The greatest adventure of our life so far (or the story of how we won an international award in Europe and the mad and crazy struggle of it all)

Part 2 by Raia Jennifer E. Dela Pena-Landicho

My feverish email relationship with Dr. Aralynn Mcmane began soon after her congratulatory email. First things first: How in hell are we going to get ourselves to Europe? Pardon my French but we didn’t even have passports when we found out about winning the Natasa Prize. I haven’t renewed my passport in like nine years and my husband has never even applied for one. I know, I know, it may sound strange to some people but we didn’t have passports and it never bothered us that we didn’t have any. We had no reason to travel abroad and ever since we started the business, Sinag that is, we couldn’t imagine leaving the press for more than a few days or spending hard earned money on foreign travel when we were working our butts off trying to make the new business a success.

So there. We had no passports! Waahhh!

Imagine winning an international award and not even having passports. It’s absurd. I should have applied for passports as soon as we submitted our entry to the WAN-IFRA but as I said, I never thought we would win.

Our beautiful Natasa Prize trophy from WAN-IFRA

Then of course, it turned out the passport was the least of our problems. We had to worry about schengen visas too. One of the most difficult visas to acquire, the schengen is right up there with the US visa (the holy grail of Filipino bourgeois travelers). Apparently, people prepare months ahead of their travel period for schengen visa applications. We had around a maximum of a month and a half to get everything ready: passports and visas all together. Needless to say, it seemed an impossible feat to achieve all that in such a short period of time. When we went to a travel agency near our office, the staff there almost laughed out loud when we told them our situation. We were told, condescendingly, that passports now take around a month to two months to process. There is now a tedious appointment system implemented by the DFA ever since biometric passports were invented and people trying to get an appointment with the DFA should wait around two to three weeks to get an appointment for an application. That doesn’t include the processing time after your appointment date of course. Sigh.

Early on, I felt that yes, we won, but no, we won’t get to receive our award. The win felt like a defeat.

And then suddenly, in the midst of my passport induced depression, a very good friend of mine, (actually one of the regular speakers for the Sinag JTS), told me he had a good friend who works for the DFA and that DFA employees had a courtesy pass privilege for passport processing every month. He told our story to this friend of his and she took pity on our plight and even though we were complete strangers, she gave us three of her courtesy passes for that month! How amazing is that? It suddenly felt like pieces of a puzzle falling into place. I was so overjoyed by the serendipity of it all – a friend who had a friend who had courtesy passes! I won’t name the person who helped us with our passports as I’m sure she values her privacy a lot but let me just say that good Samaritans still exist in this world and she is definitely one of them. Helping a stranger is a noble thing and she’s a real angel, I tell you.

So, we got our courtesy passes and our passports were scheduled to be released by September 12, just enough time for visa appointments. We were optimistic and enthusiastic! We are going to Vienna!

Then again, the ax fell.

The Austrian Embassy said that it takes two weeks to get an appointment for an interview and then you have to wait another three weeks to get results, which means we should get our visas around two weeks AFTER the awarding ceremonies. So near, and yet so far I tell myself...TO BE CONTINUED