It's a visa story...

Hi all,

I just checked Fanny has been quite active recently so I need to keep up and add my bit to this blog.

So here we go a funny story to start with.

How to get a visa for the USA?

As most of you know, the US have a visa waiver program for most of western Europe (apart of the Greeks but well... ) and so for French citizen as well .... if you have a recent enough passport, which is not my case.

So here I go, applying for a US visa. And that's when the race started.

When you want a visa from the US you can't just pop down to their embassy in London. No,no,no. First you need to call an overpriced call center to book an appointment, then 4 weeks after you need to queue .... a lot ....
First you need to queue outside to get into the embassy (in the cold of course) then you need to queue to go through security checks, then you need to queue again to get a ticket to queue to give all your paperwork and have your hands scanned for fingerprints.
Then you have to queue, ...... again, to wait for your visa approval.

And after 5 and a half hours of queuing, 3 security checks (I still don't understand why 1 is not enough) and seeing human beings for roughly 10 minutes they give you (or not) your visa.

No wait you have to queue again to fill up the forms to get your passport sent back to you.

In comparison, Australian visas took 5 minutes over the internet and Vietnamese visas just 10 minutes queuing at their embassy.

But all this waiting and queuing is well worth it because after 1 months and a half you have a nice sticker on your passport saying you are trustworthy enough to enter the USA :) yeah!

And know I need to translate all that in French so for our French speakers I promise I'll do it asap.