Image via WikipediaIn the past I haven’t posted anything terribly personal here – mostly for privacy reasons – but I don’t have anything impersonal to talk about at the moment.
First of all some background. I live in the US, but I am not an American. I have dual British/Canadian citizenship (long story) and I’m in the US on an L-1B visa. This visa is an intra-company transfer and it is based on me having special skills – FileVision (the company I work for) has US and UK offices, and Jade (the programming language we use) is pretty unusual. As a Canadian, I could have used a TN-1 visa, but my wife is British so she wouldn’t have been allowed to work, whereas because I have an L-1 she can get an L-2 visa which means she can apply for a work permit.
Anyway, our visas would have expired at the end of this month, so we got them extended for another two years. There is, however, a catch – one that I didn’t see anywhere in the visa extension documentation. The visa extension lets you stay in the US for the allowed time, but if you leave the country you have to get a new visa with the new expiry date on it. In hindsight it makes sense – the visa is an inviolate document: you can’t just change the date on it, but that never occurred to me.
The reason it’s a problem is that you have to make an (expensive) appointment at the embassy well in advance, then you have to go there no more than 30 minutes before your appointment and no less than 30 minutes before your appointment and wait in line for (literally) hours. You are also no longer allowed to bring your mobile phone into the embassy, and I feel oddly naked without it (even though I hardly use the thing). Then assuming you haven’t forgotten any of the required paperwork and they agree to issue you the new visa, it takes them up to 5 working days to do put it in your passport. Finally they use a secure courier to deliver your passport to you (any time between 8am and 6pm), and they’ll only give it to you if you can produce ID (other than the passport you no longer have) so you have to sit around all day waiting for them.
I’ve had to take two weeks off work to allow enough time for the whole process, and I’m only in the UK for my brother’s wedding, which should have only taken a couple days.
I did get to see my parents and siblings, who all live in different countries and who I haven’t seen for various amounts of time. Also I’m staying with a friend from the University of Hertfordshire, so that’s been fun.
I have that odd familiar/strange feeling being back here. There’s something soothing about the overcast skies and greenery, but I’d forgotten that English people annoy me as much as Americans do.
