Good News on the Visa!

We don't need to go to Chicago now!

The reason we had to drive to Chicago was to pick up our visa. The Colombian Consulate's website clearly says that you must have an in-person meeting either when dropping off your visa application or when picking up your completed visa. Since we mailed our visa app and documents, it was pretty obvious that we'd need to have a meeting at the consulate in Chicago when our visas were complete.

Well I called this afternoon to make sure they received them yesterday since FedEx showed that they left them at the door (our actual passports were in there - that was kinda scary). The voice mail system was all in Spanish but I worked my way through to the operator (dial zero is the universal operator button by the way).

Someone finally answered... in Spanish. So with my 2 years of high school Spanish I try to say something about speaking with the visa people. After a good little laugh by the woman on the other end she says "Would you like to talk in English?"... (geez...).

Long story short - our visa app was received this morning, they processed it today, everything was fine, and it was going back to us Fedex this afternoon. WOW! It was supposed to be a 3 day process plus that face-to-face meeting. Awesome!

No trip to Chicago required! (I'm sure Chicago is nice but we just don't have the time). We should have our passports with our Colombian visa stamps in them tomorrow. We couldn't have asked for a better outcome on this one.