Wayne has a passport!

Finally Wayne has a passport! Booked a trip to Genting Highlands during the last week of December so it was some motivation to get his passport done.

Applying for the passport was a breeze! Everything was done online. Filling up the form, attaching a photo, payment and submitting. And after 3 working days, his passport was ready for collection. Impressive! Gone were the days of queuing to just get a form!

The nightmare however was in two areas :

1) Getting a passport photo for Wayne

This was like have fun and half nightmarish. Had to get a front view of him and one where he was sucking his thumb or looking upwards or downwards or sideways or giving me some funny scrunched up face. So you can imagine.. Not easy at all. So I had to put my camera on the multiple shots function and just keep clicking away, hoping for that one photo which could pass off as a passport photo. And after probably a few hundred attempts, we settled on this photo. =)

He looks a little stunned here, but it’s the best we've got. It wasnt easy getting this shot y'know!

You will know what I mean after seeing just some examples of the rest of the photos..

2) Collecting his passport

Gosh.. This was truly a nightmare. I was on leave last Wednesday, so together with Wayne, made our way to ICA for the collection. Arrived at around 4pm (was hoping there'd be less people in the late afternoon - obviously I was wrong), got my queue number and there were 254 people in front of me! *faint* Decided not to wait.. God knows how long the wait would be. 2 hours at least? So anyway, made an e-appointment for collection this morning, and it was much better. Still quite a lousy experience but at least it was better compared to Wednesday. There were about 50 people in the queue before me, and we waited an hour.. So yay, finally we've got Wayne's passport! But surely they can improve on e waiting time???? After having such an impressive experience with the online application and prompt processing of the passport, having to queue for so long just to collect the passport is really a dampener!

Anyway the passport is valid for 5 years, so I'll just complain again 5 years later when I need to renew the passport. Meanwhile - yippee! Got out ticket to holidays!