Day 17: Train wreck

We were both a nervous wreck when we woke up. We fly to Paris the next day, and we still don’t have our passports. We called lady B, and she said she didn’t go to the consulate to look for our passports, since they haven’t returned her email. This was one of those times when my implosive Israeli side has to battle his well-trained American counterpart. “It was my understanding that you are not waiting for their response, and just planned to go there. Our flight is tomorrow. I’m not sure I communicate well how stressed we are.” Let me translate to this my Israeli friends: “would you get your fat ass up and MOVE!”. As you can see, I have learned a lot during my two years here.

Lady B. had a brilliant idea – she would cancel her meetings and go to the consulate. Duh. An hour later we got the report: Julia’s passport was sent the day before. That’s already weird and distrurbing, since we can’t track the envelope on-line. Please don’t tell me they have lost it. The good news about this were that lady B read to me the tracking number as was given to her by the consulate, and it was the same number we had, so somebody had a visual on that envelope at some point. Well, whatever. Where’s MY passport?

“Ah,” said lady B. “I have it! They didn’t want to sign you visa because.. (something about a missing document) so I told them it’s OK, they approved it, and gave me your passport which I will send you right away!”

The fascinating thing here is that if we hadn’t insisted the she goes herself, that morning, without waiting to be invited, to the consulate – I would have never known there’s a problem. My passport would have not been sent to me, with or without a visa. I would just be sitting like an idiot in Baltimore waiting for something interesting to happen. I couldn’t believe it.

So now we wait for the envelopes. In the meantime, we went to the Baltimore railroad museum:

Lot’s of trains, lot’s of history of trains, two very big mode train layouts. Not enough technology to my taste, but it’s still a pretty cool place:

In the afternoon we checked our envelopes trackings, and it was bad. My envelope was already tracked, but Julia’s wasn’t. It’s either somebody in the consulate is just being lazy taking the box with letters to the post office, our that the envelope is indeed lost. We called lady B. again. She was getting impatient, which really annoyed me, because patience and support were exactly the things I needed. She said that if the passport doesn’t show up by noon the next day, I should fly alone, and Julia will join me when the passport shows up. Very saddened, we started adjusting ourselves to the idea.

And just as we were about to turn the lights off at night, I decided to try just one last time. We couldn’t believe it – BOTH envelopes were tracked! Making their way to Maryland, and should be in our hands by noon, less than nine hours before the flight.