Popped into Vietnam today

I popped along to the Vietnamese embassy this morning to sort out the Visa for my upcoming holiday in January.

It's on Victoria Road, just five minutes walk from High Street Kensington and you can't miss it thanks to the huge red flag with a gold star prominently waving from the front of the building.

Embassies are funny old places. They never look the same inside as out and of course there's that bit of international law which means that once you are inside an embassy, you are counted as being on that land's soil beholden to its laws, rather than that of the country where the embassy itself is located. (Hence the title of this post.)

As it was, the building seemed quite grand from the outside but inside had the impression of a slightly run down but cosy home. It made up for it's lack of square footage by having lots of floors, none of which I would have the chance to explore as the consulate section was just across from the main door.

And by consulate section, I mean a small hallway with two sofas tucked away in one corner and two chairs placed in front of the two windows behind which sat two members of the consulate staff.

One window was for applying for your visa, the other for paying for it and getting a receipt.

There was only a short queue but annoyingly the first guy at the front was making a non-standard request that was taking up all the time. Annoying, because I had hoped to pop in and out quickly and get on to work as soon as possible.

Then, some bloke came along asking if he could also get his visa for Laos here.
Yes.....Laos. A completely different country, a concept that he evidently hadn't quite grasped.

"No sir," he was told, "you'll have to go to their embassy in Paris for that!"

When I did eventually get to the front, after about twenty minutes, the women behind the window took all of thirty seconds to process my application form (downloaded from their web site and pre-filled in by me along with one wonderfully posed photograph of me looking like the spy that came in from the cold) and then spent the next minute excruciatingly unwinding the cord on her phone before allowing me to move into the next queue for the cashier's window. *sigh*

For some reason, I'd thought that the visa was only 30 quid but it turned out that it was 38! *another sigh* Luckily I had the exact cash so handed it over, got a receipt in return (as I had to leave my passport with them) and was told to come back next Thursday to collect it.

So ended my trip to Vietnamese territory.

I'll be popping back there next week and will hopefully stay in the real thing a bit longer come January...