Visa Experiences

Visa Experience!!
I am writing it now sitting at the hotel after my visa has been approved – and myself pretty much relaxed and after receiving all the congratulations from near and dear ones. It was pretty simple and the questions were pretty normal like why you are leaving the job or what was the purpose of your earlier visit and how would you finance your education…So the interview went in a very normal way – very different then how my previous day had gone.

To summarize my yesterday’s experience in short – If there was anything that could go wrong, it simply went wrong. To start with , I took the visa forms for Xerox and the stupid lady did a Xerox in the back side of one original form and misplaced another copy of the DS158 form. Then I came back home and took copies again of those file ( luckily internet was there) , and started searching for a internet café for printing them out. It was as if I was staying in a jungle – one shop did not have power and the other had a problem with printer and then finally got lucky the third time.

Then came back home, papers are ready but just thought that let me confirm my hotel booking once. I called the hotel up and they said that the room was not reserved by mistake and somehow it had slipped and all the rooms are full and they are extremely sorry for the mistake. The easiest way out for anyone after committing a blunder. I really hate those words – regret, sorry.

Anyway, good that I called up and checked out or would have roamed around Chennai which would have been a icing over the cake with people really very understanding here.

Well then located a hotel through internet around 1 km radius of US consulate and booked it. It makes me wonder sometime what people did when there was no internet. Did people do such kind of stupidity at that time also???

As if that was not enough, then I got ready and went out to get some cash for the trip and then got a call from Indian Airlines that the flight was delayed – not by 1 or 2 but by 4 hours. And that is all the information that they have. Wow!! And to add salt to injury she says generally the Chennai flight is on time and I can say it is bad luck that the flight is delayed today – As if I did not know that.

I had booked IA while I was getting Deccan tickets for half the cost to avoid this and I was sitting in the airport for my long wait of 6 hours while the deccan flight went of with a 20 min delay and the flight was full.

Then after a 3 hours wait, I decided to hop into Indigo – as their flight was on time (and payed a premium for that) and I cancelled the IA ticket and then reached Chennai and rest is history. I would be on my way back to Hyderabad in a couple of hours.