my visa (VAL)

Although I arrived at JFK several hours early, I ended up running through security to my flight because I was held up at the check-in counter. They didn't want to let me board the flight without a visa. Although the Bangladesh Consulate website says tourists can easily secure visas on arrival for up to 30 days, and Matt's various expat connections had all assured him that this is what their guests had always done, the airline agent told me their system "strongly recommended" getting a visa beforehand and thus would not allow her to print me my boarding pass. Her supervisor said he himself was Bangladeshi and would never dream of going to Dhaka without a visa. An hour, a panicked call to Matt, a bloody nose, and a fight with the airlines later, the supervisor's supervisor finally approved my boarding pass.

This, of course, made me nervous for my arrival. Visions of being trapped in the Dhaka airport haunted me as I tried to sleep on the plane. Of course I had no way of knowing what the visa on arrival process would entail...

I was one of the first from my flight to make it to the terminal in Dhaka, so I walked right up to the passport security checkpoint to ask for the visa. The agent gestures past him and into the baggage check area, and tells me to find a kiosk for Sonali Bank. With that I’m through security and staring at a row of airport service kiosks: rental cars, currency exchanges, some shady abandoned TI desks. At the Sonali Bank kiosk, a man sits slumped over in his chair, sleeping, behind a counter and a thick pane of Plexiglas. The lights are out. I knock on the glass timidly. He jumps up, runs his hands over his face, and flips on the lights. I now see that his small office is a 6’x6’ space wallpapered in free posters from old airlines and carpeted in . . . people. Yes, four men are sleeping on the floor, under thin blankets, their bodies stretching from one wall to the other. I try to keep my eyes on the teller and not on his strange office mates, who don’t even stir in the sudden light.
“I need a visa on arrival?” I ask hesitantly.
“Fifty dollars” he replies, as he gets out a carbon-papered receipt pad and begins scrawling on it.
“Do you need to see my return itinerary?”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Well, do you want my passport?” I shove it under the glass.
He waves it to the side, leaving it unopened, and continues writing out the receipt. A minute later he rips off the top copy and slides it back under the glass with my passport.
“That’s it?” I ask incredulous. It takes every ounce of my sleep-deprived focus to keep my eyes off of the floor, where one of the men is starting to stir.
“Go back to security now,” he replies, “that’s it.”
So I head back to security, which I realize at this point was only because I didn’t have the brain energy to come up with my own alternative path. If I grabbed my bag off the carousel, I could have had a straight shot out of the airport and to the taxi stand. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this was the strenuous visa process that the JFK agents were concerned about.