Step 1: Get to India

Hello! Welcome to the first (mini) post. It's 5 days until we fly to New Dehli and thought some people might be interested in how you go about getting a long term visa for India.

The catch is that your visa starts from the time it's issued, not the time you arrive in country, which can mean leaving it later than you'd like. We applied for 6 month single entry visas and headed to the embassy.

Arriving in London was a very British scene with Morris Dancers and a Canal Festival in full swing:

We tracked down the embassy and got our ticket numbers as 721 and 722, great. Sitting down we looked at the screens and saw the current tickets being called were 132 and 948...Ahh.

Greg was called first. The interviewer didn't recognise his job title and decided he was probably going to try to work in India, so would need to come back in a few days with a letter from his manager. After some discussion Greg wrote a letter himself explaining he was NOT intending to work and simpy wants to be a tourist. He was told this probably wouldn't be enough. Eek.

When my turn came I was all geared up to defend myself and write a convincing letter as to why I wouldn't want to work in India (having just finished a job in a call centre). I saw the same woman as Greg, paid my fee (£126) and was told it should be with me in 3-5 working days.

The only difference between our applications was that I put "worker" and he put "professional". So what we have learned from this is that Greg has a very suspicious face.

Luckily enough we both got our visas about 4 days later.

Now it's just packing up our things and saying goodbye!