Adventurous Start to an Adventurous Trip

Ola Amigo.

Finally the countdown is to zero. And we are ready to board the flight to Mozambique to “Connect the Dots” to make an impact.  At 6:15 am, new lavish black car shows up in front of our building to pick us up to go to JFK Airport, New York. Excitements were on the height. Thank you so much Drexel for a special treat. Finally, we reached the airport at 9:30 am. Hold on, how everything can go so smooth?  Oh wait here comes the problem, according to our itinerary we are supposed to have a 2 hours halt in South Africa to go to Mozambique. And from now on, we need a separate in-transit visa for South Africa in order to board the plane.

Then happened a lot of back and forth discussions, the airline people helped and moved our flight reservation to tomorrow, March 28 now. But the question is “How are we going to get a visa to another country in one day”. Here comes the most impactful call from Andrea Allimatiris, Director of Finance, College of Computing and Informatics (CCI), Drexel. Her perfect words “Don’t worry, we will take care of everything”.   Such a relief! Thanks Andrea, you are awesome! Thanks, we love you Drexel CCI!! On field, we are the players, but in this whole show Drexel and Y-center are playing the biggest roles to make this show happen. Thank you so much Drexel and Ycenter. So finally off to Manhattan, first time in 4 years, I reached in Manhattan without any plans. Then we showed up at the consulate’s office without visa application with a hope for a visa within next 5 hours. Pretty interesting isn’t it? 

Every experience is a new experience.  Then starts the race, got the application done, paperwork requirements, thank God we had copies of all the documents. First time in New York, but with previous experience of map navigation from Philadelphia made us survive this day in New York. We ran to the nearest CVS to get the photos at 12:30pm and ran back to reach the visa office by 1pm (closing time). But finally, we made it. We submitted the application. Let’s get to the present. We are writing this blog while we are sitting in the Visa office at 3:30 waiting to collect our passports at 4pm. And finally we got the visa and checked into a hotel. All thanks to Andrea. We told everyone that, “We are ready for the next adventure”. But we were not expecting it to start this early :P.  Everyone who gave us best wishes, thanks, we packed all the wishes with us J.  Here is the view from the window of our room:

Moral of the story: 

Adventure does not start at a new place, it starts when you feel it!!

We will be back with the update soon... Stay tuned.