Bonjour readers! It has been a very long time since I last updated this blog. But alas, nothing much was going on that needed to be documented. Until now. Well, actually, a couple of months ago, around May-ish. But, I got so swept up in the process that I haven’t had time to tell you about it! So, I’m going to backtrack a little. (And some of the posts may come out of chronological order.)

On getting a passport:

DO NOT DELAY. I repeat, DO NOT DELAY.

I didn’t have a passport before this year because my parents did not want to pay for a piece of document that I would not use any time soon. So, seeing that I was finally going overseas, I needed to get one. I had already made plans to get a passport back in the second half of 2012, but my mom said, “No! Why do you need to get one so early?” I think she was probably in denial that I was going to leave for a whole year when the longest I’ve been away from my family so far is 3 days.

Anyways, my friends were telling me, oh, sometimes it takes months to get your passport! You don’t have one already?! You need to get one NOW. Well, that scared the heck out of me. So why didn’t I get one until several months ago? Well….

Aside from my mother discouraging me from getting one early, she also told me to take the passport photos myself because it’s such a waste of money to go to a store and get my photos taken. BUT, there are no white walls in our house and the requirements that one has to meet (size of the photo, no shadows, face takes up this much space, etc.) were daunting. I had to find somewhere to take the photo, I had to take the photo myself (with my faux tripod), and I had to edit the photo to fit the size requirements. Oh. My. God. So naturally, as difficult as this actually wasn’t, I kept putting it off for months and months and months. (Also, being very picky, I had to look perfect in real life to look decent in a photograph. So if I didn’t feel pretty that week, I put off the task for another.) Until I realized, oh wow, I’m leaving in less the 4 months! I need a passport.

So, I had to coerce my family members to help take pictures of me (since my tripod wasn’t good enough), but the lighting was terrible in my house, no one in my family knows how to center or focus, the piece of white oak tag was not large enough to cover the background unless you took the photo at the perfect distance and angle, and I plainly looked TERRIBLE in all my head shots. (FYI, I am not photogenic in the least.)

Here are some lovely photos for your viewing:

The wonderful white oak tag that barely covers the wall.

My sister does not know how to focus a camera or how to stop laughing…

I told my mom, I give up. These photos suck. I need to go to a store to get my pictures done. So I took a trip with my dad to Costco and wow, I should have done this months ago. $5 for 4 photos. That’s a great deal. They let me see the picture before they printed it out and if I wasn’t satisfied, they simply took another one. (This was another issue my mother had with taking photos at a store. She said that if you looked bad in your photo, that was it. They wouldn’t retake it. I think my mom is living in the days before digital photography became the norm.) Overall, it took 5 minutes to take the photos, print them out, and pay for them. (A week later, I took the rest of the family, mom included, to get their passport photos done and my mom was very happy with the quality and quickness of the photo-taking process. Also, didn’t hurt that she looked fabulous in her photos.)

I went to the post office near my house on Wednesday morning, May 1, only to discover that the post office doesn’t process passports on the first, second, and third days of the month. 🙁 So I returned the next Monday. No line, but it took about 40 minutes for the employee to process my application. I think it was her first time. But no worries. Everything went pretty smoothly. A weight off my shoulders. Side note: Ladies and gents, if you want to avoid unnecessary fees, do not delay. I had to pay for expedited processing and shipping. I can’t remember the exact cost now, but it was SO EXPENSIVE. Expensive and avoidable. The worst kind.

Then, I went to orientation at Queens College and they talked about doing some CampusFrance process (more about that in a later post) before applying for a visa. What. I clearly had not read the instructions carefully. So the next day, I went online to fill out the CampusFrance forms, but lo and behold, I needed my passport number in order to even get past the first step :'(. I sat on my bed frustrated at my horrible life decisions. However, luck must have been smiling upon me because, my dad came home an hour later with mail for me, including my passport! Yay! Wow, talk about great timing.