Against all my expectations, I got my new visa forms from the British Consulate in the mail at the end of last week. I was very impressed by the swiftness with which they sent the stuff (I was even more impressed by the fact that it actually showed up - way to go, Deutsche Post). What I was not so impressed with, however, was the fact that, when I opened the envelope that they had sent, I saw that they had sent me different forms than they had sent the first time around.

This called for another phone call to the British Consulate. Unfortunately, the visa office of the British Consulate in Düsseldorf - like most other important and overworked offices in Germany - is only open between the hours of 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. from Monday to Friday. And even more unfortunately, no one seemed to want to be bothered to pick up the phone in the visa office yesterday, and I sat in my living room for an hour and a half, dialing and redialing and redialing and listening to phone ring and ring and ring…and then beep with a busy signal…and then ring and ring and ring…until I finally gave up in disgust and hung up the phone for good.

So today I tried again. I wiled away the morning by filling out visa forms and reading old emails, and when 1:00 rolled around, I approached the phone with a now-familiar resignation.

It took about 45 minutes this time, but I finally got through. I talked to a German woman for a total of 7 seconds before she stopped in the middle of a sentence and put me on hold (where I got to hear something that sounded something like “Rule Britannia” interrupted every few seconds with the words “Please Hold” spoken in various languages), and then the woman came back and I had to start all over again, and then she transferred me to someone else, who transferred me to yet another person, but only after we had a conversation that seemed to consist entirely of letters and numbers. “Ignore 1 on IM2A, and on 2 write BEEA - not EEA - and we’ll fax IM2B A.S.A.P., O.K.?” Uh, okay.

If I actually get the right visa to get into Merrie Olde England, it will be a miracle.

On a slightly weirder and completely unrelated note:

After I got off the phone, Jeremy came home for lunch. As we ate together, we saw what we took to be a fly buzzing around the room. The bug was kind of throwing himself against walls and stuff, as bugs are wont to do, and he was flirting dangerously with our halogen floor lamp (which was on at the time). He finally seemed to hurl himself into the light, and we heard him banging around inside the lamp a bit, and then all was silent. We figured that he had either flown back out or had been fried or something, so we lost interest. Jeremy left for work again, and I left the living room briefly to putter in the kitchen for a moment - and when I came back in the living room, a vile, singed sort of smell assaulted me.

I thought, “Okay, the bug fried himself - I’ll turn off the light until he cools off or whatever.” I looked in the light, but I didn’t see the bug anywhere. I turned the light off anyway, waited a bit - and realized that the smell was getting stronger.

This is when the panic started to set in. My imagination is always more than ready to provide me with images of the worst possible disasters, and it did not fail me today. I became convinced that there was an electrical fire brewing somewhere in our very wired apartment. So I ran around unplugging everything - lamp, telephone, TV, stereo, two computers. I looked in the lamp again, but still didn’t see the bug. I pressed my hand against the walls around the electrical sockets, hoping that they weren’t warm. I yanked the window open and tried to smell outside to find out if the smell was really coming from the living room. I ran through the other rooms, sniffing the air everywhere like some mad beagle on speed as I tried to locate the source of the smell. I started to wonder what I would do if something - the lamp, say - actually did catch fire. Throw water on it? Throw a blanket on it? Call the firemen and run screaming from the house?

I eventually noticed that the smell had begun to fade, and I stood in the middle of the living room, completely perplexed and still sniffing cautiously. As a last resort, I climbed onto the couch and looked down into the lamp one last time - and there I saw it: the charred little carcass of the stupid bug who had indeed toasted himself on the lightbulb (it wasn’t fly - it was just some random insect that smelled truly vile when fried). Feeling rather foolish, I stopped sniffing the air, plugged all the appliances back in, and sat down in exhaustion, vowing to just straight out kill the next insect that snuck into my house, instead of being kind (or lazy) and waiting for the bug to find its own way out.

And that was all the excitement in my day. I think tomorrow I’ll try to get out a bit.