Official Business

I finally have my visa! After months of stressing about forms and rules and qualifications, the actual visa interview was amazingly casual. And/or sketch.

I spent the night previous to my interview in Seattle with my friend Shannon, and left early in the morning for a 10:30 appointment at the consulate. After the I-5 morning traffic and a scenic route through Olympia, I was feeling pretty good. All that changed as my mapquest directions ended at a condominium development. After freaking out for a few minutes, I called to confirm the address and get the phone number from my brother. The address was right: I was looking at the Chilean consulate inside an upscale gated residential community. I called, just to figure out what was going on, and received no answer.

At near panic, I paced the sidewalk in front of the gate. There was a car of confused-looking Latinos staring at the gates and street signs, which I took to be a good sign. Deep breath, enter the gate. The consulate itself was exactly like each of the other condos in the park: columned, white, with manicured lawns and flowerbeds... and a basketball hoop in the driveway. Very sketch. Even more sketch when I heard voices inside but had my doorbell rings ignored.

Eventually, a short man in khaki cargo shorts and a red tshirt opened the door, barked at me to take off my shoes, sit down, and wait. I was so nervous I was happy for any instruction. Twenty minutes of mob-sounding Spanish conversation from the upstairs later, Jorge Gilbert, the consulate official ran down the stairs, barked to me to follow, and ran back upstairs.

The actual interview was nothing. He corrected a few things on my form, had me cut down my passport-sized photos to fit the form in triplicate, and took my thumbprint. Then he stamped my visa into my passport, filling out the relevant details by hand. THEN he asked me for the documents I had so painstakingly gathered over the past two months. All that work, completely an afterthought. Argh.

Not complaining too much, however, since I'M LEGALLY READY TO GO!