The Good: Still in Singapore to celebrate Chinese New Year!
The Bad: My entire family has already booked a trip to Cambodia for themselves.
The Ugly: $500 ZUJI flight cancellation fee. WTF.
All thanks to the German embassy, whose inefficiency has given me new insights into how a failed system can screw up people's lives. Case in point: Out of the 10 over cases i witnessed while waiting for my turn, not a SINGLE one managed to complete anything they needed to do. One was asked to go download some missing doc from the net and come back another day. The next five people were similarly rejected. Another didn't have the exact cash for the processing fees, and had to go down to a nearby shopping centre to get it. Yet another was failed because of a minute detail that was conveniently unstated in the embassy website. Just one unreasonable little condition that ended up dragging the entire visa process by a month. Sadly, that last case was me.
But you can imagine. All these poor, needy souls submitting their applications anxiously, only to be rejected for the same issues over and over again, which could have been so easily solved with a little help, even something like a clearer instruction set on the website. Don't they even care?
These horror stories that recur every so often, that you wouldn't think possible in this day and age, especially not for an organization representing one of the most efficient of nations, Germany. It will shame Daimler, Volkswagen, Siemens to hear that their embassy still, for example, uses big thick books for some of their records. Or that it's downright impossible for them to pick up your phonecall queries. To illustrate it clearer: A long-term visa takes 1-3 months for Germany. It takes 4 days for a China one.
We get the idea. You just don't want any riffraffs in your country eh. That's a fantastic image of your country to portray, strong enough to override the beautiful impression i've had of Germany. All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the entire barrel.
Yea i'm pissed. All my weeks of planning... the short perfect holiday in Toronto with Wudao, the couchsurfing with strangers around the Bay Area... all gone in a flash.
As Archimedes once said,
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall bloody smack your ass."
