Yesterday I had to pay a visit to the French consulate to apply for a visa for my upcoming trip. It was not a too-unpleasant experience, which is not to say that it was pleasant in any way. I had the first appointment of the day and had to tackle the traffic. This was semi-intense, because it is difficult to know how much delay the logjam will cause. Apart from two hold-ups, there was no problem, though.

What worried me much more was that my application would be incomplete. As it turned out, the visa people were particularly uninterested in the documentation I had carefully gathered. In fact, I think the lady who helped me was slightly offended by all the documentation. Compared to the Finnish consulate, the security was lax, but the staff made up for it by being quite unfriendly.

I do not want to complain unnecessarily about travel and the associated trouble. But it seems to me necessary to do a little of that now, because it seems to me to be part of a larger contraction of individual freedom. This is happening much more widely than just travel. I see more and more bureaucracy at the university, at the bank, and at the municipality. Every company has a call centre where dehumanized zombies provide zero information. One saving grace is that the South Africa government is so inept/corrupt that we do not have a health and safety police force, as in many other countries.

Ugh, this is an ugly line of thought, and I’d rather not carry on with it. The silver lining is that I’ll get my visa on Wednesday and then there is only the two 11 hour flights to look forward to.