Passports

Even if you are not planning on travelling any time soon, make sure you know that your passport is there and valid from time to time. I had a horrible experience recently that i would never want anyone to have to live through.

I have dual nationality, irish-canadian. I use my canadian passport when travelling to north america and my european passport when travelling in europe. It is very convenient to have both!! My irish passport is also my only official document that says that I have the right to live and work in france or anywhere in europe for that matter so when I need some kind of official ID, it is what i use.

I know i used it at the end of may one day, and i discovered two weeks before we were leaving for our trip to italy last week that my passport never made it back into the passport drawer. I turned the entire apartment upside down for a few days searching for it and resigned myself to the fact that i needed a new one. I could get on the plane from paris to pisa with my canadian passport and my return ticket out of italy. But they wouldn’t have let me back into france as a canadian without a ticket to leave france within 3 months.

With 8 days to go before we left for italy, i called the irish embassy. To get a new passport, i needed my original long form birth certificate, my mother’s original long form birth certificate (she’s the one born in ireland) and my parents’ original marriage certificate. These documents were of course all in Toronto.

My parents mailed them to me express, and what should have taken 2 business days, took a full week because of a french national holiday and a completely incompetent courier company (that will have to be another post)

We were leaving france on Wednesday evening and i was finally at the embassy with my documents and passport application on the Tuesday morning around 11am. They told me that i could pick it up around the same time the next day – but they didn’t tell me that they needed an OK from the irish embassy in ottawa since that is where my first irish passport was issued. Of course, with 6 hours time difference, getting this fax from ottawa wasn’t as easy as it might have been.

This is getting long, so I will just finish by saying that our flight was at 6:50 pm on wednesday. I was waiting at the embassy here for that fax to come in. My passport was ready, but they couldn’t hand it over. It finally came at 5:15pm and i RAN to the train to get to the airport. Arnaud was waiting for me half way there and we actually made it on time!

I never want to repeat that experience. I have no idea what happened to my other passport, but from now on, I am going to keep a regular check to make sure both my passports are where they are supposed to be and I am going to get the french government to give me an official document that says i am allowed to live here.