April Grab Bag

by Jinryu

International immigration systems are stupid.

I’m not even talking about the American travel bans which I keep hearing about from Australia.

[CM] and I recently found out about this “6 month rule” thing that many countries have on passports. Basically, CM and I are landlocked in Australia because, although we have valid passports, the countries that we are supposed to be flying to (we’ve missed the first 5 days of our planned overseas annual leave in Malaysia and Hong Kong) won’t accept you unless you have a passport which is valid for at least 6 months past the last date of your travel.

Normally, when you book through a travel agent, apparently the travel agents tell you this. But since we booked directly on the Malaysian airlines website, and we didn’t know about such a rule, we only actually found out at the airport at the baggage claim. Basically, sorry, you can’t get on this flight.

Um… what?

The details of that don’t matter too much at this point. It’s very upsetting generally. That’s an understatement. You only get so much vacation in a given year, and to really work your way through difficult jobs up until the point of physically being in an airport and then refused… it’s frankly heartbreaking. It’s terrible for mental health. It makes one think that you’ve endured all this time just for some reward which you don’t even get.

 

Malaysian Airlines, throughout this ordeal, has been terrible, every step of the way.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

On separate accounts, dealing with the Canadian embassy, as well as the Malaysian and Chinese embassy (for the issues above, as well as for other issues) has proven to me that these places are all stupid. The level of service you get, compared to the amount of useless red tape and administration, is ridiculous.

 

-=-=-=-=-

I’m in a Ford dealership right now, just waiting on our car to get serviced. Not exactly how I planned on spending a day of my vacation.  But I guess it’s a good use of time to catch up on “life-administration” that I don’t normally get.