Visa Rollercoaster

            As of yesterday, I was finally officially granted my student visa to live and study in the United Kingdom. My application has been “in progress” for more than a month now, and I’ve been pacing the floor, chewing my fingernails and popping antacids for just about the entire time.

            Have you ever applied for a visa to live abroad? If you haven’t, let me tell you, it is a full-scale Broadway production, complete with costumes, sets, divas and a kickline. My only previous experience with the process was about a year and a half ago, when I spent a month travelling around India. An Indian tourist visa is no problem at all – you fill out a form giving your name, address, and a promise you’re not a terrorist, and you send that with a photo, your passport and a small fee to a visa processing company and boom, five days later you’re set to visit India. The UK process is entirely different. I needed to go to a federal building to be fingerprinted and photographed, I had to give extensive copies of “evidence of [my] financial situation,” I needed a notarized copy of my birth certificate in addition to my passport – and on top of that, the application fee is several hundred dollars. Even the form was epic; I had to give identifying information for both of my parents, dates and reasons for all previous international travel, information on all expired passports, and (here’s the bit where I made a mistake) anything on any prior crimes or offenses, including traffic violations.

            I freely admit I am a fair-to-middling driver, but I am (generally) pretty good about at least not crashing my car into things. However, I was involved in a minor one-car fender-bender when I was sixteen, some two months after I’d gotten my driver’s license, and I got a ticket from an incredibly grouchy cop for failure to control my vehicle. (I remember milking that accident into a whole day off school – the airbag punched me in the face and my nose swelled up to twice its usual already-generously-proportioned size, and I stayed at home with an icepack and sulked.) In my home state of Ohio, when a minor gets a traffic ticket, said minor must appear in juvenile traffic court with an associated parent or guardian, which is exactly the barrel of laughs you think it is.

            Anyway, I really wanted to be honest about everything on my visa application, because I would be crushed if it had gotten rejected on the grounds of “failure to disclose” or something, so I said that I had no criminal convictions but I did have one minor moving violation from 2003. My god, you’d think I told them that I’d crashed my car into a group of blind orphans holding puppies! After a couple of weeks of waiting I received an email telling me I needed to send them proof from a court that I had “served my sentence” and that “all criminal cases are closed.”

            WHAT.

            The entirety of my sentence had been a long car ride with my mother, who was grouchy about having to take off work to go with me to court, and I’m pretty sure the government didn’t take the time to document that. Anyway, I discovered when I called the juvenile court that they don’t keep records of traffic citations for more than a few years, so a nine-year-old ticket wasn’t in the system. I could find no proof that I’d even been in the damn accident.

            Again I say: WHAT.

            Cue tearful meltdowns to family and friends on both sides of the Atlantic. The visa office was asking me for documents that didn’t exist. Of course, I couldn’t speak to anyone at the visa office – for reasons of security there’s no way to call or email anyone there directly. My aunt (who is a lawyer and also a lifesaver) helped me prepare an affidavit that 1. I hadn’t been sentenced in the first place and 2. it was so long ago there isn’t even any record of the incident anywhere official. I faxed the notarized affidavit to the visa office and went back to the antacids and nail-chewing and pacing. I had no idea if that was documentation enough.

            And now, a week later, I just got an email telling me that I’ve been granted permission to live in the UK. I am going to finally sleep easily tonight, and I can’t wait to start the London chapter of my life! For now, though, I think I’m going to have a real meal and a manicure, and I’ll see if I can’t erase some of the lingering signs of the stress of the past weeks.