Ready to go!

Last night I had trouble going to bed, and trouble sleeping. That's bad news, if you, like me, have announced that you'll get up early. I felt like crap, and ended up taking a pill against what could be a fever. I don't know, really. But at least I fell asleep, and when the alarm went off at 8, I was in a coma and slept for another 4 hours.

Now it's already 14:21 and I still haven't done anything - but - John and I have picked up our visas to China! We sent our applications to the Chinese embassy one week ago - I'm quite impressed with that. Some people I've been talking with have been worried about my visa, like "won't those commie-Chinese spend like a year giving you a visa?" But no, apparently it's faster than Soviet private car applications, and such. Anyways though, the whole visa application procedure was nearly foiled by the Swedish postal service. Of course our visas were sent registered, afterall, visas are powerful pieces of ID that you wouldn't want to get lost. And this is the beginning of the problem - our passports was inside the package we were to pickup for which we needed ID. But no problem, we have driver's licences. We thought.

Then showing up at the post office - no chance: "Your ID has to be Swedish!"
"What?"

That's right, we need a Swedish piece of ID to pick up stuff. That's annoying. What's strange is that even if they'd opened the letter with the passports, or we'd had our passports, that still wouldn't have been enough! I think that's stupid. Does this have anything to do with terrorism and stuff? That you can't have stuff sent to you unless the Swedes know who you are? That's really annoying, but what's really strange is that it was all ok and dandy as long as some random dude behind us in the queue agreed to sign with us, and provide the postal dude with his ID. Then, all of a sudden, it's ok. It didn't even seem to bother them that this was clearly just a simple move to get around their clumsy bureaucracy.

So a question poses itself - is this only a Swedish thing, or is it the same all over?

Anyways, we're all ready to go: tickets, visa and the Rough Guide to China. Wonderful!