slightly annoying

so my mom and i realised that our passports were going to expire soon so being good immigrants in England (yes there are such persons) we looked into how to renew it. and so starts the process that eventually lead to me nearly biting my tongue off to stop myself exploding with verbal abuse all over the policeman over the counter...

do you know what the form B73 is?? no? well neither do i. there are so any different forms all so specific that its impossible to find the right one. so we make a choice, still not sure, and send them off. two weeks later we get a letter telling us we sent the wrong ones.

ok alright which are the right ones? you'd assume they'd tell us wouldn't you? nooooo of course not we had to phone someone who conected us to someone else at the south african embassy who had to get his manager and then put us on hold while they found out what to do.

well we finally got the answers. THREE different forms. i must say my mom and i have the funniest conversations while on hold. i believe one involved the purpose of a hole in bagels. still dont know

Anyway so we fill them out. fine. realise we need fingerprints on one of them. phone them up. they tell us we have to go to LONDON to the embassy to do them. when they realised our we weren't too impressed by that answer the guy said we can go to any police station in our area. so we walk down to our local police station. they don't have holding cells so they can't do them.

off to the one uptown we go. stand in line behind a guy who's responding to a bailiff warning or something. shaved head, big puffy jacket, sneaking a smoke outside every now and then. after about half an hour we get to the front, smelling like an ashtray and we ask if can have our fingerprints taken and we show all the forms and identification only to be told we should have made an appointment. grrrrrr!

we make an appointment for the next day. The next day we arrive with all our forms ready we get to the front; they say take a seat we'll call you when we're ready for you. so we wait while a girl pretty much sits on our laps trying to squeeze on a seat while talking loudly to her boyfriend about contraception. 45!!!! minutes later we speak to an officer who very politely tells us we need our photos signed by a professional before we can have our fingerprints taken.

This is the point where i could have drawn blood from biting my tongue. Surely they could have mentioned this the day before?!

and that is where we're at now, phoning the doctor's to try and get them to sign our photos but, of course because luck has decided to disown me, there are no appointments until the end of june. and they won't just see me for a few minutes.

this may be the longest post i've ever written. well that's the life in the shoes of an South African immigrant in England. lol ah well life here is more good than bad. and it's fun to tell the stories.

Kez*