i'm so cool

I'm not sure exactly how old I was when my mom explained the whole concept of a passport to me, but I do remember that what really perked my interest was when she told me that sometimes, if you really travel a whole lot, you need to get extra pages put into your little personal book. I remember thinking "now that is the mark of a true badass." Years later, when I finally received my first passport, I was disheartened to see all those pages, and those four boxes on each page, each little box on each page needing a tiny little stamp before I would need new pages. When I set out for Australia in college with that passport, I thought I was getting close to filling that puppy up, and might actually make it before the thing expired three years later. Unfortunately, I mailed that passport home on the slow boat, had to have a temporary passport issued at the Embassy in Sydney, and then I had to buy a new, blank, permanent passport when I made it home. I had to start all over again.

Well, it took a lot of work, a lot of time on sweaty central American chicken buses, stuffy trans-Pacific flights, speedy hydrofoils, slow ferries, smokey Chinese trains, etc., but with the help of several full page visas, I am now the proud new owner of extra passport pages. I just had to brag.

One more item, if you've seen my passport, you know that I look like Bin Laden in it, if you've seen pictures of Bin Laden, you've seen what my passport photo looks like. It's fun to show off at parties, but not so great at border checkpoints, immigration offices, or U.S. Embassies. Usually people just laugh it off (the guard on the Vietnam side of the Vietnam-Laos border remarked "very handsome"), but I still get nervous when I have to present that document to anybody with any kind of authority. So, when the Vice-Consul at the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane called me up to the window and didn't immediately return my passport with it's shiny new pages, I started to sweat just a tiny bit. He was chatty, conversational, asking how long I'd lived in Korea, how my Korean was. I wasn't sure where this was going, but he ended up asking if I had ever considered working for the Foreign Service; apparently they're always trying to recruit well travelled, handsome people (Korean speakers in especially high demand) to work for them. It really made me happy that someone had judged me based on the stamps in my passport and not just the picture at the front.