Thursday, August 13, 2015

Oslo Embassy Trip

Do you ever have this circumstances where things just fall into place perfectly despite appearing to veer off course? We had a handful of those type of encounters and knew without a doubt God's hand was looking over our trip to Oslo and orchestrating things to work in our favor.

First, the decision to make the trip to the embassy this soon came pretty last minute. We emailed the embassy on Wednesday of last week and by Friday had an appointment for the following Wednesday. They opened an appointment slot up for us surprisingly!

One of the things we need to present at the embassy appointment is birth certificates from Norway. We got notification that they were being mailed July 24. Well, for some reason, the tax office now uses KPMG as our mailing address. My co worker told me I had an envelope from KPMG and I foolishly assumed it was or birth certificates. We were quite panicked Monday night when she dropped off our mail and we didn't have them!

Jason headed to the tax office the next morning in hopes of getting a copy printed. He waited in line and was told that they no longer print them and you order them online. She said they can order them for you when you come in. He explained that we were headed to the embassy the next day and didn't know why they'd been mailed to KPMG and was there any way she could print them for us. She said "no" but walked over to the printer to retrieve the copies of the birth certificate! Yay!!!

Our next obstacle was airline tickets. By the time we got the appointment there weren't many seats left and we needed to book fast. The flight we needed we couldn't book online with the airline because we wanted to book three seats and it wouldn't let you do that with an infant under two. And of course because this is Norway, the customer service was closed. We were able to book through cheap tickets though! Jason called to get us three seats together and they said they couldn't assign us seats because it was SAS's system and when we called SAS they said they couldn't because we hadn't booked through them. Ugh!


Once we were able to check in we could pick seats. Except they only allowed us to pick two seats going out! I called and spoke with someone and got it arranged to have an entire row on both legs of the flight. Phew. Except that when we went to check-in, it was the same as the original error. Nothing had been changed from my phone call the day before and now it was after 7:00 am for our 8:00 am flight! The gal had to call and it took some time to correct things. She said thye had put the infant lap child with Evelyn, our other infant, and that she was barely able to get our seats together. She said they crew would also be confused why they only had one infant on the manifest so to make sure and tell them we booked an infant with seat ticket. But it got resolved and we made it through security in enough time! 


Once we landed, we made our way to the train station, but not without a quick stop at Starbucks. As we were in line to buy our tickets, an agent asked us if we needed help. We told her where we were headed and she informed us that train left every 20 min and the next one was about to depart in 4 min. She walked us to the escalator where you can just swipe your credit card and go. She was super helpful and we were glad to make that train and not have to wait for the next one!


Once we arrived, we walked the short 8 min to the embassy arrving around 10:15 am. Unfortunately our appointment wasn't until 11:00 am. We went through security however, and asked at the counter if we could go early if there was an opening. He took our paperwork right away and started our processing. The whole thing took a little over an hour and the girls needed to eat. I kindly asked the guards if I could bring my nursing pillow in if they performed additional checks on it. Since it had already been checked for explosives, they let me take it! (This is a big deal because you can't bring anything into the embassy with you - no strollers, backpacks, blankets, etc. - so I was super grateful!)


We got out of the embassy around 11:15 and had plenty of time to grab lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe and feed the girls again. We slowly made our way back to the train station and headed to the airport. Things went smoothly the rest of the trip and we were so glad to have the trip finished! 


The girls were angels on both flights and did fabulous! They must have been tired because they slept 5.5 hours last night!!! :-) 

Here's our trip to the embassy two years ago with Madi and the same picture we took with her. We were able to do a bit more touristy stuff then, making it a weekend trip.  



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