After the wonderfully cruddy serving of life that we were dealt yesterday, today was substantially better. We went to the US consulate again for an interview, which basically turned out to be “simply hand over more documents and go away while we assess them”. This made us glad we’d bothered to write it all down in case it was not a face-to-face interview.

We lodged the documents at 10:30am and by 12:00pm, we fnally got the response. We did not like our chances - the same woman was delivering everyone’s final verdicts and she had rejected pretty much all of them that we had seen that morning. Frightening stuff.

We finally got there and she asked us some basic questions about our travel plans. As soon as we explained how we were leaving the US to go to Canada, then returning back into the US again after a while, she was fine with the whole deal. No problems.

Why she was mollified by this when the rejection letter was more concerned we had no ties back to Australia was beyond us. However, we did not overly care at that point - the final verdict was that we were permitted to get a visa to enter the United States. Hurrah!

Of course, the visa is only a piece of paper that lets the INS decide whether or not they are going to let us into the country and for how long, but we’re a lot better off with one than standing in Australia without the chance to get into the INS office.

The downside of all this is that we now have to forever fill out the forms and answer “YES” to “Have you ever been rejected for a US visa?”. That’s not the real problem. The real problem is the next question - “If so, why?”.

What do you put there? “The initial reason for rejection was because there were concerns we had no ties to Australia but the secondary lodging of documents made them happier and they were concerned about something else entirely”. Write all that in a half-inch space. Except you don’t want to write that, because it’s being smarmy about the staff and they will be able to get their revenge by not issuing a visa to you on that occasion.

That’s got to be a great job if you love power - they hold the monopoly on visas, after all…

Still, much better news, and to all the good folk of the US reading this (and let’s face it, if you’re from the US and on this list, you must be one of the better ones…*grin*), we will be able to see the land of liberty, freedom and drive-by ghetto shootings in a few short weeks.

21 days to go….

Categories: Travel, Odyssey 2001