Cats Passed Quarantine!

It's official! Our cats are legally in India. Getting pets to post with you in India is no small task. There is a ton of paperwork before you leave and even more when you arrive. You also are required to take the pet(s) to the quarantine office for inspection immediately after arriving in the country and 30 days after arrival. I had heard many interesting stories about people having to "call their pet by name" to prove that they hadn't swapped it with another animal. This is probably no big deal with dogs... but people with cats have had varying success. Fortunately for me, both times we went to the quarantine center, they merely inspected the cats through their carrier's screen, asked me a handful of questions, and stamped our papers. It still took several hours each time, but at least I didn't have to try to stuff the cats into their carriers more than once (per trip)!

Our cats:

Sweet Pea

Cinnamon

Now 100% legal.

First Day of Work

This week started like any other, except: Oh yeah! It was my first day at my first post! My sponsor picked me up for a moderately early arrival time (I guess he likes to get a bunch of visas done before people start showing up in the morning). Once at the consulate, it became readily apparent that I was one of the first new people for the summer transfer season (in my case THE first person). I could tell because almost every one I ran into knew I was new. This was nice, because people regularly just walked up and introduced themselves. Of course, the downside to this is that many of them then immediately told me they were on their way out the door. So now my mind is cluttered with tons of names and faces that will shortly be disappearing from Chennai.

Anyway, my first day was busy with meeting people, administrative paperwork, and trying to memorize combinations to doors and safes. I got several short tours of different parts of the consulate, including (but not limited to) the consular section, HR, the canteen (that's cafeteria, in the US), the commisary, and the space I'll be working.

Midway through the afternoon, the GSO arranged a car for me to go home, pick up my cats, and take them to the government of India quarantine facility. This was one of the two "inspections" required to allow my cats to stay in the country without having to actually be quarantined. The facility was a 45 minute drive from my house and the inspection consisted of approximately 2.5 hours of waiting with 5 minutes of showing the cats to a veterinarian. I'm not complaining though, the cats passed...

All-in-all, it wasn't a bad first day!

Flying (halfway) Around the World

Departure day started out with good news - namely that the paperwork for importing our cats had come through. While printing it, the manager of our hotel noticed that it was from India and commented that that was his country! He was delighted when he learned we were going to Chennai, since he has family there. It’s interesting, everyone from India that I've spoken to about my posting has immediately said something to the effect of “you’re going to have a great time.” Of course, they've also invariably then said some variant of “It’s really hot there.”

Anyway, when booking our hotels we’d slightly miscalculated the time it would take me to go home to pick up the cats, so we ended up all going. This ended up not being a bad thing, because we had some last minute repacking to make sure all our bags were underweight (Psh, we had like 25 lbs. to spare!). I mowed the lawn for the last time in what I assume will be a long time, we packed up the cats, and started our 24+ hours of travel. 

Things kind of stopped going our way when we arrived at Dulles. We had tried to check in for our flight at the hotel, but the online system had tripped up due to our pets. The result was that my son was checked in… and my wife and I were not. It took about 6 people and 30 minutes for us to get checked in, and even then it was sans boarding passes. We’d have to pick up those at the gate. Of course, if this was the worst thing that happened to us, I’d say it was a great flight. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite that simple.

Our first flights tickets had us sitting separately. Technically, it had my 2 year old sitting by himself… but that didn't seem like a good idea. Fortunately, the singleton seat was an aisle, and we were able to trade a center aisle middle seat for it. The man came to take his seat, which my wife was in, and was perfectly happy to get a better seat (albeit further back in the plane) without the adjacent small child, go figure! The flight to Frankfurt was pretty easy, though our son didn't really sleep at all, which is unfortunate on a red eye. The cats seemed content enough, though I did put them on my lap (in the carrier) for a while to pet them.

Frankfurt is where things got interesting! We arrived at the gate to pick up our boarding passes (keep in mind, the tickets I’d gotten from Travel included seat numbers), where we were informed that the flight was overbooked and we’d have to wait until they could find people to bump to another flight. Hooray… We heard them offer to bump people on the intercom (to a flight that arrived at 8am instead of midnight and included a 600 Euro airline voucher, not bad!), but weren't called up to pick up our boarding passes until everyone else on the plane had boarded. Then they had to clear our cat paperwork, which took a bit of time. They’re very sensitive to not letting people bring animals that aren't pre-approved, because they (Lufthansa) have to foot the bill for the return flight if the animal is denied entry.

