Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

21 Feb 2007, 13:16 p.m.

Day Of Activities

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2007 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Yesterday I took the day off from work to help Leonard get his Indian visa at the Indian consulate. (Later this year he's coming with me to see my parents in India, just before our short vacation in London.) I didn't expect the whole day would be as nice as it was.

If you get to the New York City consulate of India by 8:30 or so, then you don't have to wait too long after the office starts working (by 9:15) to actually get to a service window. They let us into the heated waiting room about 20 minutes early, which I appreciated. (Snow from about ten days ago is still on the ground here.) Leonard's application said he was a writer, and this got his otherwise bog-standard case escalated to "Talk to Mr. Such-and-so on the upper level" status. Aside from that, everything was in order and tediously uneventful.

In between dropping off his application and picking it up at noon, we walked around a bit and ate an unremarkable brunch. Tip: Central Park's zoo doesn't charge you until after you've seen the seals through the iron fence. Also: Lexington in midtown has lots of little interesting shops, where Madison has extremely designed rich-people stores.

We passed two of the nine Oren's Daily Roast locations. Oren's takes in used books to supply schools and libraries in Ethiopia, a coffee exporter.

After we picked up his visa (which takes up a FULL HONKIN' PAGE in his passport, with stamps and glittery stripes and who knows what all), we visited the Make (Meaning) shop and painted a few coasters. Neither of us wanted to do representational art, so they're all abstract: dots, stripes, that sort of thing. Maybe we'll get pictures of them up after we pick them up next week (the store fires them in the shop kiln). Huzzah, they'll be microwave- and dishwasher-safe!

Then, another nonmemorable meal, and homewards, where we watched "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)". Leonard's old CollabNet colleagues hosted it, telling stories about ways they kept the Subversion community out of trouble. Recommended.

Comments

Susie
22 Feb 2007, 14:01 p.m.

My Romanian visa took up a whole page. No glitter though.

Rachel
22 Feb 2007, 21:31 p.m.

actually I think visas generally take up the whole page. everyone i have seen does.

AnonymousCoward
23 Feb 2007, 21:54 p.m.

Confirmed. Both my U.S. visas each consumed an entire passport page. The first (weeelll before 9/11) was from a giant ink stamp. The more recent included a photograph and all sorts of currency-like anti-forgery measures.

Martin Marks
http://www.flyingghoti.net
26 Feb 2007, 23:27 p.m.

Did you know I just now realized your blog had comments? I never noticed the little numbers before.

My mother has an Indian visa - she was in Chennai and... Hyderabad, I think, doing nursing education stuff a year or two back. She had quite a bit of fun getting the thing, for reasons I don't fully recall, but managed to convince the Indian Embassy in Singapore that they should let her in. It's a very attractive little visa, but I still think my Ukranian one is cooler. It has a hologram! And it says "MAPTIH MAPKCS" on it, which is just adorable really. Actually, the Ukranians managed to get themselves two full pages, because the page after the visa itself is a big old stamp covered with illegible Cyrillic scribbles. Can barely make out a word of it.