The Eye of Patrick

Hello everyone,

Since April 19th I have been done with school and also found out where I will be going in Japan. This seems to have been the easy part. Now that I know that I will be going to Japan I have finally started to prepare for it. This leads me to my post today about the stuff I am working on to get to Japan.

In the last 3 years I have been to 15 countries and have re-entered some of them more then once. This has taken a heavy toll on my passport and as a result it looks like it has seen better days. As you can see the photos below the passport does not look good and the photo too. When I took that photo I had learnt you were not suppose to smile, but that created a problem later as my face lacked any expression. When I look at it, I feel how any country could let me in.

So this time when I went to get my passport photo taken I made sure to practice not smiling but at the same time having a more positive emotion. I also learnt that you can’t wear white shirts when you take a passport photo. This is funny because I had selected a black shirt for the day, but decided to change it to a nice white one for my photo. So rather then walk home I went to a second hand clothes store and bought a black shirt. Though it turned out to be too small, but still good enough for the photo. I will probably have to go back and return it.

Then I had to go to the post office and mail it off. One of the things you must have when you submit your passport (besides the photo) is someone to sign saying that you are, who you say you are. But this can not be any person, but someone who is a member of a professional body (i.e. lawyer, doctor, and teacher). I am currently away on university studies, so I could not go to the people I used before when I lived in Calgary. So luckily my father will be in Calgary on business and he can get one of his friends to sign it.

So I will wait and see.

It is interesting next week I will graduate from Trent University with a Bachelor of Business Admin and International Development Studies with an Emphasis in International Political Economy. This sounds very fancy, but is in reality a degree of business, politics and economics. But they just add all those extra words to make it look fancy.

I went to Mexico after I finished my school year in April and I took about 800 photos. I will try to include some in my posts. I hope you enjoy.

Patrick