It’s been a while since I posted again hasn’t it! All with good reason of course, I’ve had back to back business trips to Japan, Korea and the US (as well as a 4 day holiday in Chicago tagged on the back of the last business trip).
I got back to Shanghai from Chicago on Thursday evening looking forward to a nice long weekend to get over the jetlag before going back to work, only for my hopes to be immediately dashed away when I got an email on Friday morning asking what time I wanted picking up for work on Saturday morning.. Ahhhh… stupid Chinese holiday system, I’d totally forgotten about working the weekend.. So I was back in the office yesterday, but I’m taking a holiday today, I just can’t face a 7 day working week..
Anyway, where do I start with the US trip, well, how about the beginning and the complete mess I made of actually getting into the US…
I was travelling out from Shanghai on Sunday afternoon to arrive in Minneapolis (via Chicago) late on Sunday evening. My meeting was starting on Monday morning and I was presenting at 10am, which wasn’t giving me a lot of time to get used to being in a different continent but I figured that if I took some melatonin on the flight to get some sleep coupled with a fistful of ginseng with my coffee on the Monday morning I should get along just fine.
I spent most of Sunday slowly packing for the trip, said my goodbyes to H and jumped in a taxi to the airport at around 1pm. There was already a big queue when I arrived at terminal 2 and I must have waited for near on 30 minutes before finally being able to check in.
I placed my bag on the scales, passed my passport and e-ticket to the guy behind the counter and asked for an aisle seat. He started entering my info on the computer and asked if I’d completed my travel authorization.
“My what?”
“yes, your ESTA, your pre-authorisation to travel”
I rolled my eyes and pointed to my passport, “I’m British, I don’t need to do anything like that”, to which he passed back all my documents and replied, “you can’t travel if you did not complete this application, even if you are British”. “He’s so wrong” I thought, “he’s going to feel like such an idiot when he realises”, but no, he wasn’t moving on it, and now here comes the supervisor backing him up and handing me back my luggage..
“Don’t worry” he said, “it’s a 10 minute online application”, he pointed down the aisle, “walk down here and you’ll find a business centre, you can use a computer there, complete the registration and then come back”, he wrote down a web address for me on a piece of paper (https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/
