I'll be flying to Kasachstan for the first time on thursday via Riga. Something I've been looking forward to for several years now, but getting a visa proved more complicated than expected, and was a nerve-wracking experience.
We bought the plane tickets about three months in advance, and when I started downloading the visa application form just over a month ago, I realized that my passport wasn't going to be valid for the required six months after the return trip (it was only valid for five), so I looked up the British Embassy's website, which pointed me to the Düsseldorf Consulate, which is now the central Passport renewal office not just for brits living in germany, but also for a whole handful of neighboring eastern european countries as well. They had a passport renewal application form, which I printed. Then I filled half of it out, shaved (burning my thoat badly), grabbed an umbrella, took the metro to a photographer, forgot my umbrella in the tubes, had my bimetric picture taken, and picked up emily from her school -all in about 50 minutes.
When I got home I had to go shopping, and then cook a meal, after which I made the dreadful mistake of baking chocolate chip cookies before completing the form. Because of that I just made it to the post office before it closed, and sent off the renewal form and my old passport without the photos. I only realized that I had forgotten to include the photos when I got back from the post office to take the cookies out of the oven. By then the post office was closed.
So I sent off the photos in a separate envelope on the very same evening (a friday), with a letter explaining everything. On monday I tried in vain to phone the passport section of the Consulate in Düsseldorf. They don't have a number, and the only option is to phone an office in the UK (irish accent) which bills the phoner's credit card about one euro a minute. If you don't have a credit card, you can't contact anyone, but then again, credit card was the only method of payment for the passport renewal anyway. I wasn't quite ready for that, so I phoned the Embassy in Berlin disregarding the voice message telling me that they don't have anything to do with passports, and I was put through to a very friendly lady (I don't mean that sarcastically) who reassured me that yes I had made a pretty good mess of things, but that Düsseldorf would be sure to get both envelopes, and sort things out. She also said that there was a four week delay in Düsseldorf at the moment because the entire computer system had been replaced three weeks previously.
I found all of this not at all reassuring, but I did have about a month to go, so I decided to wait a couple of weeks before panicking.
Two weeks passed. An email I had written remained unanswered, so I had a good long 13 minute phone call with england from which the only thing I learned was that my passport was definately not being proccessed yet. The time had arrived; I decided to panic and phoned first the British Embassy in Berlin, (friendly, promised to write an email to Düsseldorf) and then the Düsseldorf Consulate's switchboard (in Düsseldorf I never got past the switchboard) who was extremely nervous and rude and hung up on me twice. I assume the switchboard operator was so aggrevated because she gets about five hundred calls like mine a day, and she always has to say no, but hanging up before I had finished talking didn't help anyone.
Then I got an sms telling me I had missed a phone call from Düsseldorf, and when I phoned back, I was stuck with the same nervous operator, who isn't allowed to put me through. That was when my panic climaxed. I had a pretty bad headache that evening, and the next morning until I get another call from Düsseldorf in which a german talking really good english tells me that my passport had been finished and sent off on the previous day.
So that's how I managed to make every possible mistake there was to make, and still got my passport renewed. It was strenuous but worth every minute. I spent my panic time well, mostly with flashbacks of past travel mishaps, but also with some good memories of the first time I flew to New York...
I was eight years old, and it was summertime, and the moment I can remember best of all is when we left the airport at around midnight. The waves of nightime heat, hotter than anything I had ever experienced under Englands sun. And the skyscrapers, and scores of long yellow taxi cabs coming and going. I might as well have landed on the moon.
That's what I hope to experience in kasachstan. Something that goes beyond the ordinary, something that changes my perception of the world. I know its impossible; I've seen too much now. My memory's too full, and my subconsciousness constantly compares the present with the past, but with a new passport in my pocket the least I can do is try.
