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| Montreal, Canada |  Review on November 6, 2007: |
PfcsBaby
Rating:  | Review Topic: General Review
Hey y'all,
Here's my MTL experience and review(sorry if it's kinda long)....
My journey started in Toronto Tuesday night. I had a friend come with me and we got on the Coach Canada bus at 9pm headed for Montreal. We stopped in Kingston at midnight for 30 minutes. We arrived in Montreal at 3:45am. It was cold and kinda spooky at that time of the morning. I didn't know north from south, even though I had a map. A taxi driver stopped and asked me where I was going. He spoke very good english, so I said I needed to go to the US Consualte. The taxi only cost $7, but I gave him $10 for being so helpful.
The Consulate is on a side street, that looks like a semi dark alley and you need to look up to see the street number on the building, along with the Consulate emblem. There is no American flag. At 4am I decided we needed to find a coffee shop to stay warm and figure out what we were going to do until it was time to line up. We did not sleep at all on the bus. So for anyone wanting to take the bus to Montreal, I hope you can get some sleep.
There is a Tim Hortons just 1 block south of the Consulate at the corner of Rene-Levesque and Du Frere Andre. You can see it right at the corner and they are open at 4am! The employees there do understand english a bit, but don't speak it too well.
There is nothing open at that time of the morning, so we walked around a bit to kill some time. At 6:45am I decided it would be a good time to get back to the Consualte to line up. I was 1st in line! Within 5 minutes piosenka(Mary and Arthur) showed up in a taxi and went to the coffee shop thats in the same building as the Consulate around the corner. I think that it opens up at 7am, but Mary said not to go there. The coffee sucks LOL. They were 2nd in line. Both Mary and Arthur are really nice people. I had a chance to speak with them pretty much the entire time.
The doors opened up at 7:30am. I showed my interview letter and proceeded to go to the x-ray machines. After clearning security, I was given a card with the letter "B" and was told to go down the stairs to sit on the chairs by the elevator until security was ready to escort us all upstairs. After reaching the 19th floor, we all proceeded to window #9 to give our interview letter and xpress envelope to the person at the window. We then had to wait to be called back to give all our papers and was told to wait at window #14 to pay the visa fee. This by the way doesn't open up till 8:30am. I paid the fee and returned the reciept to window #11. I sat down and waited to be called again for fingerprints. Sat down again to be called for the interview.
At 8:55am I was called and I went to door #9 and it is a closet LOL. The lady I spoke with is in her 40's, short straight brown hair. Very nice lady. She had to take another fingerprint of my left middle finger. I guess it didn't turn out too well the 1st time. So I almost flipped her off LOL. She asked me where did I meet my fiancee, which I told her online and a short story about that. Then she flipped through my file. She then asked me to swear an oath that everything I was about to tell her, along with everything in the file was to be true, etc etc. I said yes, I do! She then asked me where do I plan on moving too, when do we plan on getting married and also what do I do for a living. I told her I'm not employed right now, but that I'm going to school. Then she explained about the visa and that I have 6 months to enter the USA, then 90 days to get married. Now at this point, I was exhausted and I think I heard her say, "your visa will be approved today, we'll send it out tomorrow, you might get it Friday or Monday", or she said, "your visa is approved, etc etc" LOL. She gave me a paper explaining about the visa. I then asked her if I was done and if I could go, she said yes. I left the building at 9:10am.
Mary and Arthur were done at the same time, so we took the elevator down together. I congratulated them on their approval and we went our seperate ways.
We walked towards the bus terminal, which is about a 30 minute walk. Found McDonalds, used the bathroom and bought muffins. We were not supposed to leave until 5:30pm, but found that we could get on the 11:30am departure back to Toronto, so we did that. We didn't sleep at all again, but got back into the city at 6:20pm.
So thats my story. Hope it's helpful to those who will be going there soon for their interviews.
Mary
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Consulate / USCIS Member Review #2157