Do you take VISA? Andrew does! To France that is. I got a phone call at 12:00pm in the afternoon yesterday from a seemingly desperate Baylor student asking for help with an insane online application to something we so furiously refer to as... CAMPUS FRANCE (music: DUN DUN DUN DUN! Lady screaming: AHH!)The extremely organized and accessible French Embassy in Washington D.C. requires all students studying in France to fill out an application and pay sixty United States Dollars to a program that “helps” with the visa process. (Audience Laughs: HA HA HA!) This application takes two weeks to be processed and must be done before one can meet with the French Consulate. Poor Andrew, however, doesn’t have this application filled out when he discovers that he must obtain a visa within less than two weeks notice. He decides to fill out the application as quickly as possible and send his sixty United States Dollars the day he completes his application, only to discover when he arrives at the French Consulate that his application was not complete. It seems that he missed a few steps the first time he made an attempt. This is when I get a phone call from Andrew at the French Consulate in Los Angeles thirty minutes before the consulate closes. They had sent him upstairs all by his lonesome to fill out this impossible application on some random computer. I did my best to walk him through the process in hopes that they would have mercy on him and give him his visa before Washington D.C. had a chance to approve him. Did they? You had better bet your sweet tooshy they did!
If there is one thing I have learned about the French in this crazy process we like to call “preparation for studying abroad” is that they have got to be the most laidback group of people in the world! If you didn’t catch it already, Andrew called me at 12:00pm, thirty minutes before the consulate closes! THEY CLOSE AT 12:30pm! For what? They open at 9:00am, work for three and a half hours and go to lunch for the rest of the day! What a job! In the mean time they scare little college students into thinking that they won’t be able to make their dreams come true by forcing them to fill out applications half in English and half in French! Let’s hope that the Pilot of our plane doesn’t decide to work for only three and a half hours! We might have a hard time navigating ourselves over the Atlantic Ocean and landing in a foreign nation!
