visa versa

Preparations for the yoga retreat are underway, albeit slowly. The trip is not until September but there is so much to do.

Thankfully, my passport is good until August 2017. There are plenty of pages freed up for travel as it has only one stamp from my trip to Vancouver. I know that many feel like Vancouver hardly seems worthy of a stamp but the border officials in Canada felt that I needed a little encouragement for my first trip over the US border.

Travel to India is a bit more involved. First off, it requires a visa. The application can be completed online, printed, and sent in with your passport. Alternately, you may choose to make an appointment to hand carry your paperwork to the agency. Either way, they keep it for a fair amount of time before it is all shipped back to you. I opted to get a jump on it time wise and save my time off by choosing the first option.

There are additional items which are required to be sent with the application, including two passport type photos. If you’ve not had to procure such photos, let me tell you that they have quite exacting specifications which cover everything from background, dress, photo composition, size, and pixels. And while there are places who will gladly take your money in exchange for two copies of the worst possible image of you, I prefer to have an image that will make me smile rather than wince when I see it. Not only do these places not care how you look, one look at my current passport photo shows that they don’t even seems to adhere to the standards.

So I asked my photographer friend to assist in the process…

What do you think?