This post updates you on what I’ve been doing and explains why you may soon see recipes featuring unfamiliar ingredients on the blog. My fiancé and I decided to take a big leap: we’re moving from Portland, Oregon, USA to Cape Town, South Africa for a while. He’s long dreamed of studying at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and we chose this year to make it happen.
Moving to another country is a complex process. To begin our visa applications we needed numerous certified personal documents, a place to live in Cape Town, and plane tickets. Because we didn’t buy return tickets, we had to pay a substantial deposit in case we were required to leave the country. Securing a flat and signing a lease without a guarantee you’ll be living there is unnerving, and entrusting important documents like passports to the mail is stressful.
After about six weeks of gathering paperwork and dealing with bureaucracy, we were finally ready to submit our applications. We left ourselves almost two months to get the visas, which should have been enough time since the process can sometimes take only 5–10 days. I used Priority Shipping and a tracking number so the package had the least possible chance of being lost.
Before this point we had a few minor panics—our first apartment choice fell through, we worried we’d jeopardized my fiancé’s financial aid (we hadn’t), some documents were difficult to obtain, and wire transfers caused headaches. Nothing catastrophic, just time-consuming frustrations.
Then the truly stressful problems began.
Obstacle 1: The package with our applications was delivered on a Saturday and no one was there to sign.
We learned that if the post office tries to deliver and no one signs, it doesn’t always automatically redeliver. The tracking information stopped updating and we had to request redelivery online. It cost us precious time but was an otherwise fixable snag. We were able to confirm the South African Consulate General had our complete applications, and then the waiting began.
Obstacle 2: I mishandled the prepaid return envelope.
I shouldn’t be trusted with mailing important items. I didn’t realize tracking numbers are assigned to parcels when they’re shipped, not beforehand. I’d focused on making sure our application package was secure and used Priority Shipping for the return envelope, but I didn’t ensure the return envelope had an active tracking number.
About a month after applying we received a call saying our visas were approved and asked for a credit card number to pay return shipping. My fiancé told them we’d included a prepaid envelope, which they used. Since I hadn’t set up tracking for that envelope, we ended up without a way to trace it, assuming Priority Shipping would be sufficient.
Obstacle 3: The visas didn’t arrive when expected.
Five days later there was still no sign of our passports. They should have arrived within a few days, so we started to panic. A call to the consulate confirmed the package had been mailed on schedule. My fiancé asked how much postage I’d put on the envelope. I’d weighed the contents, but he worried they might be mailing back more items than we anticipated and that I’d underpaid postage, causing a delay.
We had only a few days before moving out of our apartment, after which the package would be forwarded to a parent’s address, adding more delay and uncertainty.
Obstacle 4: Thursday, we leave Monday, and the visas still hadn’t arrived.
We’d waited more than two weeks for something that should have taken a couple of days. We called post offices, checked with the consulate, and considered all possibilities. If the package hadn’t been delivered, we figured it might be lost.
Friday was our last day to act, so early Thursday we tried a different approach. After more calls we learned the consulate could issue new visas the next day—provided we had new passports for stamping. That meant the possibility of getting new passports and flying to Los Angeles on short notice.
We spent a few frantic hours booking flights, securing a hotel, and gathering documents in case we needed to apply in person.
Obstacle 5: Our visas finally arrived while we were flying to Los Angeles to apply for replacements.
My fiancé predicted it: as we headed to the airport he kept saying, “They’ll come today because we’re doing this.” And they did arrive. Because affordable flights didn’t fit the new timing, we had already committed to the trip, so we continued. We learned about the delivery during a stop in Phoenix and ended up spending a night in Los Angeles at a budget hotel, then killing time at LAX the following day. We were exhausted, and my fiancé endured a lot of my stress in a short period.
Obstacle 6: Our New York to Johannesburg flight was cancelled.
We finally reached PDX packed and visas in hand. After a farewell dinner we took a red-eye to New York and had a long layover before our international flight. The flight was delayed while engineers searched for a needed part. After several hours and only a few hours of sleep total, the airline cancelled the flight.
They rebooked us, provided hotel accommodations, transportation, and vouchers—but the food was unappetizing. While waiting at the hotel we discovered we were queued behind famous South African golfer Gary Player, who kindly chatted and posed for a photo with us despite starting a bit of a commotion.
Obstacle 7: We missed our connecting flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town.
The airline rebooked our connections but allowed only about an hour and twenty minutes to clear customs, retrieve checked bags, recheck them, and pass security. We made it to baggage recheck in time, but reissuing new boarding passes took much longer than expected. We eventually ran to security with just minutes before the gate closed.
At security my fiancé noticed an issue: he and I had the same seat number because two copies of my boarding pass had been printed. Security directed us back to the airline desk and it became clear we wouldn’t catch that flight. That flight already had our checked bags.
We were rebooked on the next flight, and the agent who’d misprinted the passes accompanied us to baggage claim to sort the bags. The result was messy—one bag ended up on the earlier flight, one on the correct flight, and one on the next—but ultimately we recovered our luggage.
Now we’re finally settled into our apartment in Cape Town and getting organized. I wrote this post in Evernote while waiting for our WiFi, which is now up—slow and unreliable, but functional. My next posts will share our Cape Town adventures, and I’ll have new recipes up soon.
