were closed. As a result we were fined 25 dollars for each expired passport as well as a few other strange fees?? No big deal except when your day is full of these "no big deals" it seems all things add up to a kind of big deal. All in all we are feeling a little frusterated! We expected to pay around 125 per month for our visas instead the first month was about 500. We might just look into this and find a cheaper way????