Friday, April 29, 2011

Milestone Reached

I travelled so much, my passport is full of stamps.  Silly...but that makes me so happy!!! 

It's so FULL, in fact that I wasn't sure that I would have enough space to get HOME, so I had to get new pages for it today at the American Embassy in Buenos Aires. 

The process went a little something like this:

1) Take bus across town around 9am.
2) Walk twenty minutes to Embassy.
3) Skip past longest line ever and go straight into the "American Citizens" section.
4) Relinquish camera.
5) Get number A701 and wait in DMV-style lounge area for my number to be called.
6) Answer "no" to the question, "did you fill out the form?"  oops!
7) Fill out the form.
8) Return the form.
9) Get sent to another window to pay $82 fee.
10) Return to original window with receipt of payment.
11) Get told to return at 2:30pm to pick up passport with extra pages.
12) Arrive home at 3:30pm with big, fat, extra-pages-passport.
13) Noted to self:  At renewal, request 52-page passport.  It's completely free if you ask upfront!

All told, pretty painless.  I can't say the same for these poor schlubs (waiting outside, just to get into the Embassy...they probably didn't yet know they were only standing in line to get a number to stand in another line where they would be fingerprinted and then given yet another number for the DMV-like lounge area, and, after having waited forever to be helped, would then only have to stand in the final line, for which I couldn't determine the purpose):

And this was the line for the bathroom.  Wakka wakka.

No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...