Sydney U.S. Consulate Office

Friday, March 5th, 2010

I am exhausted, and not in some existential sense, but just physically exhausted.  I was out until 4:15 a.m. last night/ this morning at the ivy pool club with Milja and then had to get up at 7 to make it to my stupid 8 a.m. appointment at the damn consulate office to get more visa pages.  I still had a few left but I know I'll fill those up on my trip and I don't want to have to deal with the consulates/ embassies in other countries while traveling.  I did learn a few things though: for whatever reason the security at the consulate is quite strict- I had to go through a metal detector and bag screen and then wasn't even allowed to take my purse in with me, but had to check it.  What's a little strange about that is that since it's in a large, main downtown building, if someone were interested in bombing the place, you could just go up or down a floor and set it off there, since the rest of it isn't secured.  The tight security also seemed strange because the only other consulate I've been to was the French consulate in L.A. and they didn't have any security at all, just signs warning against buying counterfeit Louis Vuitton phones that were so tacky it's hard to imagine that anyone would be interested in them anyway.  There probably should be more to this post about how I was tired and how strange most of the new pages look, but I've already written the next post and want to put up that one, which I can't do until I do this one.