Veni, Vidi, Visa!

by Alex in United Kingdom, Red Tape, In Transit

After Denmark, we booked our tickets to the UK, and for one very straightforward reason: Money. We've done remarkably well budgeting and tracking our spending while we've been travelling, but tragically, neither Tash nor I had the foresight to be born spoiled trust-fund babies to millionaire parents. Stupid decision, really. What that means instead is that we have to work for our money, and what's the best place in Europe for two young Australians to get a job? The UK! Where's the hardest place for us to get a working visa for? The UK! The easiest place for us to get a visa? Ireland! The easiest place to get an Irish visa? The UK!

Fun fact: You are at least 31% more British after looking at this picture.

So we jumped on a ludicrously cheap flight from Copenhagen to London (context: to an Aussie, any international flight for less than 3 figures is obscenely cheap) and found a niceish, not very cheap, horribly noisy hostel in the heart of London. Then came almost two weeks of tracking down application forms, visiting the Irish embassy and gathering up all the documents we needed. I wish I could say we had all sorts of adventures in those 10 days, visiting all these major tourist sites and doing awesome exciting things, but sadly no. It was pretty much all documents and bureaucracy. We did eat a lot of pizza, though. Once we finally had all our sticks in a pile, we caught the Tube out to the embassy, turned in our applications, and then it was time to wait.

Oh, the waiting.

Waiting, and a trip to the British Museum.

Remember when I said that London was the easiest place for us to apply for our visas? I meant that it was easiest for us. Our applications, on the other hand, got to go on a whirlwind sightseeing tour of the world. After being handed in to the office in London, they were shipped halfway around the world to the Irish embassy in Canberra, processed, and then shipped back halfway around the world so that we could pick them up 4-8 weeks later. While I like to think that they had some kind of marvellous, Toy Story-esque adventure in exotic locales where they finally managed to overcome adversity and learn the true meaning of friendship - Tash assures me that real life doesn't work like that, and they probably just sat in envelopes in the back of a mail plane for a few days.

Stupid reality, always being less fun than my imagination.

Since we now found ourselves basically killing time in the UK for at least a month, Tash looked up the most efficient way for us to get around, and found an unlimited, month-long, hop-on hop-off bus pass. This kind of thing worked out really well for us in New Zealand, so we went for it. If we had 4-8 weeks to wait, we might as well get to see some things, right?

Wrong. Our visas only took two weeks. We decided not to go back to London immediately when they were ready, as our bus tickets were already paid for and we wanted to get our money's worth.. And while we tried to travel as cheaply as possible, we still ended up spending more money in a month in the UK than we're likely to make in 3 months working in Ireland.

That, dear friends, is what we call logic.

But hey, at least we got to see Scotland!

Spoiler alert.

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