Visits and Visas

Plans for the summer break are coming to fruition. To our deep delight the Gnomadettes UK visa was issued two days ago. Depending how you look at this, it either took three days or three months.

The actual issuing of the visa took three days; application form, passport and supporting documentation dispatched via DHL to British Embassy, returned two days later avec visa.

DHL have a good arrangement for passports to the Embassy. You go in and dispatch the documents, paying for outbound and return carriage, DHL pays the Embassy fees (they won't carry cash) and then you collect your documents from them, reimbursing the Embassy fees DHL has incurred. Pretty straightforward. Well something in the Magic Kingdom has to be.

What took the time was getting the embassy to say what documents were actually required. This took months. If you look on the Embassy website it gives a general list of required documents but says to check with the local diplomatic mission (ie the Enbassy) what other documents are required for your specific country of departure. So, duly emailing the Embassy for local requirements the Gnomads recieved the response "check out our website" having replied that the website said to contat the embassy, the next reply aksed a couple of apparently pertinent questions and promised, once these questions were answered, a full and complete response.

Questions duly answered the reply came back "check out the website for the documents you need" This went round and round several times until eventually the visa section emailed a list of documents. This list was apparently cut and pasted directly from the website (or there was a phenomenal coincidence in text, font, colour formatting and spelling errors, but I suspect not)

so with no further information forthcoming the documents et al were couriered off the the Embassy. Where they were not accepted as they weren't all present! Everything on the list had been sent, I checked it about fourteen times. No this was another document, one that had not previously been mentioned. Fortunately DHL were really on the ball, rather than return the package they called us with what the Embassy had said and advised us to fax the missing document through, and said they would hold the delivery untilwe called them to confirm the document had been recieved. I suspect they had had this problem before because, as it turned out, the DHL guy delivering to the embassy was on first name terms with members of the visa section. The next day the missing document was duly obtained and faxed through, DHL did their stuff and the day after the Gnomadettes passport was duly returned with the visa safely inside.

Plans are now afoot to be in the UK for the first two weeks of July, or thereabouts. defintie dates will be circulated by other means.