I’m going to be spending next semester as a visiting scholar at MIT’s Department of Comparative Media Studies, and there are a lot of practical things to organize. We have rented a flat there, but still need to rent out our place at home (anyone rneed a place in Bergen from August to December?). I’ve done the paperwork for bringing Norwegian universal health insurance with us to the US, and still have a few other forms to fill out for taxes. I think we can’t do anything about the kids’ schools before we get there.
But today’s big task was going to the US embassy in Oslo to apply for a visa.
Notes of interest about visiting the US embassy:
- They’ll store your phone and other small items in a box at the gate, but no large items or laptops.
- There are no clocks on the walls of the waiting room. Rows of chairs face the counters where the embassy employees take your paperwork and then call you up for your interview.
- They only let you bring your paperwork with you, nothing else. It was a two hour wait. There is no reading material provided except some children’s books. So the room was full of silent people with no phones, staring into space. The lack of phones or newspapers did NOT make them speak to each other.
- I had luckily brought a printout of a paper that needs revising and they seemed to think that was part of my paperwork so didn’t confiscate it. They wouldn’t let me bring my book or even my pencil. Luckily there was a pen chained to a dish at a counter not being used so I borrowed that and now have a wonderfully marked up essay that, once my computer is out, I can hopefully fix in a jiffy after my two hours of paper-based work on it. I was the only person in the waiting room not staring into space.
