Is This Our Last Visit to the Embassy?

Today we delivered the application for renewal of our passport to the embassy. This involves filling out and printing a form, finding a place to take passport pictures (easy in China), bringing enough money, and getting an interview appointment. In Beijing it also involves starting out 2 ½ hours before our appointment time. Although we could have taken a taxi we were told that in the morning rush hour a taxi would be stalled and the metro would keep moving. So we opted to take the metro for 45 minutes.

Of course when we got off the metro, we had no way to figure out how to find the embassy from the metro stop and ended up using DiDi, Chinese equivalent of Uber, to get a taxi to take us the half mile to the embassy, just so we would not get lost. When you arrive at the embassy you are struck at how LONG  the line is. It stretches for a few blocks. However, as a citizen of said embassy, one can go in another door and wait in a 10–minute-line. (Although I know it was misplaced guilt at this point, parading past all those 100’s of people to my non-existent line sure felt like “white privilege”.) Then you process through document checks, scanning machines, etc. You have to somehow leave your laptop completely outside the building. In the 10 minutes that we were in line we saw 2 different individuals trying to figure out where they were going to leave their laptops outside the building. They must have solved the problems because we saw them later in line. Oh, and although my Kindle went inside, it was confiscated and held for me out side of the document building. We were politely and quickly processed, paid our $140 apiece, told it would be ready in 2-3 weeks (although most of the time they are returned in 1 week), and ejected.

As we walked back to the metro, we walked past the embassies for India, France, Qatar, South Korea, Malaysia, and Brunei. The only other embassy that had even a single person lined up in front of them, was about 20 people in front of the Qatar embassy. I don’t quite understand the lack of lines anywhere else. There must be something I am not factoring in.

Anyway, Rick is 70 years old, I am 65. A passport lasts 10 years. After all these years of doing this, is this the last time we will visit an embassy to renew our passports? One just wonders.

(Tomorrow I will try to continue the “Dealing with Sickness” posts.)