Consulate Review: Montreal, Canada
Review Topic: IR-1/CR-1 Visa
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| Event |
Description |
| Review Date : |
February 25, 2010 |
| Embassy Review : |
We were first in line at about 6:30, before another VJ'er. They let us in some time between 7:30 and 7:45, and the wait felt surprisingly short. Given the time we invested waiting for this interview, I'm not sorry at all to have arrived this early (even when we were still on west coast time!)
The security process is the same as other reviews describe, and the view is amazing once they take you upstairs on the elevator. Since we were first we were called first to the window where they check your documents and take your Xpresspost envelope. She asked if my husband had an updated police certificate, but he didn't, and she didn't seem too concerned about that.
She said it would be a short wait, and what felt like a few minutes later, she called my husband up to get his fingerprints taken. I went to the window with him though it was totally unnecessary, and I was amazed at how lightning quick the fingerprinting was.
When the fingerprints were done, she said they'd call us into a room in a little while, and the wait there seemed like a few minutes again. (I was devoting more energy to staying calm than watching the clock  ) The next part was the interview, and the first surprising thing was that I wasn't expecting to be standing the whole time. I did read that the interviewer would be behind glass, but I also was picturing us seated and no such luck.
The interview consisted of a few general questions about how we met, and then we started to get into the details of when exactly my husband had lived in the US. He was there on a variety of visas, each time with moves back to Canada, so it was rather complicated. He asked for an original of one of my husband's visas and the stamps in his passport for the other visas, though instead of those we had some little slips of paper that were apparently equivalent.
He seemed to look perplexed at the documentation we were providing, and he excused himself and disappeared into a room behind him. But it ended up being nothing too serious since he came back and said (though still with the concerned look on his face and reaching down and to his right) "Based on the information you've provided..." that my husband's visa was approved. Then he handed us the welcome to the US letter, and explained we'd get the visa mailed to us in our Xpresspost envelope sometime next week.
We were back in our hotel room a few blocks away by about 9:20, so the whole process didn't take long at all. Honestly, after all the waiting, the whole thing was pretty anticlimactic. Not that I'm complaining about that, of course!
All in all, I'd say the people we dealt with were courteous, though the woman who took the documents and fingerprints was friendlier than the interviewer. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the waiting area was. It was cleaner and newer feeling than most government buildings you see that are populated by surly workers and look like they haven't been touched since the 70s. They also had a rack of US government-related reading materials in the waiting area and some vending machines. They even had a suggestion box (!) though it didn't have any papers or anything to write with. Still, having a suggestion box at least indicates that someone cares!
To all those reading this because you're about to go through this process, best of luck! At least for me it wasn't nearly as trying as I was imagining. |
| Rating : |
Very Good |
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ver 5.0