Visas & Passports come at last minute.

You guys would not believe the craziness with which our visas and passports were delivered to us. We ended up getting them on a Saturday and had to leave that Monday! Yeah, it was a pretty intense wait. Yet, God had His hand on the wheel the whole time.
The big problem was in the communication with the NY City Consulate of India. It’s no big deal to call the consulate in Washington D.C, or Vancouver BC. Someone actually answers the phone and redirects your call, but in NY, where we were forced to process our papers due to our geographical location, everything is automated. There is no pressing zero to get an operator. In fact, I am now firmly convinced that there system may render it completely impossible to actually talk to anyone through that phone system.
We had sent in our papers with lots of advance notice ( over 3 weeks) and the note on the website said not to inquire about the visas until the time allotted to processing these papers had expired. So, I waited until then, which happened to be 7 days before we were scheduled to depart. For three days, I called. I left messages. I emailed. At one point, I even started dialing random extentions in the hopes of getting someone, anyone!
I would dial… Six, One, Two, I’d get someones voice mail and then,”Uh, hi I’m having terrible trouble with a visa situation please call me back at # such and such”, I repeated it, over and over at various random exetentions and never heard back from anyone. Very bisarre. Finally, I told my travel agent about our woes.
Our travel agent, Sunitha Davidar is worth her weight in gold, and more! I can’t even tell you how many times we have said that recently. She contacted us with an Indian man who runs a visa/passport service in NYC and he went to the consulate for us in person. He went on a Thrusday, and they began our papers in the morning and finshed them by the end of the day. The papers were mailed to us on Friday and arrived on Saturday. Whew!
Yup, just another example of God’s provision.
Hallelujah. Anyway, if you are ver going to India and need to deal with Indian Consulate General in NYC, Please… use Jose Kunjappur’s service for your visa and passport, and Sunitha Davidar as your travel agent. Contact me for their info.
Blessings

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.