Visas? We got 'em.

It's official! Argentina approved our visas. There's no stopping us now, you know, once we buy flights and get our cat's paperwork squared away... (Yes, I know this is a picture of passports... but the visas are... our passports... to entering the country. Besides, the actual visas are pretty plain looking.)

The Arrival

Post two of our traveling to India, not to be confused with the movie from the ‘90s involving aliens and global warming.

We were met at the baggage claim by someone from the GSO, after using the Diplomatic Visas and Airline Crew line in immigration. I guess we kind of stood out as the only people to have two cats… I have to say, I've never been met at an airport by anyone other than family, but in this case it was a huuuuuge relief. It pretty much marked the end of our stress, since we knew everything would be taken care of from then on. It ended up being even better than we expected, because we slowly realized (once all bags on our carousel had been taken), that the bag containing my son’s car seat hadn't made it.

I've had misplaced bags before in the US. I can’t stress enough how different a process putting in our claim was. In the US, my general experience had been that waiting in line was the ‘hard part.’ The line wasn't that big at MAA, but the process after that was an adventure. We spoke to 2 people at the Airport Assistance counter and filled out some paperwork. Then we were walked over to the immigration folks where we spoke to 3 more people, some more than once, and with slight changes and additions to the paperwork. Finally we headed back to the airport assistance counter where we spoke to another person, before finally settling things. Somehow, during this process we also ‘went through customs’ even though my wife and son were hanging out with all the bags near the carousel. The plus side was, all we had to do was walk out after that. No one in India (to my knowledge) asked about the cats, but my guide left me for a few minutes to talk to people, so it’s possible he just greased those wheels without me knowing.

Once outside the airport we met my social sponsor, hopped in a motor pool van, and headed into town. Originally we thought we’d be in temporary housing for a brief period, but the renovations on our housing had been completed, so we were actually headed ‘home.’ I really surprised our sponsor by recognizing a restaurant that I’d seen was very close to our apartment when checking the area out on the internet. I don’t think he was expecting me to say, “Oh, we must be nearly there” when heading to a place I’d never been!

At this point it was past 3am, but we couldn't contain our excitement and we immediately started checking out our ‘new digs.’ My son quickly noticed that we’d been loaned a box of toys and immediately got down to business pushing his ‘car’ all around. This place is way nicer than our old house was, but I’ll go into details in another post. I will say, it’s readily apparent that we’re not in the US. Ignoring any differences in architecture, electric plugs, or whatever… Chennai just smells different. Not bad, but there’s a noticeably different smell in the air. Also, the random sounds of the local animals and frequent quick bursts of car horn create an unfamiliar cacophony.

PS: We’re 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.