Anyway, the flight ended up having 20 no-shows, so the overbooking was moot. We were even ticketed 3 adjacent seats. The cats were a little more stressed out this flight. Side note on cats: while walking around (or sitting and waiting) at the airport, the cats would periodically make their plight of being in a carrier known to everyone within earshot. I had expected that to be a mild annoyance to people in the vicinity, but it actually appeared to have the opposite effect. We were regularly complimented on how pretty our cats are, and many people said they wish they could bring their (or just have a) cat. It was kind of funny walking around with the cats meowing, because people would look around a few times… then spot them and say something like, “I THOUGHT I heard a CAT!”

This post is getting really long, so I better wrap it up. The flight was fine even though the movie selection was much more limited than the previous one. Between the two flights, we both managed to watch “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” which is set in India and had been recommended to us. It was a cute movie and we both enjoyed it. One final parting thought: Why do they serve breakfast burritos near the end of the FRA-MAA flight, when it lands at midnight? 

Pre-Departure Stress

It’s the day before we leave and all the stress of the move is coming to a head. Today was my last day at FSI and the Basic EMT class was pretty interesting. I went through the “departure from FSI checklist” and headed out to pick up my wife and son from the Smithsonian, where they’d spent the day. I dropped off one of my classmates at his apartment, and during the ride we noticed that the rental car’s AC had stopped working. Bummer, I thought, but I’ll be returning it tomorrow anyway. Turns out, I was wrong. A couple blocks after dropping him off, the car completely stopped responding to the gas petal. It would idle, but wouldn’t accelerate any more than that. Fortunately, since it was still moving, I was able to pull out of traffic to a side road. Unfortunately, it was insanely hot, and it took a little over an hour for the tow truck to come get me. Another hour later and I had a new (upgraded) car from Alamo and had somehow skipped out on paying for most of a tank of gas. Probably not worth the time in the sauna… but I guess it's good practice.

Anyway, my wife and son had made their way to a friend’s house on the metro, so I headed over there. We had a pleasant dinner talking about how excited we were to get to India, and how insanely nervous we were about not yet having the paperwork from the Government of India (GOI) regarding importing our cats. With one business day left to get it, we were certainly cutting things close.

I should mention here that the import paperwork is submitted (and generally taken care of) by one of the people in Shipping at the consulate. Without his hard work, this process would have been incredibly more difficult. It was definitely not his fault that things were coming down to the wire. Instead, I blame the USDA. The GOI requires 5 business days to process pet import applications. However, the USDA will not allow the pet to be certified for export until 10 calendar days before departure. Since you have to get your local vet to sign off, and then mail (FEDEX overnight) the paperwork to the USDA regional office (Richmond for us), the process is almost guaranteed to induce heartburn.

Oh well, 48 hours from now we’ll be in India!

Blog Catch Up

I'm embarrassed to admit, despite my best intentions, that I've missed several minor milestones over the past few weeks. Rather backdate a ton of posts... I figured I'd just combine them all here. Enjoy!

May 12
We scheduled our pack-out and the "pre-packout evaluation."

May 13
We received our Diplomatic Passports (pictures of me sporting mine are forthcoming). This was also accompanied by a lot of groundless bragging to our friends (e.g. our son has two passports before he's two years old... that's 'two before two!').

May 23
After a brief delay, we handed our passports right back to get our Indian visas processed.

May 31
Pre-Packout Evaluation. This consisted of the assessor spending approximately 20 minutes walking around our (half-organized) house taking notes and asking us what percent of things in the room were going with us, and what percent were going to storage.

June 2
Our flights to India were reserved, paid for, and ticketed (in that order, none-the-less). This topic will have it's own post (eventually), since I want to detail the headaches we've had trying to get our two cats to post with us. However, long story short, we ended up having to pay the difference in airfare to fly through Frankfurt instead of Heathrow.

June 4
Our Visas are finished and awaiting pickup.