One of the “maintenance tasks” of living abroad is having to keep your passport updated. Most Americans don’t have a passport in the first place. The U.S. State Department estimates that about 37% of the population has a passport. Compare that to 86% of U.K. residents and a whopping 96% of EU citizens!

Passports have an extremely long expiration date of 10 years for adults. Minors, on the other hand, only last five years. This reflects the fact that they change more quickly and the picture needs to be up to date in order to pass through border controls efficiently and safely.

We first got the girls passports a few months before we immigrated, so they’re quickly coming up on their expiration date. Considering the backlog that has plagued most bureaucracies since COVID, we decided it was prudent to start the process a bit early.

For Americans living in England, this means a trip to the U.S. Embassy in London. You have to schedule an appointment some months in advance. I can’t be more specific than “some months”, because we’ve yet to figure out the rhyme or reason as to when they make appointments available. We would check every day for weeks, then suddenly a glut of them would bookable, only to almost immediately disappear, for more to appear at a seemingly random time in the future. Oh, and all the passport appointments seem to be before 10am as well.

So, last Thursday, having dutifully booked an appointment and collected our documents, we caught a very early train to Vauxhall, a station south of our usual destination of Waterloo, upriver on the Thames.

The U.S. Embassy building is just a short 10 minute walk from Vauxhall Station. I have to admit that it’s not a particularly attractive building, looking like a cube with aluminium foil shapes stuck to the outside. To make the choice even odder, the “foil” shapes are only on three sides of the building, but not the fourth, so it doesn’t seem to be protective or for blocking signals or anything. It just seems to be a (rather odd) architectural choice.

We arrived just in time for our appointment and my heart sunk to see a HUGE line of people waiting to get in. Fortunately, it turns out that was the line for foreign nationals wanting to get a visa to go to the U.S. As citizens, we got to skip that line and was put in a much shorter one (two people in front of us) to go in a side door to security.

The first real surprise was that almost none of the employees we encountered were American. (Ok. Disclaimer time: most of them didn’t have American accents. Obviously they could have been naturalised American citizens, but I kind of doubt it. I will admit that I’m generalising here.) There were London Metropolitan police officers patrolling the grounds, fully armed, which is rare here. The lady directing the line had an Indian accent. The person at the front desk was Polish. It wasn’t until we met with an embassy official that we heard an American accent.

Now, let me be clear for the racists: I’m NOT complaining about this. Obviously it’s more efficient and effective to hire local London residents than to ship Americans over to do all these jobs. I’m certain all of these individuals are security checked twelve different ways. It just didn’t fit what I was expecting. Which, to be honest, my entire view of embassies comes from Jason Bourne movies. I expected Marines on the door and to witness at least one spy arrest or shootout. I was disappointed on all these fronts.

The passport process itself was refreshingly quick. We were assigned a number and told to listen for it, then report to the window that was called out. We were called up within 10 minutes or so of arrival, gave over the old passports and signed a couple documents. (Don’t ask what they were. I didn’t read them.) We then sat back down to wait for our number again; this time to appear before a Consular Officer who had us swear (right arms raised and everything) that these were our kids and all the information submitted was true. We then sat down again and waited to be called up to a cashier to pay. In and out in just over an hour.

Of course, now comes the waiting. We’re planning a trip to Spain in October, so we’re fairly confident that we’ll have the new passports by then….if not, I guess the girls can fend for themselves for a few days.

Kidding. I’m kidding. Mostly.