Monday, 25 June 2007

Okay, so that happened. Now all I have to stress about is getting my passport back in the mail successfully before I want to depart on Saturday.

My appointment was at 9:30am, which Id foolishly made without considering that arriving on a Sunday, I'd still need to get to a post office on Monday morning to get a postal money order and a stamp. Given that you're not supposed to arrive any earlier than 15 minutes prior to your appointment, that didn't leave me a lot of time.

Post offices here open at 9:00am, but I'd managed to locate one within a fairly short distance of the US Consulate. Last night, I went for a recce to figure out how to walk to Consulate from the hotel, and where the post office was in relation to the Consulate. I was relieved to discover that the post office was literally about a minute's walk around the corner. That made me feel much more comfortable about pulling everything off on time.

So this morning, I arose early, and walked to the post office, arriving there at about 8:30am. There was already a considerable queue outside the Consulate, something I hadn't considered. Not long after I arrived at the post office, a postal employee was coming in and she told me that they weren't opening until 10:30am for some reason. Damn. My well-laid plans were shot to pieces. She told me the nearest post office that opened at 9am was on Baggot Street, and pointed at my Google Maps printout to something labeled as Baggot Lane. It didn't look that far away, and I still had about 25 minutes up my sleeve, so I scurried off.

I walked the length of Baggot Lane, no post office. Then I realised there was an Upper and Lower Baggot Street one street over, tacked on the end of another street (they seem to like spontaneously changing street names on straight bits of road around here). So I scurried off over there, but couldn't see any sign of a post office. It was now a bit after 9am, so I didn't want to waste more time just finding the post office, and so I jumped into a taxi, and I'm glad I did, because it turns out the post office was in the back of a newly renovated convenience store, and there was no external signage whatsoever, so I wouldn't have stood a snowflake's chance in hell of finding it on my own.

The taxi then dropped me back at the Consulate at bang on 9:15am by my watch, and I jumped on the end of the queue.

The process was a bit unusual in that the Consulate is on the corner of the intersection of a couple of fairly busy roads, and there's a guardhouse on the perimeter of the boundary, where you have to line up and talk to someone through a speaker-box (contending with all of the traffic noise) and they verify you have an appointment, and have all the prerequisites, then you get in another line to go through the guardhouse and get your stuff x-ray-ed and yourself metal-detected.

Then you get to walk across the yard, into the building itself and wait. I must suck when it's raining, because you queue outside on the street for a little while.

The Consular processing went perfectly smoothly. They weren't interested in any of my supporting paperwork, or my updated resume that I'd prepared. I was only asked why I was applying in Dublin (rather than Australia) and that was it. They reckon I should have my stuff back in a couple of days.

So the take-away from all of this is don't make the appointment so bloody early in the morning if you still have to run around and collect prerequisite items. Duh. Colour me dumb.

Now off to work after a cup of tea to recover.