Getting a visa

I started writing this post before my trip to Lvov, so the beginning looked like: "My last one day trip...", but now it should start: My second to last one day trip was around two months ago. I can’t call it a city break, it was just a stopover. In Dubai on my way back home from Sri Lanka. A whole story of getting there is more interesting than the city.

When I was buying tickets to Sri Lanka I had two options to choose: with longer or shorter stopover. Dubai had been my engineering dream to see, so I checked a possibility to get out from the airport between flights. I browsed few websites and I learnt that it is possible to buy a visa at the airport, which costs 25 euro. So I bought the tickets with one longer stopover on return and then I was waiting for my flight to Sri Lanka, being in 100% sure I would also visit Dubai. Aha, how much I had been wrong I learnt two days before the flight!

It is a prove - I really got there after trying thousand times!

Preparing to my exotic trip as a backpacker, I was checking every law issue, not to have any problems then, and I found out that “Passport holders of the countries listed below do not require a prior visa in order to enter the United Arab Emirates for business or tourist visits lasting 30 days. Europe: France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Finland, Spain, Monaco, Vatican, Iceland, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein.” POLAND? No, so “If you do NOT fall into one of the above categories, you will require a visa and a sponsor for your visit. (…)The sponsor can be your travel agency, your hotel, the company or department with which you are doing business in the UAE, or an individual (e.g. a relative or friend resident in the UAE).” There is also a possibility to buy a visa by Emirates for… 67 dollars! Ha! Two days before the flight, on Saturday afternoon I had a vision of 18 hours of sleeping at the airport.

Cruising to the souk area

But I didn’t give up. I called Emirates call center. There, such a nice lady advised me to choose the cheapest hotel and appear in Emirates office on Monday morning to deal with official papers. I found only one quite cheap hotel, where one night costs the same like a cost of visas, but we decided to take it. When every paper was signed the customer agent noticed that a scan of my friend’s passport was black and white. Wrong! It should be in color. So what to do when my friend was exactly in a train going to the airport?

Who is going to buy me such a treasure?

Still without giving up, we were looking for nice people at Warsaw airport who would scan and send one page of the passport. We found them, twice, every time – not too smart. The first lady scanned in a huge resolution, the second lady – in a huge resolution and… black and white. In the meantime we were calling Emirates call center to check if the scan appeared in a mailbox. But… Emirates call center is in… Manchester and they don’t switch to Warsaw office. The other problem was that I didn’t remember a name of the customer agent, so I couldn’t say who had been helping us. In the end we were told that Emirates hadn’t received any visa copy.

No, this is not our hotel. Ours was better!

We weren’t tired of giving up, so at the airport in Dubai we went to the airport hotel and paid for scanning the passport page once again. We paid 5$ – the most expensive scan I had ever had! But then we paid 7$ for sending mail with the color copy.

I started thinking that Dubai was not meant to visit, but during our stay in Sri Lanka I checked my mail every day for a little sign of visa approval. There was no sign till our going back home, so we thought that seriously we would spend 18 hours at the airport. No way!

Burj Khalifa

After landing in Dubai we went to the Arabian Adventure desk to find out if they knew anything about our visas, but… they had been waiting for us with our names written on the pieces of paper. Hurra! We got visas, so we could visit Dubai, explore the city, go to souks, and had a nap in the hotel. But do you hope it is the end of the story? Noooo… After coming back home I thought we got a gift from Emirates, because I had still had the same amount of money on my account.

Emirates withdrew money just few days ago! I had been hoping it had been Christmas. Bad Emirates, bad Santa! ;)