Twig's European Adventure

Well I have finally done it; I have applied for a Holiday-making Working Visa. With the small to large task of filling out their online form and submitting that. Then printing said form and printing a bunch of other forms and filling them out, placing them in an envelope with my passport, 3 months of financial details with an explanation of the extraneous details on said statement. Final thing for the envelope is a Money Order for the some of the cost to process the application and send your passport back to yourself regardless whether or not it was successful.

So now I wait for it to be returned to me. The processing fee seems a lot like a bribe to me. Anyway power on.

It is 40 days until departure

I have now saved enough money to go to Europe for at least the 3 intended weeks. Three weeks is not enough and as you may or may not know I am trying to apply for a UK Working Holiday Visa. This application is proving more difficult than first expected.
They want in their forms information that I do not have, like where I will be staying during my holiday in the UK and how much money will I be bringing with me. These things can only be answered on the day, with the place I will be staying organised when I am there and money will have access to be determined from my last pay check on the night I fly out.
More irritating still Contiki (those whom I am travelling with around Southern Europe) can not give me the details of my tour excreta until three weeks before I am due to leave. Its is all starting become very overwhelming, but like always... power on.

It is 55 days until departure.

Interesting times have been since my last entry. I lost my job last week and it has created a void in the money department. No matter, power on.
I received my passport today in a cool little plastic sheath thing with a small booklet on smart traveling ideas and international calling numbers. It turns out passport now days have microchips in them so they can scan your passport for your details into a computer and so forth, isn't technology wonderful.

It is 122 days until departure.

I have booked myself in to get my passport application processed, so tomorrow at 2:45pm I will rock up at the Morwell post office for a form finalisation session. Which leads to the next issue of the passport photo. Like a driver licence, a passport is valid for 10 years, with that come a picture of yourself that will be 10 years old. So one ask themselves what can I do to ensure that in ten years time and looking at my passport and not wish it was someone elses... answer NOTHING. Passport photos are designed to look crap, and no amount of preparation can change that. Either way I am getting my passport photo done this afternoon, and the crappyness that comes from that photo.

It is 143 days until departure.

With a few hiccups along the way... mainly me being lazy, I have started the process of getting a Passport. I got the form from the Post Office and had a read through it. A Passport application is bureaucracy at its best, the amount of little things one must do to have one of these application go through. Take a picture that is not blurry, dark, light at angles, of someone else. Then find someone to prove that the picture is you and not that weird guy down the street. Then prove how you are by showing your birth certificate which you get by sending off certified photocopies of your drivers license and a bank statement, which you got originally by showing your birth extract back when you went for your learners permit. Then after you have done this and answered all the question about whether or not you are Australian, born before or after 1987, and whether or not you prefer corn flakes or rice bubbles, on minimum 100gsm paper and in black pen, because blue pens are used by terrorists. Then after all of that you have to wait 10 working days for the application to be processed.

Anyway I have started getting my Passport, I had better get a haircut.

It is 152 days until departure.