Tuesday, June 16, 2009

New Passport!

The fine folks at the US Government turned around my passport application in 10 days -- and that includes mailing both ways!

So I now have a shiny new passport, with some sort of electronic doohickey implanted therein which apparently makes for quicker passport scanning at the airport. Oooo.

Also got my old passport back, which is kinda cool, because it's a record of all my trips in the past ten years. There are still a lot of blank pages in that thing, but I love how the immigration agents cram all the stamps on the same pages -- so I've got a 2002 London stamp right next to a 2005 Taipei stamp, with a 2006 U.S. re-entry stamp just sharing the page. And a couple pages later I've got Iceland and Fiji sharing a page -- and those two usually aren't in the same neighborhood.

AND, when I sent in the new passport application, they had me send in two copies of the new passport photo. They sent the second one back, stapled to the old passport.


The first time I renewed my passport as an adult, I had to run to three different places to get the photos done. Honestly. The first place's camera was broken and the second place was out of film. (And, no, the first place wouldn't sell me the film to take to the second place.) And I had no car at the time, so was literally running. The result was a passport photo with my hair every which way. I decided that this was actually a good thing. After all, if I had looked all polished and business-like in the photo, nobody would believe it was me, when I'm standing there in an Immigration line after having spent 12 hours in a cramped airplane.

As you can see, I've kept up the tradition of the passport photo that looks like I just got off an international flight. (I'm particularly proud of the dark circles.)

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