Visas Granted!

We’ve been granted Visas! Woo Hoo! {Or is it now, “Woot?”}

Yes – Tuesday the movers came and carried away most of our worldly belongings … to ship them to Glasgow … and we hadn’t been granted our Visas yet.

Today, however, we spent a lovely several hours at the British Consulate and were rewarded with Multiple-entry Visas, good until 9/1/2008. D’s says that he’s a Student, can Work, and has “No recourse to public funds.” T’s says much the same, aside from the fact that she does not have to seek approval from any government agency in order to work while in Scotland. D’s says “Work (and any changes) must be authorized.” According to the embassy worker, that just means that he’s a student who is authorized to work, but must get the British version of a Social Security Number. we’re not sure, but it sounds awfully much as if there will be no restriction as to the number of hours he’ll be able to work. And the public funds bit just means that we can’t go on welfare. Yeah. OK. {No, no, no, it’s the dole we can’t go on. The dole.}

We followed the advice given us to bring way more paperwork than we’d ever need, and it was good and true advice. We were told:

The British LOVE bureaucracy — never, ever think to yourself: “Oh, no one will ever ask me about such and such.” Yes, they will. Always try to out-think them in stupid requirements. Sometimes this will actually come in handy — they’ll be impressed by how ridiculously prepared you are and let you slide where other people would spend two hours being probed.

Because we were so overprepared, in bringing color photocopies of all sorts of documents {And then they had the nerve to only want black-and-white}, in bringing 13 months of bank statements to be notarized, etc.{AND after all that nonsense, they didn’t even look at the immunization records we schlepped along. Days of fevers and chills and for what??? Oh, yeah. Greater health down the line. Never mind.}, we were given a reprieve of several hundred dollars by the consular notary. You see, for a consular notary to use their stamp, they charge $71 for each document they stamp. Because the notary was amazed at the volume of documents we were sending to the bank, and because she was offended by the documents they were asking for (among them deeds to property and our marriage license), she let us slide by with a charge of $71! She asked us, “so do you have just loads and loads of money?” {Which elicited a noise somewhere between a snort and a squawk} When we told her that we were transferring £5,000 into the account, just to get it open, she was absolutely disgusted with the bankers, and we had won the day.

We were told to have a lovely day, to top it off. We were told this several times, and were told that we’d love Glasgow, because, although it rains, “it’s not a cold rain … but kind of a warm rain. It doesn’t soak you through, it’s just kind of … gentle.” Hah! Gentle rain, we’ll meet up with you in 33 days! {We were also called ‘luv,’ as in “There you go, luv.” That’s just not what you find at your local DMV. Still not sure how I feel about it – do I prefer the honest acrimony of low-wage state employees, or knee-jerk sweetness? Or are people from the UK really that nice??}

We looked at last year’s schedule, did a bit of thinking, and came up with the fact that D’s only allowed to take 2 classes each term aside from the mandatory course “M. Litt. 1 Course 0.” So, he’s looking at 6 hours of class per week, plus whatever studying he has to do outside of that time. We think that we’ll be doing a fair bit of traveling & having fun, if that’s all there is to it. {Oh, hah. The visa didn’t restrict someone’s work hours… Methinks the business will be up and running — if that’s what is called ‘traveling and fun’ these days…}

– D & T

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