Phew!

I finally made through most dreaded experience which I have been thinking about for weeks. Got my US work visa stamped at Vancouver. I have cribbed earlier about this and each time experience gets only worse. Dealing with DOS or USCIS is painful. My interview was on a Wednesday. I had flown into Seattle Monday night (BTW Deval Patrick, Governer of MA was in the same flight as me on Jetblue) and taken the Greyhound to Vancouver on Tuesday(Greyhound and my trips to Canada - hopefully this is the last one :)) It took 4-5 hours on the bus to get there. I had to take the Sky Train to get to that part of downtown where my hotel was booked. First thing you notice about Vancouver is undoubtedly the scenic views. Beautiful snow capped mountains as a backdrop to the downtown. Its picture perfect. Unfortunately there were quite a few beggars - people seemed to attribute the warmer weather as the reason. As soon as I would reach out for coins for the sky train someone would attack me for a dollar! And I am somehow afraid of beggars. Yes! one of the many things I fear in life, so it was not very pleasent in that sense.

My interview was a disaster, everything that could go wrong went wrong. The Visa Officer was a Fraud Prevention Manager and he just let it all out on me. Basically I lived through the typical Murthy dot com forum case/scenario. I had booked the hotel for only 2 days so I extended in another hotel for 4 days. The previous hotel was not in a comfortable location for me. By this time I couldnt take it; 3 days had passed and I requested my DH to come down and be with me for the weekend as I could not re-enter US and asked him to get extra clothes etc for me. I was basically close to implementing Plan B (and I was secretly relieved). As soon as the weekend passed things changed dramatically. I had provided the additional documents requested on Monday and the Officer called me and asked me to drop my Passport for the visa next day. In a day my visa was processed as if nothing had ever happened and before I knew we were driving back to Seattle on Tuesday. So it took a whole week for the process. Probably if someone reads my post might claim I just complain a lot, but hey I am human and in fact this post dosent justify my experience completely. I do not want it to actually. My experience was much worse than I state here.

After this experience my Plan B has only become more firm now and actually become my Plan A. It will happen very soon. I hope it does!

God & Destiny - you both owe me now! come on! :)