Ho John Lee’s Weblog

My passport expires in a couple of weeks, so I’m about to send it off to get a new one. This one has been well used, I had an extra set of pages inserted a few years ago. This time I’m going to request a 48-page passport to start with, instead of the standard 24-page version.

The photo in my current passport is ten years old. Since then I’ve gotten rid of my eyeglasses and lost around 30 pounds. Between not looking exactly like my passport photo, and an ever-accumulating set of entry and exit stamps, it can sometimes take a while to clear passport control. I usually explain that I’ve taken up marathon running.

It helps that the places I’m visiting don’t raise a lot of eyebrows. I once met a fellow while transiting at the Narita Red Carpet Club. He was nominally based in Manhattan, but it sounded like he spent most of his time in places like like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, along with much of the Middle East. It turns out he worked for a German industrial chemicals company. So not only does this guy have an “interesting” travel itinerary, but from time to time he’s around explosives and other volatile chemicals that are picked up by trace residue detectors at airport security.

I’m looking forward to having a passport photo that looks like me.

Update 03-04-2006 20:14 PST: The new passport, along with the cancelled old passport, arrived in the mail yesterday. I sent it via US Express Mail on February 20th, with a request for expedited processing, but didn’t bother with enclosing an Express Mail return envelope as I didn’t need it that quickly, it appears that the default is US Priority Mail. The process appears to have taken about two weeks end-to-end.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Travel, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.