I filled out my visa application this morning.  Oh Bulgaria. It's pretty straight forward. But there are a couple of things that are so Bulgarian about it.

First, the application is not a write-able PDF.  This means you have to fill it out by hand.  I know this isn't such a big deal but in this day and age it's sort of a surprise that you can't fill it out and then print it out.  What this meant in practice was that I had to use my neat easy to read handwriting which has always been capital upper case letters. And I had a hell of a time filling out the application this way.  Funny, after living in Bulgaria for a year it's significantly harder for me to write in upper case letters in English. I spent the whole two pages of the application thinking n (N) and trying to write H. I never thought this would happen to me.  But, it has.

The second very Bulgarian thing about the visa application (or maybe it's tedious--and I often associate Bulgarian bureaucracy with tedium) is that you actually have to fill out the application twice. You're required to turn in the application, photos and any other supporting documents in duplicate.  Apparently you can't photocopy the original application, you must in fact fill it out twice.  Sweet.   <!--more-->

By far my favorite part of the whole process is that there's really not enough space on any of the lines to fit in the information they are requiring.  For example, at one point I had to squeeze in the name of the school, the address and the phone number all into one tiny line.  I did it and it's readable but I can't help but think that the people who are going to process this application must all wear glasses.  So I wrote as small and as neatly as I could and I am keeping my fingers crossed that nothing gets misread.

Heck, my last name has already changed twice in this last year: from Emigh to Eмиг to Eмит.  And I am not sure that I could handle another revision. I already have a hard enough time answering to all of the mispronunciations in English let alone to the newest iterations in Bulgarian.

What I got the greatest kick out of was filling out the question: what countries have you traveled to in the last five years.  When I filled out this line last year in June, the answer was none.  This year even in my smallest neatest handwriting, I couldn't get all of the countries on the three lines in the application.

It made me think: what a year I've had.  Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Russia. Wow. To look at the list even now it's still pretty amazing to me.

I was born at the end of the cold war in the United States and as a result, many of these destinations aren't exactly countries I was "taught" to dream about.  They were foreign, unknown and in some ways even exoticized. And yet, I was there.  I have been to, seen and explored parts of the world I never dreamed about and I am a better person for it.

So while I still think that the Bulgarian visa application should go digital, I do appreciate the chance it gave me to think about and reflect on this last year.