Visa appointment

Well my letter from SA arrived, so I called the embassy and made an appointment to submit my application (20 minutes on a £1 per min line!).

I took it in on Wednesday morning and proceeded to have possibly the most stressful, horrible day of my life so far. The short story is that I saw 3 different people, who all told me different things, I spent 2 hours running (literally) between the embassy and a nearby internet cafe getting faxes sent from SA, photocopying extra documents and printing off possible flights. It was quite simply a nightmare! The staff lived upto their reputation of being difficult and rude - one even called me stupid to my face. But after all that they processed my application same day.

So at 3pm I arrived back at the embassy after a lovely lunch with my friend Lindsey. The queue was enormous and the room appeared to be in disarray. I finally reached the front of the queue to be told that my application was successful. I had been told earlier that there might be a problem with my funding so that was a relief. Such a relief that I didn't immediately notice that they'd given it to me for completely the wrong dates! I had asked for it to start on 3rd January 09 - this is what all my documents stated, was the date of the flight I had printed off, the date Dihlabeng Church stated in their fax. However, the visa began immediately. This is not a problem except that it leaves me 3 months short at the other end.

So then I joined another queue to ask for it to be changed. The long and short of it is that it became quite clear that the lady at the desk didn't have a clue, and was just making stuff up on the spot to deal with the large volume of people with incorrect visa's. In the end she offered to keep my passport and look into changing it - but there was no way after a day like that I was leaving my passport with them - I genuinely think I would probably never see it again! So I walked away - at least I have a visa valid for the first 21 months. I'll cross the bridge of the extra 3 months when I get to it.