Slowly getting there...

Since I've decided to go to Asia my life has been incredibly busy .. I've been running around making all of the arrangements needed to go there without any troubles following me there.

While doing this I noticed how extremely bureaucratic the Netherlands actually is. How much the people here like to follow every little rule down to the last letter, and how easy ones life could be if they would be a little bit more flexible.

Last week I was trying to get my Visa for Bali and Thailand, which should have been easy, if not for the above mentioned bureaucracy ..
To aquire the visa I need, I had to make an appointment at the Embassy of Indonesia and Thailand, located in the Hague and Amsterdam.
Apparently, it is only possible to aquire the visa inbetween 9-11 ish in the mornings, which is quite a small window, if you need to be in both cities.
Therefor I tried to come up with a different solution! Letting a company do it for me (the travel agencies actually have this service)

Coming there, they told me that they could do it, but they did not handle it personally, there was another company they did business with, and they were just a go between...
Didnt seem like a big problem, so we decided to get all the paperwork in order we scheduled an hour for it ( how long could it take to fill out a few forms , right? ) boy was I wrong!

The company that actually handled the visa requests has very strict rules, they work according to the rules and guidelines and wont stray an inch away from those said rules.

The thing is that these rules aren't the same rules as the rules that are applied by the embassy of the said countries! Things that were apparently possible by one party were impossible according to the other one, and vice versa!

To make matters even more troubling(little did I know) I asked my contact from AI to reach out to the people on the project, that actually live on Bali, for their advice ..
These people told me that both parties I had spoken to were wrong, and that there was a way more simple solution to my problem ..
ofcourse they could not get my visa and the rules they said applied, werent familiar to the people from the Company that handled the visa, and only partially at the embassy in the Netherlands .. making it even more confusing ...

In the end it took me a full 6 hours of work( the travel agency actually did most of the work, I just sat there and was annoyed by everything)
and we still werent sure if we had actually gotten the right visa

I've been told that the authorities in Indonesia arent as strict as the ones in the Netherlands .. so heres to hoping that they wont be!
Another thing I was able to get off of my to-do list though ....
Slowly getting there!